Melanie Lauer sifted through a pile of T-shirts at Urban Outfitters on Tuesday.

The 21-year-old secondary education and English junior likes shopping at the store because it's close to campus. She said she also is drawn in because the store is decorated in an appealing way.

"If stores have a lot of different and cool stuff around, it makes it more unique and interesting," Lauer said.

MSU students might have a variety of reasons for shopping at the stores they do — from the location to the atmosphere — but now businesses will have a better understanding of what things factor into a consumer's shopping experience, thanks to recent MSU research.

MSU researchers and Publicom Inc., a marketing firm, conducted an online survey during the summer to analyze customers' experiences. Business owners placed the survey on their Web sites for visitors to fill out, and researchers were then able to compile the data and identify seven common elements that affect consumers' buying experiences.

MSU hospitality business Professor Bonnie Knutson, one of the researchers, said there has been a lot of talk in the business community about what drives consumers to buy, but no one has looked at what goes into the whole shopping experience.

"Once you know what's important to customers, you can form a buying experience around it," Knutson said.

The researchers listed the elements in order of their importance to the experience.

Knutson said the most important element is that a business offers what a consumer wants or is looking for. The second element is accessibility, meaning that the product or service is easy to locate. Other elements include easy location of merchandise, consumer confidence in the business, incentives such as sales and product or service safety.

Katherine Czarnecki, a manager at Moosejaw Mountaineering, 555 E. Grand River Ave., said her store offers reward programs and free shipping to entice customers. Store managers also keep the most frequently purchased items at the front of the store so they are easily accessible to customers and organize the store by brand and activity, she said.

"We try to place items in the store by logic and put them where we would think to look for them," Czarnecki said.

Knutson said the sales environment should also be stimulating.

"If a business, like a store, is dirty or confusing, people might not want to deal with it," she said.

Companies that market to teens and college students might decorate their stores with bright colors and play loud music to attract customers, while seniors might find this environment unnerving, Czarnecki said.

Companies will soon be able to obtain the surveys used for this study to determine their individual strengths and weaknesses in these areas, and see which elements are important to their customers.

Knutson hopes to do additional research in this field by conducting the survey abroad to determine whether these elements are universal or isolated to American consumers.

Patricia Huddleston, a professor in the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing, said this was the first time she has ever heard of a study of this kind.

"A number of studies have looked at store environments, but none have identified these dimensions," she said. "If a business can measure them, then they can employ them."