Retail footfall counters have the ability to separate customers into groups based on height and gender, and it’s providing retail stores with interesting insights into consumer behavior and how to personalize the shopping experience for different demographic profiles.
Men and women have different shopping preferences, which is just as valid for older and younger consumers. Learning how to engage customers from different demographic profiles more effectively is proving to be a significant benefit for retail stores, and footfall counting technology is the key to unlocking those benefits.
Does gender influence consumer behavior?
In a word, yes. In a study from the Journal of Economics and Business entitled: A critical study: How gender determines consumer preferences, evidence points to the fact that men and women do indeed present different consumer behaviors regarding preferences towards quality, price, brand, and discount.
Consumer behavior is the science that studies why, when, where, and how individual customers buy, select and use goods or services to satisfy their needs. In conclusion, the study suggests that “it is quite clear that companies must split their target market, with an extra segment, the one of gender. In other words, for better coverage of the market, the marketing plan is suggested to be different.”
Does age influence consumer behavior?
Age is also an important demographic factor that affects consumer behavior. As people grow older, their needs change, and so do their buying decisions. Younger adults or teenagers are more likely to spend more on their lifestyle needs, from fun and movies to fashion, while the older generation is more likely to spend on family and more sober needs. Again, this highlights the need for market segmentation and different strategies according to age and gender.
How are retail stores using demographic data to their advantage?
Here are some benefits of leveraging demographic analysis as part of a retail store’s footfall counting strategy:
▶︎ Use demographic insight to shape the customer journey and improve service delivery
Understanding your customers is fundamental to providing the kind of service they expect. The data collected from retail analytics can inform your store layout, in-store design, product display and placement, and even the type of products and brands you sell. Track which marketing campaigns resonate with your core demographic and replicate them to keep your customers happy and continuously returning. Software like Vemcount, which measures consumer behavior analytics, footfall counting, heatmap, dwell time, and queue management, provides the kind of insight you can use to optimize the customer journey and improve service delivery.
▶︎ Mix it up with targeted marketing campaigns
If you’ve identified that your store is attracting a particular age group or gender, use that to your advantage and display targeted messaging, discounts, and marketing campaigns to boost conversion rates. If your data shows that a particular demographic is not flocking to your stores, even though you cater products they need and want, you can create targeted campaigns to increase engagement and draw them in. Keeping your demographics as diverse as possible increases sales opportunities.
▶︎ Don’t forget the children!
Many retail store managers don’t bother collecting data on children’s numbers and behavior that enter their stores simply because children don’t have money. These store managers don’t realize that they are missing out on a golden opportunity to allow the parents of those children to spend more time and money in their store. Suppose you notice that parents with young children are part of your predominant demographic. In that case, you can create a fun and engaging “kiddies corner” in your store that entertains and occupies children so that parents are more relaxed and more likely to shop and spend more in your store than they would with bored children dragging them down.
Conclusion
By identifying your customers’ prevalent age and gender and gaining insight into the different consumer behaviors relevant to the demographic groups, retail store managers can better predict customers’ needs and tailor the customer journey to meet them.
To leverage demographic analysis and other retail analytics solutions, get in touch with us. We are continuously developing our retail analytics solution, Vemcount, in close dialogue with our partners and customers in order to meet every expectation and need. Vemcount is configurable, device-independent, and available as a hosted or private cloud-based solution to work seamlessly with existing ERP- and BI-systems.
