Next time you’re lost in a maze of grocery aisles, a bazillion brands vying for your attention, blame it on King Kullen.

When the store cited as the first modern American supermarket opened in a New York garage in 1930, it became known as the “world’s greatest price wrecker” and built a no-frills business on high volume and low prices. The concept was so successful that it thrived even as the nation plunged into the Great Depression.

King Kullen and the other regional chains founded in that era radically changed the way Americans shop. Out went the clerks of small specialty stores who selected, weighed, and packaged goods for customers. In came the era of self-service.

The shift gave more power to consumers and refocused the industry on how to persuade shoppers to select from an ever-growing array of product choices. We consumers have been trying to make up our minds ever since.

Packaging, ads, in-store tastings, even artificial scents pumped into the aisles. These and many other marketing elements affect what makes it into our shopping carts, explains Barbara E. Kahn, School of Business Administration dean and co-author of the book Grocery Revolution: The New Focus on the Consumer.

Kahn and other University of Miami marketing faculty are investigating the many subtle (and not-so-subtle) variables that companies and marketing professionals seek to understand—from the importance of flavor names to the way consumers contemplate expiration dates—to sway shoppers, whether it’s to get them to buy green, buy luxury, or simply buy more. Kahn’s latest research, to be published in an issue of The Journal of Market Research, delves into how even the location of a product image on the package affects a consumer’s decision.

Packaging research has been conducted since the first days of supermarket self-service. A seminal study from the 1920s, for instance, pitted two boxes of detergent against each other—one was covered in triangles, the other in circles. Shoppers not only favored the circle-decorated box, but also claimed the detergent inside actually worked better than its triangle-festooned counterpart—despite the fact that the cleaning agent in both boxes was identical.

Kahn and University of Pennsylvania researcher Xiaoyan Deng recently set out on a more sophisticated mission regarding package persuasion. Focusing on snack food, their study showed that if the image—a picture of a cookie or cracker, for example—was placed toward the right side or bottom of the package, consumers perceived the product to be heavier. If it was situated near the top or left side of the package, consumers perceived the product to be lighter. Their research also revealed that when consumers were looking for richer products like cookies, they favored the “heavier” packages.

“It translated all the way to taste,” Kahn points out.

When consumers ate the cookies, they liked the taste of the cookies from the package that featured the heavier image location better. In contrast, shoppers looking for more health-conscious fare tended to choose snacks from the “lighter” packages.

For another study, Kahn dived into flavor names, a subject that piqued her interest after she noticed some that did nothing to describe the product’s taste. Think Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby ice cream, or the line of Gatorade that comes in flavors such as Rain, Fierce, and Frost. “What does ‘frost’ taste like?” Kahn recalls wondering. More important, why would shoppers faced with a wide variety of sports-drink flavors go for it?

She originally theorized that the names could sway the parched because they evoke a certain mental image. Instead, Kahn and Boston College researcher Elizabeth Miller discovered that the unusual names made taste-testers pause a little longer to mull them over. “It just made you stop to figure out the puzzle,” Kahn explains. “If you spend more time thinking about it, you’re likely to pick it up.” It’s not a large effect, and consumers won’t go back to a flavor if they like the moniker but not the product. But on the margin, that kind of name has an influence, adds Kahn, who found these results also applied to nonedible products such as sweaters and nail polish.

Other factors that influence consumers include shopping frequency and experience as well as household size. Michael Tsiros, an associate professor of marketing, found that more frequent shoppers and those buying for larger households are more likely to contemplate expiration dates on perishables. When he and University of Virginia researcher Carrie Heilman surveyed grocery shoppers, they discovered many people didn’t know some perishables had expiration dates. Even if they did know, at times they didn’t bother to check. Milk was an exception. The more shoppers felt a product had a spoilage risk, the more likely they were to look at the expiration date.

However, Tsiros and Hellman also found shoppers were willing to pay less for perishables approaching expiration, suggesting retailers may want to give discounts based on remaining shelf life, says Tsiros, who also manages the ’Canes Behavioral Lab. The experimental research facility, which opened last year, allows students to take part in faculty research on a host of consumer decision-making simulations.

Overall, Tsiros attributes a lack of attention to expiration dates to the fact that shoppers just want to get in and out of a store quickly. “Going to the grocery store is not a pleasurable experience,” he notes. “Most people go there as a chore. They want to be there as little as possible.”

Even in a crisis we may underestimate the need to stock up thoroughly. Robert Meyer, the business school’s Warren Johnson Chair, professor of marketing, wrote the chapter “Why We Under-Prepare for Hazards” for the book On Risk and Disaster: Lessons from Hurricane Katrina.

He cites field work he and Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science colleagues conducted last September when Hurricane Ike briefly threatened South Florida. In surveys, many residents revealed exaggerated beliefs about the likelihood that the storm would hit and its strength. Yet when asked what preparations they were taking, those same residents seemed surprisingly complacent, saying things like, “We are all set; we still have some stuff we bought for Fay,” a minor tropical storm that affected the area the month before. But had Ike hit at the strength these residents believed it would, Meyer explains, they might have been without electricity for weeks, and their supplies from Fay would have proved dramatically insufficient.

He says this disconnect can be explained by the theory that people have two cognitive systems at work in decision-making, the rational (cold) process and the more emotional (hot) one. Problem is, the hot side has short-term memory. “Hence,” Meyer concludes, “we have the rational system saying, ‘There is a 62 percent chance that a category 4 storm will hit,’ but the hot (emotional) part saying, ‘OK, so what’s the big deal? I’ll get a couple of jugs of water and a flashlight. It won’t be all that bad.’”

Of course, the real elephant in the room when it comes to grocery stores, especially in today’s economic crunch, is cost. “When people are feeling the squeeze of high food and gas prices,” Kahn says, “they start to economize.” Juliano Laran, an assistant professor of marketing, has students in his consumer behavior class investigate the role price plays in supermarket decisions. He sends them to the store with an unwitting friend. Then, after the friend pays at the cash register, the student must confiscate the receipt and ask the friend to try to recall the price of each item on the list. But this is less a test of memory than a lesson in human behavior.

Before engaging in the experiment this fall, senior political science major Joe Altieri was convinced his peers would prevail. “I’m pretty confident people are going to be able to recall their purchase prices with a good degree of accuracy,” he predicted. “College students will be concerned with the amount of money they are spending. They are on a limited budget and are more aware than most of the population.”

Instead, Altieri found that people “are a bit more careless with their money” than he had assumed. Laran says his students, like Altieri, typically find that people have a very hard time recalling what they paid. However, he adds, with purchases that require more buyer thought or involvement—a computer or car, for instance—people tend to be more price-conscious.

Although supermarket shoppers may struggle to recall a dollar amount, what they do remember in this kind of test is whether they bought a given product at a special price or on sale, Laran points out. Therein lies the lesson for these students—and future marketing professionals. Shoppers might not remember how much they paid, but they do consider the cost relative to those of the other products on the shelf when they are making their selection. Retailers, he says, may not have to offer “that good a price, as long as people remember that it was a decent price, or cheaper than it would have been otherwise.”

Surely King Kullen—now a 49-store empire—would agree.

MARIKA LYNCH is a freelance writer based in Miami, Florida.