The holiday season is here! Well, it’s the time of the year again – Christmas is approaching. Interestingly, I came across an article about ‘The 5 Online Holiday Shopping Personality.’ As a retailer, have you ever wonder how you should be planning your marketing strategies? Let’s take a quick snapshot at the 5 personalities by Toni Zito.
- Uber Planner – Someone who has already purchased their holiday presents for 2012. Tend to be savvy shoppers who stock up gifts for upcoming festive seasons and who knows their research well. Will most probably be responsive to “Christmas in July” and post-holiday promotions.
- Down to the Wire Procrastinator – Antithesis of Uber Planners. Last-minute shoppers who are extremely responsive to last-minute deals. Making the online shopping experience for them easier helps and a big bulk of this group is college students.
- Cyber Monday Surfer – Values an awesome deal and is willing to sacrifice productivity for the sake of monitoring deals online. They are sure of which deals they are after and the want to secure the offer “while stock lasts”. So, it’s important to get the right deals in front of this group at the right time.
- Black Friday Fanatic – Gets in line as soon as one shopping trip ends. Always on-the-go, loves crowd and the thrill of the deal. A strategic online campaign with constant calls-to-action, in-ads tools to improve the tracking performance (QR codes, emails) can increase Black Friday turnout.
- Green Monday Bargainer – Somewhere in between the Uber Planner and the Down to the Wire Procrastinator. They know what they want and do not want to be stressed out, but usually get shopping done in the nick of time. Making in-ad shopping tools selective for them – for example shopping for your mom, brother, girlfriend etc. will help.
Knowing these 5 personalities is important because it allows you to plan how you would want to target these audience groups. If your product is a niche market, it would most probably be possible to identify where the bulk of your customers lie in. How do you identify which personalities your customers belong to then? This brings me back to the constant reminders of listening (monitoring), conversing (talking) and energizing/ supporting/ embracing (Groundswell) to your online conversations. Understanding the topics where most of your conversations are diverting towards, what people are commenting in your review sites and how they are interacting with one another would help you better decipher their personalities. In that case, can a brand have more than one personality – for sure! That’s when effective allocation of resources comes in!