STUDYING CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR IN RETAIL STORES



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IDENTIFICATION OF CUSTOMERS

The terms customer and consumer
are not synonymous. A customer is a
purchaser of a product or a service; a
consumer is a user of a product or a
service. Bed-ridden invalids in hospitals
are food consumers but hardly food
store customers. Purchasers of rat poison
are not the consumers of the product.


Origin of Customers

Where do a store's customers come
from? What is the geographic distribution
of their homes and how far do they
travel to the store ? The answers to these
questions supply useful data on customer
origin, which in the sense used here is a
composition characteristic. Origin tells
us whether the customer is a large-city
apartment dweller, a suburbanite, a
ruralite, a transient, and so on. The foodbuying
behavior pattern of a customer
who lives in a congested apartment area
of a large city is markedly different from
the rural customer who has a large
vegetable garden and a home freezer.


CUSTOMER BUYING BEHAVIOR PATTERNS

To buy is to purchase. To shop is to
visit business establishments for inspection
or purchase of goods. Therefore
shopping is an element of customer behavior
in buying. A customer placing an
order over the telephone is buying, not
shopping. For this reason it may be
desirable to standardize on the use of the
term buying rather than shopping when
the totality of customer behavior is under
coQsideration.


Time and Frequency of Purchase

Store operations must be geared to
mesh with the customers' time of purchase
pattern. Store buyers and merchandisers
must keep on schedule with
it. Merchandise must be available in the
store in adequate supply if maximum
sales are to be achieved. Woe to him
whose Christmas trees arrive to market
on December twenty-sixth!