If you've ever gone shopping with your spouse, you have probably experienced the differences in the way men and women shop.
This is crucial in determining the layout of your store, the way your staff interacts with potential customers, and even the words you use in your advertising messages.
Recently this study was released that gives us more information.
Different Sides of the Aisle
Men on a mission, women on an adventure when shopping
This might be a shock, but men and women are as different as Target and Tiffany when they shop, according to recent research from the
Women, on the other hand, generally like to look around, talk to sales associates and experience the shopping. They walk around, smell perfume, touch clothes, dab on cosmetics. They want attention and they want direction.
The differences are as primitive as hunter vs. gatherer, said Paula Courtney, president of the Verde Group, which conducted the random study of 1,205 telephone interviews with Wharton's J.H. Baker Retail Initiative. Ahead of the phone study, four focus-group discussions were held for females and males ranging in ages from 16 to 60. The study is called "Men Buy, Women Shop."
"Men are very task oriented while women are very much more about the relationship and the engagement and the interaction with the people at the stores," Courtney said. "Don't point me in the direction and say aisle 6," one man said during the study. "It's better if he takes me and says, 'There it is.'" Better yet is the sales associate who holds men's hands through the checkout so that they get through it quicker.
Women told surveyors that they liked it when associates showed them different styles and new items. "I told her what I was looking for and why and she set out to find me the right suit," said one woman. "I didn't have to do anything."
And this might not be terribly surprising either: Women run into more problems when shopping than men. On the tribulations scale, women's No. 1 issue was not being able to find help when they needed it. One in three women who were so miffed by the issue that they said they would never go back to the store again. Men's biggest headache: Parking. One in three said they hated not finding parking close to the store entrance. But very few of them said they would desert the store forever because of it.
The clerk factor
Twenty percent of women said they were ignored by sales clerks, mostly because they thought the clerks were more interested in talking with each other about their weekend plans or were on the phone with friends.
A whopping 47% of those women said they would never go back to that store. More men -- 22% -- recounted incidents of feeling snubbed, but only 22% of those men considered it a lifelong negative mark. "Being ignored is a big issue for women," Courtney said. "It's a loyalty issue."
Men ditch stores, too, but their biggest reason to do so is when products are out of stock. Men complained they experienced that when shopping 24% of the time compared with it happening to women 21% of the time. But here's the real kicker: Of those men who complained, 43% said they would never shop at those stores again; only 16% of women cited that as a reason to stay away.
Some people did go back to stores they vowed never to return to -- less than one-third, according to the study -- but it took them close to a year to do so. Both men and women told questioners that they really appreciated a "lack of pressure" when store employees were willing to let them shop at their own pace.
Age made a difference, too, in shopper loyalty. The younger the shopper, the more likely he or she was to pooh-pooh a store for poor service. The pickiest of all groups were men 18 years old to 35 years old. "I'm not going to tell them that they're messing up," one guy said. "Let them lose business. I just won't go back."
The wow factor
Their experiences were fewer, but there were shoppers who reported "wow" experiences at stores. Fifty-one percent of women told of times when sales associates made near-heroic efforts to solve a problem or help out while 39% of men said they did.
"The prevalence of 'wow' is not as high as among problems and how often they occur, but 'wow' happens," Courtney said. "It's the she-saved-the-day stories and usually because something went awry and a sales associate went to great effort to resolve or fix the problem and make the shopper feel better."
What's more, it's always a person who has championed the cause; never the store. "Emotions tend to resonate," Courtney said. "People remember them and they're quite powerful experiences." So much so that they tell their friends, who tell their friends, who tell theirs, and so on.
Women and men both are four times more likely to relay a good-news experience than a bad one. "It's really easy to deliver service to customers as though they were one big homogenous group, like one size fits all," Courtney said. "But one size does not fit all and gender is by far the easiest way to facilitate loyalty."
Still, when all is said and done, women are the shopping queens. They spend an eye-popping $4 trillion annually, which accounts for 83% of
(Source: MarketWatch)
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