Garden centres location analytics reveals competitor customer behaviour
The challenge
Family owned Frosts Garden Centres constantly feel the pressure of competition from larger nationwide brands. Fierce discounting in the highly competitive UK garden centres market demanded that they find new ways to maximise profitability whilst growing market share.
At the same time, Frosts need to protect their own loyal customer base, in a price sensitive market where customers will typically drive over 10 miles to spend up to an hour in the right garden centre destination.
Whilst loyalty levels are traditionally high in the garden centre market, there are distinct audiences who shop around, and also segments who actively visit multiple destinations. The question for Frosts was how to locate and identify them.
Using location analytics to target the right audiences
By understanding consumer visitation behaviours to each Frosts Garden Centre and then each of their competitor sites, Frosts could identify where their most loyal customers originate, and where to find those susceptible to conquest. The core analysis focused on:
- Unique visitors and total visits to each location
- Share of visitation and cross visitation between every location
- Visitation behaviour across times of day and week
- Frequency of visits and dwell time at each location
- Seasonality of visitation behaviour by location
- Detailed catchment area mapping for each location
In addition Frosts wanted to specifically analyse the restaurant areas within their locations to understand on-site visitor behaviour, to assess potential spend growth opportunities.
The outcome
Protecting loyalty
Frosts were able to clearly pin-point where their dominant loyalty base originates from around each store. Knowing precise postcode locations of visitors enables loyalty communications and actions to retain and grow this base. Especially crucial for valuable weekday audiences, revealed to have longer dwell times than weekend visitors.
Driving discretionary spend
Of particular importance are the distinct audience segment who visit at weekends, where shorter dwell times indicate purpose driven visits, which can be targeted for growth with personalised communications to specifically identified local postcode areas.
Raising awareness of proposition and merchandising
In fact Frosts discovered that their customer dwell times significantly outstrip the competition underlying the importance of their diverse product offering and experiences, and the need to communicate this.
Conquesting competitior customers
Most crucially of all, Frosts identified postcode areas where customers most susceptible to conquest reside. Customers who display no set loyalty pattern in their shopping can be targeted with compelling communications and offers to make a choice in future.
Next steps
Frosts are now taking targeted marketing actions to further protect and grow their loyalty base, understanding what parts of their store experience drive footfall, and from where.
Frosts will also target specific geographical segments of their competitor customer audiences, having identified those with the highest propensity to defect.
Access to regularly refreshed data also offer Frosts the opportunity to review changes in customer behaviour, and validate the outcomes of marketing strategy.
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