By Siobhan O’Leary
What draws customers into bookstores in Germany and how well informed are they about what they will find there? Cologne-based agency Die Gefährten recently attempted to answer these questions by surveying 400 book-buying customers from the bookstores Mayersche and Stern Verlag in Düsseldorf and Hugendubel in Munich.
According to the survey, the results of which were published in Buchreport, 69% of the customers in the stores purchased a book. Nearly 80% of those who bought something were knowledgeable ahead of time about the product they bought, primarily informed by the Internet (80%), critics (23%) and customer reviews (16%).
For the majority of respondents, content was more important than price and 80% of them were first drawn to the book they purchased by an advertisement. The casual passers-by entered the stores primarily because they spontaneously remembered a specific advertisement (40%) or were drawn in by a special offer (36%) or window display (24%).
Perhaps the most interesting finding was that 20% of the customers surveyed felt that buying books on the Internet is cheaper, which should not be the case for new releases, given Germany’s fixed book price laws.
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