I recently spent a day listening to a series of presentations at a Market Research Society seminar, 'The Future of Geodemographics'. Those who read this column will doubtless recall me banging on about this subject. To recap, our thesis is that a shopping centre's catchment is inherently unstable and that a significant amount of a marketer's energy and resources should be devoted to sustaining or improving the number of shoppers using the centre. The effectiveness of the marketing strategy to achieve this will be determined by the depth of understanding of the target shoppers.
The challenge is that most geodemographic systems will remain resolutely based on neighbourhood classifications. This is an issue for shopping centre marketing as a given household will contain a number of individuals with very different shopping behaviours.
Most geodemographic systems in the future will continue to address behaviour - what people do - rather than focusing on the key drivers behind why they do what they do.
Tesco's Club Card was featured in the seminar. Tesco invests £100 milllion a year in this programme, and this allows it to track its customers' behaviour. Tesco has developed six distinct shopping segments from the resulting data, and has also gone behind its customers' behaviour in an attempt to understand the driving motivations. These are then applied to the marketing strategy.
Clearly such investment is beyond the reach of shopping centres but there are cost-effective mechanisms available to deliver the desired outcome of a deep understanding of your shopper base; surely it would be folly not to seriously address the topic?
Stephen Logue, chairman, Business Blueprints
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