The July update from the BRC was the latest in a number of reports that consumer confidence is slowly returning to the economy and the high street, writes Alex McCulloch of CACI.
Typically these are “macro”-level views, collating industry-wide data, and it prompted us to look at shopper behaviour from a more “micro” view to understand the perspective of what’s happening on the ground in the shopping centres.
CACI conducts in excess of 100,000 consumer surveys a year across more than 110 UK shopping destinations; this includes in-town shopping centres, out-of-town retail parks and every format in between. In every centre we record, among other variables, retail spend, catering spend, frequency, party size, dwell and the Acorn group. We collate this data into a single database called ShopperDimensions, which gives a unique insight into customer behaviour from the ground up.
The first thing to note is that consumer behaviour is certainly changing; comparing 2012 off-peak behaviour with 2013 off-peak we see that across all centres:
• Retail spend has increased 8%
• Retail conversion rate has increased 10%
This initially indicates a returning consumer confidence; people spending more, and buying more. However, this increased regularity has been accompanied with a decline in average frequency (-6%). Catering spend has increased by 4% and catering conversion has remained steady. People are therefore spending more but are doing so a little less frequently.
Things are not therefore as clear-cut as they may seem; people are heading out to shop with more to spend than last year but are still watching the pennies as they go shopping less frequently – an indication of a return to spending as a leisure activity and perhaps growing confidence.
If we drill into the centre type in more detail we can see that there is variation by centre type, which indicates that encouragingly in-town centres are seeing a big uplift, the retail spend growth is 10% and conversion up 21% – could this be the start of the high street recovery?
What is clear is that in this new retail landscape people want to shop as a leisure activity but are still watching the money. If shopping as a leisure activity is on the rise then clearly the quality of the leisure offer is crucial, perhaps more so than is realised.
