Keep Targeted Selling Appealing

When you—the retailer—target your selling precisely to what your consumers want now, you save time for your business and for the customer. When you target your merchandising to what customers will be buying in coming months, you can keep your inventory trim.

      To target your selling, you need to gather information from the customer, and to target merchandising, you must gather information from groups of customers. Some retailing experts have concluded that consumers—especially younger adults—are quite willing to share information about themselves. The experts base this conclusion on how social networking users—especially younger ones—are willing—even driven—to reveal absolutely everything.

      But researchers at University of California-Berkeley and University of Pennsylvania report that when it comes to dealing with retailers, consumers of all age groups say they hesitate sharing an abundance of information. Younger consumers are indeed more willing than older consumers to help the retailer customize to them, yet they seem to be saying they’re not interested in complete openness. For example, when a representative sample of American young adults were asked a question similar to, “Would you like the ads you see to be based on information gathered about you while you are in a store?,” 90% said no.

      Because of the value of targeting, keep the information gathering appealing to your customers.

• Whenever gathering information in a formal way, tell consumers you’re gathering information on them in order to save them time, find products and services to best meet their needs, and keep costs down so you can keep prices lower.
• If you keep customer information, such as what is gathered from a frequent shopper program, make it easy for customers both to look at the privacy practices you follow and to request corrections in or deletion of information.