Recent work in the sporting goods space, amplified our observation that even product categories that lend themselves to more of an impulsive purchase with less involvement, consideration or research, still follow certain fundamentals of the traditional purchase funnel. This particular project called for a research design that required us to get more embedded in the retail environment to understand what goes into decision making at the moment of truth. We pre-recruited a number of likely purchasers to take them through rigorous qualitative interviewing, while also observing their behaviors. We augmented this with the creation of a simulated environment that forced the potential customer to evaluate product as they might in a real retail circumstance, limiting their time and product exposure to replicate the actual point of sale experience. Capturing all on digital video, such an exercise revealed a number of visceral and emotional aspects of visual merchandizing that drive these types of purchases. The process created even more value-added data for the client, as we will next quantify these hypotheses that we learned, by building a similar virtual environment into an online survey. This same type of purchase process research can be embarked upon for you, either in a retail setting, digitally, or both. Let us know how we can help.