Encourage Category Consistency Time-to-Time

It can be handy for a retailer to have repeat customers with consistent purchase habits. When those sorts of customers come into your store, you earn good will by promptly pointing them toward the sorts of items they’ve bought in the past. You know what special offers will entice them. You could build your inventory around items your consistent purchasers like.
     Researchers at University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, National University of Singapore, Singapore Management University, and ESADE in Spain find that consistent purchase habits are a matter of time. That is, compared to shoppers who think about the money involved while making a purchase, those shoppers who think about the time involved are more likely to select the same sorts of items in the future. They’re also more likely to keep making purchase decisions in the same ways. This is useful to know when you’re introducing a new item to the shopper. You can predict how they’ll go about evaluating it.
     The implication of the research findings is that to build consistent purchase habits in your customers, talk with them about the time it will take to select what fits them best, the time you recommend they reserve to learn how to use the item, and for about how long they can expect the item to keep working for them.
     The researchers say that such talk of time causes the shopper to decide based on emotions, since time considerations are difficult to analyze objectively. Lots of other consumer behavior research has shown that decisions based on emotions are both more consistent and more satisfying. In contrast, thinking about the financial aspects, such as the price or the credit terms, leads to analytical reasoning, which causes more variance from one shopping trip to the next.
     Added by research findings from University of South Australia and Mondelez International is that consistency is more likely at the item category level than at the brand level. The study looked at the purchase habits for a selection of 139 brands from fifteen packaged goods categories by the same 15,000 United Kingdom households from one year to the next. About two-thirds of these households showed category consistency, while only about half of the households showed brand consistency.
     Aiming for category consistency rather than brand consistency is good for the retailer. Shoppers seek a certain amount of variety, and you’d prefer they change brands than change stores.

For your profitability: Sell Well: What Really Moves Your Shoppers

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