Applying Psychology Research to Shopper Mindsets with Implications for Future Symbiotic Search Systems

Optimising communications to take account of user states is a nascent, huge and growing business opportunity for the retail and advertising worlds. Understanding people’s behaviours, thoughts and emotions to different messages in different contexts at different times, can inform the strategic planning and design of systems promoting positive customer experiences and increasing retail sales. Using theory combined with applied insights from our projects, this paper highlights a number of factors (mindset, attention, focus, time pressure and salience) that drive ‘search’ behaviour in a dynamic retail based environment. The work has implications for developing symbiotic systems.

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