The typical customer profile of each retail chain is a key differentiator between retail players. Understanding the audience profile of each retail partner can play an instrumental role in your channel and category strategy. With Placer, you can view a range of chain-level consumer attributes, allowing you to gain a better understanding of the customer makeup of each chain and tailor product assortment and promotional plans per the needs of each of your partners.

You’ll be able to answer these questions after reading this article:

1. How can you view consumer demographic information for specific chains?
2. What are the differences between the shoppers of competing retailers? What type of consumers are more likely to visit a certain retailer and not the other?
3. How did the customer profiles change in recent years in light of macro events like the pandemic or inflation?

Get started with the following steps:

Step 1: Compare demographic & psychographic attributes in different chains

a. In the Chains section, go to the Demographics report. Select the chains you’d like to compare in the top search bar. You may select up to 8 chains for comparison.

b. In Audience Profile, select the chains for comparison and then the relevant dataset.

c. In the example below the STI: Popstats dataset is used. In the Ethnicity section, we can see the breakdown of population ethnicities and the indices of each segment compared to the nationwide average. For example, in the trade areas of Smart & Final locations, Hispanic and Asian ethnicities are over-indexed. This means that the areas from which the chain draws its customers have higher ratios of these population groups compared to the nationwide averages. This insight can be used to adjust product assortment or merchandising plans for those chains.

Pro Tip: Customers may find different datasets in Audience Profile depending on the company’s subscriptions. While several datasets are available to all customers at no extra cost, a variety of additional datasets are available on Placer's Marketplace for an additional fee.

Step 2: Compare demographic & psychographic attributes for the same chain at different time periods

a. In the Chains section, go to the Demographics report. Select the chain you’d like to compare in the top search bar.

b. Click the 3 dots next to the selected chain and select Duplicate. Click on the calendar drop-down and select Advanced. In the right drop-down, select Filter per Industry, select the relevant dates, click Apply, and then Apply Filters.

c. In the example below, we used Popstats dataset and a comparison of H Mart’s visitors in 2022 (red) vs. 2019 (purple). You can see 2 interesting trends: (a) A decrease in average and median household income and (b) A decrease in disposable income. This may indicate that the chain’s shoppers have more limited purchasing power. Category and channel managers should consider this shift when approaching product launched, assortment decisions, and promotional plans.

Step 3: Identify the top household segments that visit each chain (for customers who have added the PersonaLive application).

a. Go to the Spatial.ai PersonaLive report under Advanced Reports. Choose the Analyze tab.

b. Make sure you are set for Brands analysis and using the Rank view. Select the relevant retail chain from the drop-down and see the top household segments that visit the chain’s locations. You can download a CSV file of the segmentation data.

Clicking the Expand icon next to each segment will open the segment report.

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‍c. The segment report breaks down each segment's attributes, preferences, and influences.

d. Go to the Geography section to view the local markets where this population segment is prevalent. Use this geographic layout to inform any targeted marketing tactics.

Pro Tip: The Spatial.ai PersonaLive application combines store visitation with digital behavior from social platform interactions to classify households into 80 segments that reveal which brands they follow, publications they read, topics they discuss, and more. For more information visit the Placer Marketplace.

Step 4: identify shared audience segments between 2 retail chains (for customers who have added the Spatial.ai PersonaLive application)

1. Go to the Spatial.ai PersonaLive report under Advanced Reports. Choose the Analyze tab. Select Brands analysis and switch to the Compare view.

Select any 2 chains to compare the household segments that visit their location. In the example below, we compare the audience segments of Sprouts Farmers Market (Y-axis) to Whole Foods Market (X-axis).

2. The comparison indicates that the 2 chains share several audience segments such as Upper Suburban Diverse Families or Ultra Wealthy Families. Also, Whole Foods is drawing a small yet notable share of visits from the Urban Low Income, while Sprouts is over-indexing for Wealthy Suburban Families. This comparison indicated nuanced differences in the chains’ customer makeup.