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Recessionary attitudes of shoppers
2009 | Filed under Previously Featured | (0) 
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According to new research from Datamonitor (www.datamonitor.com) - The Global Economic Crisis: The Impact on Consumer Attitudes Behaviours in the UK - most UK consumers are well aware of the economic downturn and are feeling the impact on their daily lives, but are not making wholesale changes to their consumption patterns in the grocery arena. UK shoppers are not abandoning consumerist lifestyles and retail sales in the UK continue to show a slight increase. Nevertheless, there are a number of downturn-induced attitudinal and behavioural adjustments that need to be acknowledged and acted upon.
Datamonitor’s research has shown that UK consumers are among the most sceptical in the world, with 90 per cent believing that the country is in recession and a further 47 per cent experiencing a worsening personal financial situation between October 2008 and April 2009. It is therefore not surprising that ‘lower prices in general’ is a big influence on where UK consumers now do most of their grocery shopping.
STORE LOYALTY NOT HIGH
However, the primary influence was ‘the overall quality of products sold’, demonstrating the ‘want-it-all’ attitude of many consumers in the UK. Only 36 per cent of respondents in the UK cited ‘habit’ as being an important influence on where they shop for groceries, suggesting that store loyalty is not high.
A significant majority of 71 per cent in the UK agree that they now wonder more whether they are getting value-for-money from their grocery purchases. In addition, almost one-third of consumers are changing where they do their grocery shopping in a bid to save money. Other popular approaches employed by UK consumers included using coupons to obtain discounts and being more disciplined by using a shopping list and not buying any additional items.
“This provides opportunities for those industry players that can successfully find the ‘value sweet spot’ whereby the product or service meets or exceeds quality expectations, but at a price that is slightly less than expected. This applies to all sectors of consumer packaged goods,” comments Daniel Bone, Datamonitor analyst and report author.
PRIVATE LABEL GROWING
While some brand loyalty could be seen among UK consumers, 43 per cent agreed that they had recently given up some of their favourite grocery brands. In light of this finding, it is unsurprising that many private label brands have enjoyed success. Datamonitor research emphasised these attitudes among consumers - only 15 per cent advised that they ‘rarely’ or ‘never’ bought private label products, while 39 per cent could be classed as regular purchasers in this area.
Regular purchases of private label products in one category can allow consumers to maintain their preferred brand choices in another category and this behaviour is common among consumers in the UK. In some categories, consumers see little difference in the quality of private label products when compared to market-leading famous brands and this represents the challenge that some marketers will face.
For example, 46 per cent of UK respondents felt that private label food products were identical to branded equivalents, while a further 7 per cent said that private label was superior in this field. It is likely that consumers will maintain their purchasing patterns when economic conditions improve if they are satisfied with the quality of private label goods.
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