How well do retailers know their customers? You may understand how consumers interact with your brand, but how do they behave with your competitors, or outside of the retail space?
Is it possible to even know?
Recently, Blis conducted a significant research study of four global brands (H&M, Victoria’s Secret, Topshop and Zara) in seven countries as a test to determine if it’s possible to arrive at these answers. We set specific goals:
- Uncover insights on purchase intent, shopping patterns and mobile consumption — all while shopping.
- Create a side-by-side behavioral comparison of user groups across the brands in multiple locations
- Assess the value of mobile location data, combined with demographic and contextual data, in making a wide variety of business decisions.
We monitored 82 separate locations, some 250K unique shoppers, and 6.6 million bids. The results are available in our new eBook, Mastering Consumer Trends: A Global Retail Study.
Key Highlights
Our findings were insightful, and sometimes even counterintuitive. More than that, they were actionable across a wide variety of functions within the retail enterprise. A few of the highlights include:
- In helping to identify outliers, mobile data can enable brands to capitalize on both scalable behavior in markets where a pattern exists, but also the opportunities (or threats) presented where behavior deviates from the norm.
- Instinctively brands might prefer to open a new store away from their competitors, but foot traffic analysis shows us that they may actually benefit from shopper crossover.
- Mobile location data provides marketers a non-biased factual perspective on your competitive marketplace. It can also be used to enrich first-party data and market research to get a more rounded view of shopper behavior.
- Make the consumer experience of your brand consistent and frictionless as they switch between digital and physical interactions. Use location audience profiling to identify in-market consumers, then resurface your brand at key decision-making moments in the purchase journey.
- In-store mobile behavior could just as easily indicate the beginning or the end of a purchase journey as the distinction between online and offline shopping continues to blur. Marketers should how they consider this when incorporating mobile into the rest of a cross-channel marketing plan.
Benefits to All Marketers
This report shows how the true value of mobile location data occurs when it’s blended with other demographic and contextual data sources, particularly an organization’s first-party data. As a marketer, once you know where your consumers are and what they’re doing, you can combine it with myriad other sources to understand why they behave the way they do. This combination can yield significant competitive advantages.
Download the eBook here.
