In today’s personalization-driven retail environment, merchants
have to pull out every stop imaginable to keep the consumer’s attention while they
shop.
A recent Euclid Analytics survey reveals a big gap in how
Millennial men and women prefer to interact with WiFi services when they shop.
While 68% of males said they would prefer the WiFi services for faster
check-out via an exclusive VIP lane, 53% of women they’d be more loyal to a
brand if it leveraged WiFi to use their personal customer history and data to
provide personalized services.
With this information in mind, the RTP team discusses whether retailers have done a sufficient enough
job in differentiating personalization and marketing efforts toward male and
female demographics, and what steps they can take to further tailor these
experiences.
Debbie Hauss,
Editor-in-Chief: My initial gut reaction is to challenge the value of
trying to separate the approach to men vs. women unless the products are very
specifically designed for one or the other (I’m thinking underwear). I don’t think
it makes good marketing sense to try to draw attention to how men think vs. how
women think. I don’t respond well to that approach and I’m sure I’m not alone.
Most of the retail industry is headed in the direction of one-to-one,
personalized messaging, taking into account the individual’s demands and
purchase desires. For marketing purposes, I think it’s best for retail
companies to continue to focus on the individual and not try to force people
into a larger group.
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Adam Blair, Executive
Editor: I tend to distrust surveys that claim to reveal major differences
in how men and women shop. Retail is an extremely diverse industry, and
consumers – of any gender – shop for different things at different paces and
with different purposes. A man shopping for an expensive suit might welcome a
“daily deal” offer on a matching tie; a woman rushing to her next
appointment, perhaps with a child in tow, would undoubtedly like to access WiFi
that speeds her checkout process. That said, retailers do need to start
somewhere when it comes to their personalization efforts. But segmenting
customers and targeting communications based on broad categories (male vs.
female, Boomers vs. Millennials) should be their first step in a long train of
ever-deeper personalization initiatives – not the last.
David DeZuzio,
Managing Editor: Based on the survey results, the differences between men
and women’s shopping preferences are incredibly slight. This leads one to
believe that any type of gender-based marketing may be moot when giving
customers what they want: a good deal, easy transactions and nice, if not
preferential, treatment. For the future, here is a quick note to marketers:
everybody, regardless of gender or age, likes the idea of speedy lines, VIP or
otherwise, and special money-saving offers; who wouldn’t? Of course, if you
insist, you can dress those offers up with rainbow hearts and kitty cats for
the girls and greasy power tools for the boys, but with the practically
unlimited amount of granular customer analytics available now, gender isn’t the
defining portal to true personalization.
Klaudia Tirico,
Associate Editor: My biggest issue with this Euclid Analytics survey is not
just the fact that they compared males and females, but also because they only
focused on male and female Millennials. It doesn’t get broader than that. If
I’m being honest, the big fascination with Millennials lately is getting a bit
old. Like Adam said, the retail industry is so diverse, I don’t believe putting
customers into these types of categories will help marketing efforts.
Personalization should focus around individual shoppers, no matter what their
age or gender is. At the end of the day, all shoppers want a comfortable and
convenient retail environment where they feel special. You don’t need a survey
to tell you that.
Glenn Taylor,
Associate Editor: Retailers can always improve on their personalization
capabilities, and if there are specific gender trends that need to be adhered
to within the store or online in order to gather the best results, then they
need to do what’s best for the business. It appears many of the personalization
and convenience trends listed in the Euclid study are actually very similar
between the males and females surveyed, showing that personalization efforts
effect both genders the same way. The only major difference marked that males
have a greater willingness to request attention of a store associate (53%) than
females (42%). When it comes down to it, every shopper has their own quirk that
makes their preferred shopping trip different from others. Retailers are going to have to dig deeper to find out what those quirks are, regardless of what demographic the shopper comes from.
