Fixing retail with the golden ratio

Mathematicians, scholars, artists have been fascinated by it for millennia. Leonardo da Vinci used it to study human proportions. It’s how snails design their homes, it’s found in carnivorous plants, tropical cyclones and the spiraling arms of distant galaxies. It is nature’s golden ratio, the mathematic formula for near-perfect proportion.

This 2-Part series explains how savvy marketers will use it to mend the lost art of merchandising.

WHY IS THE GOLDEN RATIO IMPORTANT AT RETAIL?

Because, proportion is what makes things look beautiful. Proportion allows us to cognitively organize what we see into comprehensible chunks or groups. For example, we consider people with well-proportioned faces as beautiful, and shy away from those with poorer proportions. According to Wikipedia, Facial beauty “evokes a widely distributed neural network involving perceptual, decision-making and reward circuits.”… [Facial attraction is] “a quick and low-effort means by which parents and infants form an internal representation, reducing the likelihood that the parent will abandon his/her offspring because of recognition failure.”

Gestalt psychology supports proportion, beauty and recognition theories by stating, “The brain is holistic…with self-organizing tendencies. The human eye sees objects in their entirety before perceiving their individual parts… Gestalt psychology tries to understand the laws of our ability to acquire and maintain stable percepts in a noisy world.” Consumers protect themselves from being bombarded with stimuli by simply “tuning out” or blocking such stimuli from conscious awareness. And they do so out of self-protection.

Merchandising today is a reflection of an unkempt and noisy world.  If we want consumers attention, then we need to change our merchandising strategy to reflect natural beauty–not a littered ocean. I propose we throw out the eye chart and other gimmicks and create shelving, displays and products to reflect the golden ratio. There is something in our minds that registers the golden ratio as beautiful. It is the primal language of imagery.

GOLDEN RATIO, WHAT IS IT?

The golden ratio is a fascinating irrational number discovered by the Greeks (or aliens) around the sixth century. Mathematician Euclid often wrote about it in the third century BC. As I stated earlier, the golden ratio is considered near perfect proportion. However we don’t know why it occurs naturally and we don’t know why we can apply it numerically to natural events.

Before we get to Part II, I’d like to first explain the math behind the golden ratio, because it is flat-out-fascinating and irrational. You’ll love how this plays out, I promise! Otherwise, do NOT miss the photos at the end of this post.

PART I. the golden ratio explained

IMAGES (REDRAWN), COURTESY WIKIPEDIA.COM/GOLDEN_RATIO

The golden ratio expressed algebraically like this (denoted by the Greek lowercase phi ø):

As a line graph, it looks like this:

Using the line graph as a baseline, turn the blue line into a square, then draw a vertical line down the middle of the box, then use that line to draw a green line diagonally to the upper right corner of the box, then use the bottom of that (green) line as an axis point to draw an arch back down to the baseline. You draw the red rectangle next to the blue box. The blue and red combined forms a new overall rectangle — the golden ratio, found everywhere in nature:

The golden ratio rectangle has the proportions of 1:1.618 or 61.8 percent. The red box area of the rectangle has the exact same proportions as the overall rectangle, at 61.8 percent.

You can continue to break up the new part of the rectangle by 61.8 percent, and you can subdivide and rotate this into boxes ad infinitum. Ta-da! This is what makes the golden ratio so fascinating:

But wait! Here’s where it gets fun.
There is another formula called the Fibonacci sequence; which is a series of integers in which each subsequent number is the sum of the two previous numbers, like this: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55…
By dividing a number early in the sequence by it’s following number it produces a percentage of 2/3 (66 percent); later on in the sequence dividing 34/55=61.8 percent!

The Fibonacci sequence overlaid onto the golden ratio produces logarithmic spirals that are indiscernible from one another. Graphically the spirals look like this (each 90 degree turn is about 61.8 percent):

Wonder who this snail’s architect might be?

Near perfect proportion from galaxies to microorganisms, weather events, and even population migration patterns:

Don’t miss Part II. Proportion is not a gimmick. Proportion at retail isn’t an arbitrary add-on. It’s a need to have. For traditional brick and mortar to keep up, then it will need to behave more like the Internet.

The Net doesn’t sit still…every minute of every hour, it is becoming more like brick and mortar. We tend to the network and in turn the network learns about us. Shouldn’t we do the same with retail?

-RKM