Blog Entry
Psychographics
Published Sep 08 at 2:34 pm
"Do you have a Super Saver card?" she asked, fingers resting on the keypad along with a glazed look mixed of boredom and regret.
"Oh yes," recalling the number without hesitation I watched with anticipation as the register in front of me calculated my savings. I had high expectations, several of my favorites, boneless skinless chicken breasts, Sweet Baby Ray's BBQ Sauce and Kiwi Strawberry juice boxes were all buy one get one free with a Super Saver Card and I was stocking up! With savings accrued and grocery bags overflowing from the cart I left the store half looking where I was going, the other half studying the receipt and printed coupons of savings on items that were on the fringe of my buying habits. The savings were printed in bold so you could not miss them, a lingering reminder of the store's appreciation of my business. Or so I thought.
Don't get me wrong, my grocery store loves me. I am a sucker for the Super Saver Card and special promotions. Room in the freezer or not, chances are I'm buying it if it's on sale. Instinctively I've understood the connection between providing my phone number and the printed coupons beckoning my purchase of a fringe item. The fact that that I buy size 2 premium brand diapers should tell anyone monitoring my purchases I may also be interested in the Simply Apple apple juice; so, oh by the way here's a coupon for the juice and some organic baby food.
Information Marketing, so I call it, is real and it works. While it seemingly comes naturally to the folks at amazon.com, garnering such information can be difficult for the small business attempting to beat the competition. Thinking back, how many times have I given my phone number, an address or just a zip code when checking out at a store? All that information is being collected and somewhere there is a file out there that can pretty much predict my purchasing behavior. Cross reference that with my magazine subscriptions and public tax records on type of vehicles I drive and, well you probably get the picture. While I'm not a conspiracy theorist angling against "Big Brother" the knowledge that a computer somewhere knows what I'm going to buy before I do makes me a bit nervous.
In the world of retail development I have falsely presumed that a new store location is based upon a simple equation. Plug in a few demographic numbers extrapolated from the last census, draw a few concentric circles and wayla… there either are or there are not enough people with the purchasing power to support a certain store. Forgive me. That my friends is old school. The new school is based less on demographic information and more on "psychographic information." Psychographic information is all that data on purchasing characteristics of a household, a neighborhood, census block, township, county, or trade area. As you might imagine, access to this size of a database is quite pricey and oftentimes reserved for the big boxes or big developers and/or communities who want to build a better case for filling their new lifestyle center (it's still a shopping center to me) and slowing the leakage of tax dollars collected by competing communities with broader shopping options.
As I weigh the pros and cons of such an expense I draw back to the standard demographics of my comfort zone. Meridian is of course more than its city limits. However, just within its jurisdiction is a disparity in income that while skewing old school demographics may provide a hint of light into the purchasing behaviors or "psychographics" of our community. At least it makes me wonder.
So be sure to swipe your super saver card, or next time you are in Jackson or Birmingham shopping, give them that 393 zip code and consider it your little part in targeting a new retailer.
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Skip Scaggs, Manager of Business Development
sscaggs@embdc.org