Understanding Retail Customers

Conclusions Retail customers have to make many choices, such as those listed in Figure 1. These choices are influenced by past experiences, consumer lifestyles, and basic needs and wants, as well as situational and mood-based factors. All these factors are undergoing change, and the pace of change is increasing, so that it is only natural to feel that the world of the consumer is complex, messy, confusing, and contradictory. Indeed, at the individual level, this appears to be true. A nuanced and subtle interpretation of what is going on in the head of a particular customer will reveal idiosyncratic responses to changing technologies, fashions, experiences and actions. But, invariably, our concern as corporate and academic analysts is with groupings of people — not whether there is one technologically savvy person in Helsinki, but how the citizens of that city and other cities are distributed across what might be seen as a savviness spectrum and whether those who are savvy on one scale are generally that way inclined, and whether this correlates with other factors (e.g., are they more or less likely to be fashion-conscious or buyer-centric?). At this scale, a greater sense of order is likely to be observed. With this in mind, a meaningful way forward — if we are to continue to understand retail customers as effectively as in the past — is to extend and enhance proven analytical approaches (such as those described in the first section) to take full account of the buyer-centric revolution that is having a profound impact on contemporary retailing (as described in the second section).