What do you want to know about Your Customers?



STOP: You don’t need to get into all the details – let SPA do it for you. For SPA’s help in tacking questions about your customers, telephone us on 01926 334978, Contact us by filling in our Enquiry Form, or Email us at info@spamarketing.co.uk.


What Kinds of People Are They?
Give us your customers’ postcodes, and we’ll profile them against Experian’s MOSAIC classification of lifestyles. MOSAIC classifies UK Postcodes into 11 broad Groups (or 61 detailed Types). A MOSAIC Profile compares your customers with everybody in their local area (or the national average if more appropriate), showing what kinds of people your customers are and which MOSAICs they’re concentrated in. We provide all the stats as standard, but it doesn’t matter if you’re not interested in how we get the results. Most clients simply need to market proactively to their key MOSAICs – the Groups with the highest propensities to buy their products or use their services,

Before rushing off to target those high propensity Groups, it’s worth asking why the other Groups don’t currently do much business with you. Are your products not relevant to them? Are they too dear for most people in the Groups concerned? Is there anything you could do to develop a new offering to tap the parts of the market that you’re currently missing? Marketing shouldn’t be just a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once upon a time men didn’t use cosmetics!


An Example MOSAIC Profile

If people from all MOSAIC Groups were equally likely to be customers, all 11 Groups would score index 100 – the average for everyone in the local area. In fact, the proportion of people from Symbols of Success that are customers is nearly 3 times their share of the local population – index 277. Other up-market Groups – Urban Intelligence and Suburban Comfort – also have high scores. By contrast, Downscale Groups – Ties of Community, Welfare Borderline, Municipal Dependency, Blue Collar Enterprise and Twilight Subsistence – account for very few customers given their share of the local population. The chart provides a visual summary of this pattern; clients get the full statistics – plus a 61-Type breakdown if the sample of customers analysed is large enough for this to be reliable.


How Far Do Your Customers Travel?

From their Postcodes, we can work out how far customers travel to reach you. Comparing different branches may be a useful first step for retailers. Tourist attractions often find big seasonal differences, with long-distance visitors in the summer (& other) holidays. The rest of the year, effective catchment areas are much smaller. Even such information can help ensure that your marketing plans are realistic.








What About the Driving Time?
Journey planning software will give you the best route from each customer’s home Postcode to the store used. So it’s easy to work out their average drivetime, fuel cost, and even environmental impact.

Drivetime analysis also helps frame marketing plans which allow for the location of competitors. Don’t blow your entire budget targeting people who live very much nearer to competitors than to your own sites – or the reverse. Instead, keep a big chunk for targeting those with a real choice – people living similar drivetimes from your branches as from the competition.




Where Do Customers Live?
Provided you’ve got the Postcodes of a fair number of them, we can map your customers in two ways:

Dot Maps – with one dot per Postcode, perhaps colour-coded by customer type, product purchased, etc. The density of dots suggests the concentration of customers.

Dots visual impact, but it may be unclear whether any pattern is due just to variations in the underlying population density. Shaded maps (below) address this problem directly.

Shaded Maps – showing the concentration of customers v population. The redder the shading, the higher is the proportion of the population that are customers.

Shaded customer penetration maps bring out areas of relative strength/ weakness. They’re good for defining store catchment areas, for assessing the effect of a competitor outlet on your market share, and for deciding where to promote your services.

It’s also worth looking at any holes in your coverage – areas where you get very small proportions of the population as customers. If the total population there is large enough, such holes could be good places for a new branch. Trouble is, they could also be areas full of the wrong MOSAICs – the kinds of people who don’t tend to become your customers. Fortunately it’s easy to find out. We just need to build a MOSAIC potential model – see Where can I find more people like my customers?


What if Your Customers Are Businesses?
Besides Business to Consumer (B2C), SPA does Business to Business (B2B) marketing too – working with business data specialists Market Location. We match your customers to ML’s business universe to identify their Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) code, the number employed, the status of the site (solus, head office, branch) and so on. Next we produce profiles – they’re like MOSAIC profiles of consumers, but with far more types! Then we can use your customer profile to model the business potential in different parts of the UK. So if you want to work out which businesses to target, roll out a new B2B franchise, or set up a new branch to serve the North East, call SPA on 01926 334978, Contact us by filling in our Enquiry Form, or Email us at info@spamarketing.co.uk.


Are Customers Satisfied with Your Service?
You’re not going to find out without asking them! Customer Surveys are the cheapest and best way to investigate satisfaction. Whether you’re in B2B, sell direct to the public or through retail outlets, SPA can design your survey and analyse the results for you. See Your Survey.


WHEN Do Customers Buy From You?
If you have sales data (e.g. invoices) it is easy to analyse this by date and MOSAIC and so – in principle – to look at sales by day of the week, weekday v weekend, by month, or by season. In practice, invoice dates seldom reflect the transaction date and – unless that is recorded reliably (e.g. on EPOS) – a Customer Survey is the best way forward. See Your Survey. The big advantage of a Survey or EPOS to investigate transaction timings is that you can also profile by time of day. Whilst EPOS won’t give you customers Postcodes, a Survey could do so if required – making it possible to understand any variations in the type of customer by time of day, day of the week, and weekday v weekend. SPA has used this kind of data to classify retail outlets into types for different treatment according to the pattern of business.


How Much Do Your Customers Spend?
One of the best ways to understand customer spend is to profile spending using MOSAIC. Instead of counting the customers in each MOSAIC Type, you count how much they spend. You can use the figures in two ways:




The second of these two approaches leads directly on to computer modelling – we look at the MOSAIC mix of each area in the UK, and use this to predict the potential spend on your products by the people living there (assuming that you were in a position to sell to them).


Where Can I Find More People Like My Customers?


Customer Potential Modelling will tell you. We need a MOSAIC profile of your customers – or instead a MOSAIC definition of your targets. Once we have that, we can go around the UK area-by-area, inspecting the MOSAIC mix – spotting the areas richest in exactly those MOSAIC Types which provide most customers. These are the areas in hot colours (red & orange) on the map; those lowest in your target types are in cold greens and blues. A customer potential model is as easy as that – target the hot areas, and turn the map into money!



Branch Potential Analysis
Of course retailers do part of their targeting just by opening shops in the right kinds of places – areas rich in the MOSAICs that provide most customers – and avoiding everything else. But even with a map of modelled customer potential (above) it can still be hard to compare possible new branches. To make the job easier, try SPA’s branch potential report – showing the total customer potential in catchment areas of 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2 and 5 miles around the Postcodes of candidate new branches. We also offer bespoke site dossiers – perhaps a MOSAIC catchment area map, a competitor proximity analysis and map, and tailored catchment demographics reports as specified by our client.


Customer Segmentation
Here at SPA, we love customer segmentation projects. We classify your customers into types by the kind of market opportunity they provide you, or for some other purpose of your own. You can then target a specific promotion or other activity at each type, measure your market share by segment, or even assess your need for repositioning. Our page on Segmentz may interest you – it is about segmenting retail outlets using similar techniques. Of course every segmentation project is different. So if you’re really serious, best call us on 01926 334978 or Email us at info@spamarketing.co.uk.

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