Search

This paper compares the buying behaviours of older and younger consumers of older and newer brands in grocery retailing. We analysed 88,000 purchases of 60 brands from six categories. Behavioural loyalty measures for different consumer age cohorts were calculated and compared relative to each brand's launch date. Results showed older consumers do not buy older brands more often than newer brands. Older consumers also do not principally buy older brands. Therefore, brands of all ages compete for consumers of all ages. Findings indicate that for newer brands, older consumers should not be ignored as a market for growing the brand. For older brands, despite the default advantage of long-term exposure of older consumers, such advantage will fade if these brands fail to maintain a competitive presence in the market, as older consumers trial and become loyal to newer brands Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Children influence up to a fifth of all household purchase decisions, yet little is known about how this influence is brought to bear. This research looks at the primary householder purchase context of grocery shopping and establishes the incidence of children accompanying adult shoppers. It identifies the effect of their presence on the spend, time taken to complete the trip and the route taken in-store. More than 33,000 observations are analysed, using exit interviews and structured observation of the in-store location of shoppers across two Australian states and four grocery retail outlets Refuting the commonly held assertion that taking children shopping makes you spend more, accompanied shoppers do not spend more than unaccompanied shoppers, but rather shop 15% faster, tending to avoid busy areas in-store We establish that, on average, 17% of grocery store shoppers are accompanied by children. Children are seen to accompany adults on both small and larger spend grocery shopping trips. Men, who are known to grocery shop less frequently than women, are found to have a lower incidence of being accompanied by a child when they do shop. This has implications for store layout and services offered. Products for children and parents need to be placed in areas where parents are more comfortable (that is, less busy areas), but also merchandised in ways that make it easy for parents to shop at their faster pace. The balance of these two needs is a direction for future research. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The ability to track shoppers as they move through retail environments using signals emitted by their communication devices kindles the interest of practitioners and researchers. This data collection method is cheap and has the ability to supply big data for shopper insights. However, this non-probabilistic sampling method can possibly under- or over-represent certain groups of the shopper population. This study assesses the validity of the data describing the length of shopping trips and representativeness of the sample of shoppers carrying Bluetooth-enabled devices. The authors track unique Bluetooth logs in-store and compare to simultaneously collected data from a manual, systematic sample of 324 shoppers observed and interviewed in the same supermarket. A comparison of the results obtained from the two samples (auto-logging and manual systematic) drawn from the same population indicates automated Bluetooth tracking produces very similar (r=.92, p