How brands can leverage the Discount Retail Shopper mentality to deliver cross-category results.
I’ve mentioned this fact before but one of the best things about this job is that I get to interact with some very bright people on topics that are shaping our business world. And one of the ancillary benefits to that is that I get a view to a LOT of consumer research, which gives me something of a unique perspective on what research is being produced, as well as the value and purpose of it. As you might imagine, some of it is truly insightful and eye-opening and some of it is, well, less than that.
“I think we have something here.”
When my colleague and friend, Michael Fisher first contacted me about what he and the team at Fluent were doing, he began the conversation with an uncommon excitement. Fluent has a living database of 175 million people and some 300 data points on each one of them so they are constantly pouring over that data looking for anomalies and opportunities. He called to tell me about one of them that looked promising.
While looking at shopper tendencies in the discount retailer space, they had found a pattern of behavior that ran strong through all three of the categories they were examining but, more importantly, it looked like it validated a hypothesis that we had been talking about for some time.
If you could figure out what made discount shoppers tick, you held some very important keys to that could be applied across the retail spectrum.
The data seemed to bear that out.
He commissioned Marc Shull, Fluent’s research lead, to explore the data further and try to either prove or disprove that idea. The results of that effort have been compiled into this research paper – Satisfying the Thrill of the Hunt. You can download it here.
The research found, among other things, that discount retail shoppers follow definite patterns and motivations in their “quest” and that those tendencies, if understood, are reproducible throughout retail. The report provides the data and detail and also makes recommendations as to how brands and retailers can leverage those findings.
I’m excited to have participated in this important research and to have done so as TheCustomer’s first co-authored study. So, it’s with some natural bias that I can recommend it to you.
Also, Michael Fisher and I will be presenting our findings in a webinar this coming Wednesday, October 30th at 11am EST. You are, of course, invited. We’ll be adding context to what we found and we’ll be translating that into real-world business propositions and opportunities. I hope you’ll join us.
Mike Giambattista is CEO & Publisher at TheCustomer.
Photo by Lucrezia Carnelos on Unsplash.
