THE IMPACT OF DISPLAY INCOMPLETENESS ON
CUSTOMERS’ CHOICE
Liu Zhonggang
Donghua University, Shanghai, 200051, P.R. China
Keywords: Display incompleteness, Display completeness, Mechanism model.
Abstract: In marketing practice, display completeness is overemphasized. In what condition won’t display
completeness take positive effect? Based on reviewing the literature related to display completeness/
incompleteness, the paper has analyzed the possible factors that may affect the effectiveness of display
incompleteness, and formulated a mechanism model of display incompleteness and has verified it through
experimentation tentatively.
1 INTRODUCTION
When company displays his merchandise on shelf,
they always want to stack the shelf he can get
completely. They think it can leave the customer an
impress of strong brand, abundance in products, so it
can increase the possibility of purchase. But this
practice may contradict the theory of Cialdini’s
principle of Social Proof which hold that individuals
determine what is correct by finding out what other
people think. According Cialdini’s theory, shoppers
would choose the products partially stacked because
it suggest that someone else has chose it. According
experience, when there is moderate vacancy in the
shelf, we may think someone else have chose the
product and it may be good. We define the display
incompleteness as the way of merchandise which
can suggest the product’s scales through its outline
and indicate the fact that the product has been
bought by someone through the vacancy of the
display: display completeness and display
incompleteness illustrate as the sketch map (to take
canned food as an example).
Display incompleteness Display completeness
Figure 1: The sketch map of display completeness and
display incompleteness.
How can we explain the contradiction between
the retailers’ practice and the instinct experience?
We think that the display completeness in practice
may have some effect when customers are familiar
with the products while the display incompleteness
may have effect when the products is new or
unfamous products. Then we put forward a further
guess: which one is more effective between display
completeness and display incompleteness depend on
the quantity of product information, involvement of
purchase, and the personality of the shopper.
The objective of this study is to determine the
impact of shop environment, product information,
involvement of purchase, and personality of the
shopper on the effectiveness of display
incompleteness. Then we can put forward useful
theory to guide the retailer design effective display
basined on different products and different target
customers. And we want to change the trend of
display completeness that is prevail but is not
effective.
2 LITERATURES REVIEW
The literatures related to merchandise display all
emphasized the importance of display completeness
(Wang Wanzhen2005, Liu Dong & Song Xiang).
Only Nabil Y. Kazouk, Victoria Seiz, Vijay Kumar
(2002) hold different point about it. they think
display incompleteness can increase the possibility
of purchase compared with display completeness,
and they have gotten supporting date through
experiment. Their main conclusions are stated as
550
Zhonggang L..
THE IMPACT OF DISPLAY INCOMPLETENESS ON CUSTOMERS’ CHOICE.
DOI: 10.5220/0003608305500553
In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (IAST-2011), pages 550-553
ISBN: 978-989-8425-55-3
Copyright
c
 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

follows: (1) display incompleteness can promote
customers to purchase compared with display
completeness if other factors are same; (2) The
difference in products character have obvious
influence on effectiveness of display incompleteness
and display completeness. When the difference
between products is little, the effectiveness of
display incompleteness is better than that of display
completeness; (3) the effect of display modality
(shelf, island, end-cap) is not significant; (4) have
explained the reason why display incompleteness
could take effect employing Cialdini’s principle of
Social Proof.
We think the conclusion of Nabil Y. Kazouk is
believable
，
but there need to be some improvement
in their study: (1) when they compare the
effectiveness between display incompleteness and
display completeness, they design groups based on
the display modality(shelf, island, end-cap).and their
conclusion is that the effect of display
modality(shelf, island, end-cap) is not significant It
is not useful to explore the factors that affect the
effectiveness of display incompleteness. (2) they
can’t explain well why the two brands products with
obvious difference in character have different
effectiveness (32.4%and 67.6%) when display
completely and incompletely, if the two brand is
comparable. They believe that the effectiveness of
display incompleteness will fall when the actual
difference and perceived difference are high. but
even the display incompleteness could not take
active effect, the number of pickings from both
display should be equal. Why the number of
pickings from display completeness is 2 times as
that from display incompleteness. We think that
when the customers are familiar whit the brands and
have enough products information, they will not
relay on the marginal information such as that
someone else have bought it .while the display
completeness can leave the costumers an impress of
verdure, abundance, and power, and can promote the
purchase. (3) They wield the theory of Cialdini’s
principle of Social Proof to analyses the reason why
display incompleteness could take effect. It is
reasonable but not enough. Because the factors that
influence the effectiveness of display
incompleteness may include shop environment,
product information, involvement of purchase, and
personality of the shopper and so on. We could not
give a reasonable explain or even may magnify the
effect of display incompleteness if we neglect some
of them.
Resource: Nabil Y. Razzouka, Victoria Seitza,
Vijay Kumarb“The impact of perceived display
completeness/incompleteness on shoppers’ in-store
selection of merchandise: an empirical study”.
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services 9
(2002) 31–35.
Table 1: Distribution of items picked from incomplete and
complete stacks by different forms of display.
Display
modality
Incomplete
stack
complete
stack
Total
Number % Number % Number %
Shelf display 387 77.2 114 22.8 501 77.7
Island display 69 81.2 16 18.8 85 13.2
End – cap
display
11 32.4 23 67.6 34 5.3
End – cap
display
22 88.0 3 12.0 25 3.9
Total 489 75.8 156 24.2 642 100
3 THE ANALYSIS OF DISPLAY
COMPLETENESS
MECHANISM
Display incompleteness can take active effect in
particular situations because of the conjoint effect of
series rules of cognition, psychology, and society.
These rules include perceptual selection, purchase
involvement the path of information search, social
obedience, and personality of the shopper. (1)
perceptual selection. Since the stimulations
information that exposed on people is
superabundant, people can only notice the
information that is novel or related to them. When
all other products are stacked completely on shelf
while this one is displayed incompletely, it can
convey a sense of active and can arose the attention
of shopper more easily. (2) the degree of purchase
involvement. when the decision is not important,
what does the decider pursue is not optimal result,
but the least efforts such as time, energy and so on.
(Einhorn and Hogarth, 1981); (Wayne D. Hoyer,
1984). (3) the path of information search. when the
information is not enough
，
customer will make
decision on the perceived relation between things
that have no direct connection (Ford and Smith,
1987). They may deduce the quality of the product
by these marginal information such as country-of -
origin, price, and the history of the factory. So to say
they go along the peripheral path when search for
information. (Petty and Cacioppo, 1983). (4) social
obedience. the theory of social obedience holds that
people look others’ behavior not only as an
information reference, but as a value reference, and
THE IMPACT OF DISPLAY INCOMPLETENESS ON CUSTOMERS' CHOICE
551

Figure 2: Mechanism Model of Display Incompleteness.
try to keep unanimous with others. There are many
other theories such as Social Proof, Social Learning,
Modeling hold the same standpoint. (5) personality
of shopper. Psychoanalysis expert Karen Horney
divides people into three categories: the compliant,
the detached, the aggressive. the compliant is more
likely to be affected by the cue figured by display
incompleteness than the detached.
4 HYPOTHESIS AND MODEL
Based on the above analyses, we guess that: whether
display incompleteness can take active effect
depends on many factors such as shop environment,
product information, involvement of purchase, and
personality of the shopper. We suppose that
：
(1)
Only when the products all around are displayed
completely can display incompleteness take active
effect; (2) When decision information is not enough,
the cue figured by display incompleteness have
obvious effect. When customers are familiar with
the products, display incompleteness cannot take
active effect, and may have negative effect. (3)
When the degree of purchase involvement is low,
the effectiveness of display incompleteness is better;
(4) When the personality of shopper is compliant,
the effectiveness of display incompleteness is better;
while when the personality of shopper is more
independent, the effectiveness of display
incompleteness is not obvious. We unify the above
factors into a Mechanism Model of Display Incom-
pleteness (MMDI), the model illustrates as Figure 2.
5 METHOD AND PROCEDURES
In order to test the model, we transfer the above
hypothesis into those that can be proved in
experiment to test the effect of environment contrast,
product information, involvement degree, and
personality on the effectiveness of display
incompleteness.
(1) The effect of display incompleteness is better
when there is only one product is displayed
incompletely than when many products are
displayed incompletely at the same time;
(2) The effect of display incompleteness of new
products or unfamous products is better than that of
famous ones;
(3) The effect of display incompleteness of products
with low price is batter that of high price products;
(4) The effect of display incompleteness is better in
low school degree than in high college degree.
We test these hypotheses through the follows
experiment designs.
(1) select two shelf that are far away in a shop, then
display one product incompletely on one shelf and
display three products incompletely on the other
shelf，then observe the numbers of pickings;
(2) select a unfamous product and a famous product
to display incompletely two weeks, and then display
them completely two weeks, observe and record the
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Table 2: The results of different groups.
Factors Group Display Completeness Display Incompleteness Change
Setting contras
One product 32 44
＋
37.5%
Three product 90 72
－
20%
Involvement degree
Low price 51 69
＋
35.3%
High price 22 32
＋
45.5%
Product Information
Famous 52 40
－
23.1%
Unfamous 13 21
＋
61.5%
Personality
College city 28 35
＋
25%
Old industry areas 22 26
＋
18.2%
number of pickings.
(3) select a high price product and a low price
product to display incompletely two weeks, observe
and record the number of pickings.
(4) select a product with obvious effect of display
incompleteness from the previous experiments to
display incompletely in two supermarkets near
college and near old industry area separately for two
weeks，and then display completely for two weeks.
Observe and record the number of pickings.
6 RESULTS
The results of these experiments are illustrated in
Table 2.
7 DISCUSSION AND THE
FUTURE RESEARCH
This research confirmed the positive effect of
incomplete display of merchandise. And found that
marketplace environment, the product information
owned by customer has influence on the effect of
display incompleteness. The limitation of this study
exists in (1) the time of experiment is short, the
amount of sample is not enough, this may limit
reliability of conclusion; (2) some experiment design
needs to improve, for example, it may not be safe to
suppose the personality based on the occupation of
the main crowd who live near the supermarket. And
the manipulation variable of involvement also needs
to be improved.
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