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At a glance

Customers appear to vary widely in the approach to home shopping and the role it plays in their lives. This may be hard to spot from conventional data analysis, but smarter data collection systems that merge qualitative and quantitative information could allow for more targeted home shopping with higher yields.

Meet five different kinds of home shopper and see an example of how their attitudes could affect the service and messages you offer them.

See the three key needs that all these customers feel are not yet fulfilled.

And read about how that creates opportunities to improve your home shopping business.

Background

Many of us remember the lady in our street who “did the catalogue”. My sister and I would spend hours poring over the glossy pages of those fabulously thick books spending our imagined hundreds of pounds. They offered a wider range than the local shops, the convenience of (almost) buying from a friend and that ever-so-tempting option of paying a tiny amount a week.

And now? Every day I get two or three specialist catalogues, more than I could ever look through, let alone afford to buy from. I do most of my spending through the internet – largely driven by the nightmare alternative of shopping with three small children. “Ocean” is cool, “I want one of those” is entertaining and “Simply Organic” is right on.

Home shopping has changed beyond all recognition over the last thirty years. So what does the customer make of it all? How do they decide which glossy book to open or which “click here” to click?

five kinds of customers you may encounter at home

The spender

The spender is doing well. Compared to her parents she is affluent and in control. Unashamedly middle class, she has children, a husband, some pets, a house (or two) and a garden to shop for. Not to mention herself. She likes treats and feels she deserves them. She has an eye for a bargain, but is more interested in knowing the market well enough to select the right products: exactly the right towel for the downstairs cloakroom, the most compact patio heater or food for Saturday’s dinner party.

She believes her family’s financial success should buy her good service. After all she must be one of everybody’s best customers. She is outraged by delivery failures and unhelpful staff at call centres. She makes sure everybody on her extensive social network hears about the bad examples and by pooling information they have clear beliefs, as a group, about who deserves their business.

Unlike some of her friends, she doesn’t mind being addressed by her first name, but much more than that would count as intrusive. It’s the 21^st century equivalent of a tradesman’s entrance.

Court her and she’ll reward you handsomely. Slip up and you’ll be tossed on the pile of companies that don’t deserve to succeed.

The researcher

The researcher is often middle class too; and is probably well educated but less likely to have gone for the high earning jobs typical of our first group. He or she pride themselves on always buying the best possible item. Even lower value items are analysed to compare quality, price, origin and brand reputation.

Given their social standing they are likely to receive lots of catalogues, and consider them as free data. They read them carefully, cross check prices to establish value for money of the new entrant and scrutinise them for any signs of shoddiness. But they prefer to make their purchases in a shop where they can study the product close up.

Although they look like ideal home shoppers (home, children, decent income) this segment is far too demanding for a conventional stand alone catalogue to satisfy their need for information. The only hope is with a trusted brand that they have bought from before – but woe betides anyone who tries to charge for delivery.

The guilty shopper

This shopper could well be older. They may not remember rationing, but they know people who can. They might be retired already and careful to balance their savings with how long they think they have to live.

They see shopping as a dangerous business that could well be responsible for the moral decline of the nation.

However, in the privacy of their own homes, maybe at night with the curtains closed, or while their partner is out, they have been known to make the occasional purchase.

They tend to buy anything embarrassing from a catalogue or website. And in their case embarrassing spans swimwear and vitamin tablets as well as the more obvious personal products. Also, as they derive no pleasure from shopping, the practical benefits of buying from home are attractive. No snooty young assistants making you feel like you shouldn’t really be buying those clothes. Or untrained sales staff who know nothing about either the products or common courtesy.

They also enjoy the no-pressure feeling of home shopping. You can flick through the catalogues at your own speed, you can spend days making up your mind if you want to, nobody is impatiently pushing you into a decision you might live to regret.

The practical shopper

This customer has a very straightforward attitude to shopping. You need things, so you buy them. She was probably an early adopter of supermarket shopping by internet. She may have a full time job and a family so she needs to prioritise. At first she justified internet grocery shopping by saying it takes her an hour, so £5 for delivery is OK. Now she’ll tell you how much she saves by not going in the supermarket and being lured into extra purchases. As recent research confirms, more fresh food than convenience food is thrown away each week; we all hanker after that healthy lifestyle – but then it’s easier to just bung in a pizza when everybody’s tired and hungry.

The practical shopper loves home shopping for its convenience – read a catalogue while eating lunch and kill two birds with one stone - and the fact that she is in complete control. No issues of opening hours, parking or long queues. She’s logical enough to have worked her way round the search engines and navigation idiosyncrasies of her preferred sites and has a reasonable idea of who offers the products she wants at a fair price.

The pleasure seeker

For this group, home shopping is certainly not about the essentials of life. They will browse singly, or as a couple, seeking out entertainment and amusement. They might buy games, videos, CDs, gadgets or sex toys from catalogues or websites. They are unabashed and relaxed about this self-indulgent approach to shopping.

They have disposable income and maybe time to kill. They’ll buy gadgets for exercise, in the kitchen or as gifts and feel that home shopping gives them access to a wider range of products, some of which haven’t yet made it to the shops. They love the latest thing and the level of product information is just right for them. They don’t need the reassurance of a sales assistant – if it’s no good it doesn’t matter because they didn’t need it anyway. And they don’t need personal service to make them feel important – they’re happy enough with their spending power.

They’re often male between 30 and 50, though anybody could be in this group – attitude is more important than demographics.

So what?

Customer segmentation is interesting in itself – like Big Brother for marketers – but what does it do for the business?

The key needs of all of the customers I talked to were pretty consistent – see below. The subtlety is to differentiate through communications to these different types of shopper. If no other data is available, it might be possible to classify customers empirically according to their responses to different mailings and offers. A better starting point would be any existing information about spending patterns.

For example, when it comes to delivery:

• The spender needs to know that you respect her and value her custom. That’s why you’ll be clear with her about when to expect a delivery, and make sure the reality lives up to the promise;
• The researcher on the other hand will need some compelling information if they are to swallow a delivery charge. He/she might be prepared to accept a much wider delivery window or slower stand-by delivery in return for a lower charge,
• While for the guilty shopper discretion will be important, they might appreciate a call to warn them of delivery. They don’t want a fuss made as this only emphasises their sin.
• The practical shopper needs to feel in control. They will be furious if deliveries don’t work out according to their well structured plan, and won’t take kindly to any suggestion that it would be easy for them to reschedule. They may pay a premium for a more predictable delivery, or an evening drop off.
• The pleasure seeker enjoys making the purchase, so reinforcing this will add to the enjoyment. The deliverer could congratulate them on their purchase, and failed delivery is less of a problem if it adds to the anticipation. They may like to be able to track their purchase to know how soon they can expect it.

This type of assessment can be repeated for other aspects of the package, and then steps taken to identify customer types and tailor the message/service accordingly.

Common issues

There are three areas where all of these groups have a common view about what needs to improve, though of course they would expect to hear about it in different ways.

Help me

The number of catalogues and websites is multiplying. The number of customers is not. Many feel awash with data and overwhelmed by choice – of a kind. Yet despite this apparent increase in choice they feel it gets harder to find what they want.

The most common suggestion for improvement from customers is for some kind of “personal shopper”, that knows about Me and uses that data intelligently. For example, my personal shopper knows that I always order three sizes and only keep the biggest one. Or that I bought red striped curtains and might be interested in matching cushion covers. Or that my daughter’s birthday is October 10^th.

The personal shopper would have two roles –

1. to find options according to the customer’s specification and provide a list of say 10 to choose from, and
2. to occasionally make suggestions (“I know you liked that garden chair so I wondered if you were interested to know the table is now on special offer”).

The personal shopper needs to have the capability to look across a range of websites, saving the customer the trouble.

Easy life

As customer power increases at the expense of the retailer, they are less prepared to put up with “customer pain”. They expect websites to work well, to be easy to understand, and easy to search. They’re not happy to try 5 synonyms when searching for the product they want until they “get it right” – and as soon as they find sites that let them search intuitively, using normal English, they’ll be off.

As we have seen, the reasons for expecting easy delivery may vary, but the need is the same. Predictability was often mentioned as more important than speed, and it is mystifying to customers how a supplier could have so little idea of where products are or when they’ll be arriving. With bar code tracking and SMS messaging they’d love to get a text the night before narrowing down their delivery time to a few hours instead of all day. They think the suppliers could do that already – but can’t be bothered. The same goes for the inconvenience of returning faulty or unwanted goods. Integrated systems aren’t just for logistics managers – customers expect them too.

An easy pick up point - more likely to be the petrol station with 24 hour access and parking than a Post Office on a busy High Street that’s never open when you can go there – would solve both problems, especially if a text or e-mail message let you know when there was anything to collect.

Personally…

Something all of the groups above had in common was a wish to be treated in a way that fitted with their beliefs and lifestyle. They were puzzled to receive catalogues full of clothes they wouldn’t dream of wearing, or home aids for the aged when they were only 35. As well as wasting money (and trees) sending catalogues to those who aren’t interested, most customers bin the catalogues, rather than return them, so any tracking and evaluation of a cold mail out is difficult.

Any attempts to segment the market in a smarter way would make sense, especially for groups of catalogues positioned differently in the marketplace but with a common back office / fulfillment system.

An idea for our times

Home shopping has every opportunity to come into its own in the 21^st century. The increasing fragmentation of markets that poses a problem for the High Street, is an opportunity for the website or catalogue. Digital printing and an increasing number of on-line customers provide the possibility of personalised shopping in a way that has never been dreamt possible. Having the right CRM and searching technology should provide ever more precise ways to understand customers and offer them exactly what they are looking for.

The nostalgia of the old days of local shops and personal service is reinvented for our times. A way to shop that offers products that are right for me, a delivery worker who knows me and my movements and a chance for shopping to fit into my life – not the other way round.

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or contact Catherine Shovlin on catherine@customerinterpreter.com

This page last updated 09/08/2005