With hundreds of billions of dollars in purchasing power, Millennials are primed to become the most powerful retail customers in the industry. However, retailers may encounter tough-to-unravel marketing difficulties with this new consumer demographic. Different demographics require different retail approaches.
Millennials comprise a valuable, cohesive group that have different needs and expectations from other groups, such as the Gen Xers or Baby Boomers. This is a generation that values having a wide variety of options, feelings of connection and being acknowledged as individuals. Millennials are social shoppers. They are more likely to shop with family or friends, and to use social media to communicate about their shopping experiences than other generations. Because of its diversity, one-size-fits-all retail models do not work for the millennial crowd. Its expectations are higher. When it comes to shopping habits and technology use, a homogenous population is not to be found within the Millennial generation.
In order to affect a better understanding of what it takes to meet the elevated expectations of today’s modern shoppers, Euclid conducted a consumer survey that focused on the shopping habits of 1,500 U.S. Consumers. Three important trends emerged from the study. First, shoppers’ views of stores seem to be changing based on new buying models. Second, millennials are turned off by traditional marketing methods, and finally, the study shows that millennials possess an openness to the regular use of multiple channels, which indicates growing channel agnosticism.
Despite the retail industry’s prevailing narrative of vast industry decline, it still has as good a chance as ever to continue to deliver on-demand goods to the people in cost-effective, profitable ways, so long as it makes some smart adjustments. While physical stores have been hit hard by online sales, they still play an important role in the retail landscape. The key to their continued success lies in a willingness by retailers to spend time exploring new and more innovative retail models, such as pop-up shops, which have a temporal nature that evokes fear of missing out on the latest, cool products and experiences if these things are not purchased on the spot.
Millennials can offer the retail market invaluable assets, and it all begins by capturing their valued attention. Retailers are wise to invest less money in marketing, and more in the bolstering of seamless technological experiences across retail platforms. The generation that is accustomed to the personalized convenience of Amazon.com wants to find the same brand of trouble-free experiences in brick and mortar stores.
Influencer and social media marketing demonstrate the ways in which this generation prefers to be a part of the retail conversation instead of just passive witnesses to the advertising that enticed past generations. This generation should be directly addressed in order to spark the right retail connection. Direct engagement leads to conversation, while it effectively strengthens the relationships between brand and consumer. With Millennials, interactivity and experiences win out every time over hard sells.
