What Retailers can learn from Elmo, Barney and Dora
I have a 7 year old and a 4 year old; who like most of the children their age love their television time. Seems like you can almost predict the age of a child by the TV shows that they like. You can also figure out the age of the kids by the tunes their parents can hum!!
The TV show "graduation" path seems to go from Baby Einstein to Elmo to Barney to Dora/ Diego to Caillou......will map the rest of it as my kids grow.
Seems to me that Retailers can pick up a few tips from these shows on customer segmentation and lifestyle driven merchandising.
It's amazing how well defined the customer segmentation is. Anisha my daughter used to love Elmo. However when she graduated to Barney; she never looked back. Elmo is a faint memory for her now...and is for "babies".
I had written an article on this sometime back; most retailers still drive their merchandising and assortment strategy using product groupings of some kind. A few of the retailers that I work with however have evolved to a model where the entire design, merchandising and assortment strategy is around the primary dimension of a well defined customer profile.
Each profile has a name and some defined traits that the entire creative and planning group recognizes; leading to a very well orchestrated merchandising and marketing process with the end goal of satisfying that customer.
...and boy are those customers loyal!!
My son Aditya wants to grow up to be spider-man; wears spiderman underpants and wants a spider-man costume for Halloween!! I am ready for him to graduate....
Comments
Good one Sudhir...
Think of it, Retail Banks execute the life'stage' based segmentation & marketing offer strategy very well...
Just to quote my own pleasant experience..Was at my B-School when Citi was clever enough (catch 'em young) to offer a bank card with a INR 20K limit, which I got used to, for the convenience it offered.
Two years and I was out and earning. The initial limit made sense no more & I was thinking for a while that I would drop a note to the bank to up the limit, but was busy and never got to.
The weekend I finally decided to do...logged on to find a proactive credit line increase mail waiting, along with a car loan offer.
Though I could very easily guess what triggered the proactive offer, this definitely was a delightful experience.
Thinking this could apply well in certain specific Retail Formats (Apparel & Electronics) than General Merchandize..
Posted by: Santhanakrishnan | October 10, 2009 8:21 AM