The Male Apparel Shopper

What Motivates Men to Buy

Men traditionally shop less often than women, and when they do shop it is often to replace existing items, or to address a new need. In the case of menswear it is most often to replace existing items in order to refresh their closet.

 While this varies per customer, in the menswear industry there are five primary motivations for a man to buy, they are fit, style, selection, quality, and service. There is of course one other factor, namely price, but this is typically taken into consideration as it relates to the other items. Price is more a function of determining value, and not in and of itself a motivator to buy. Men will buy if they believe something is of good value, and value is derived from the benefits they receive from a product less the price. If in their mind an item provides value of $1000 and the price is $900, then the price is justified and the product is a good value. On the other hand, if the same item is viewed as providing only $800 of value, then the price is too high, and the product is viewed as not being of good value.

So, if we were to put this concept into a simple formula, we arrive at the following:

Value = Benefits - Price

If this is the case, there are then two ways to increase the value of a product. The first is to lower the price and the second is to increase the benefits – or at least the perceived benefits.
So if a customer’s primary focus is on Style, it is imperative that style becomes a main talking point, but then also including discussions that highlight other areas of interest can also help to increase perceived benefits. For example, speaking of the style in addition to the fit and quality will increase the perceived benefits.

As a final note, it is important to understand that customers do not buy features.  In my many years selling custom clothing I often had sales people who focused on horn buttons, silk threads, Bemberg linings, and the like.  While it is good to discuss these items in describing quality, it is critical that you don’t stop with the feature.  You must then describe the advantage and ultimate benefit to the customer, it is this benefit that is ultimately what the customer buys. Benefits like looking good, feeling more comfortable, attracting others, etc., is what product presentation is all about. Benefit selling can in fact build a price objection, as expensive sounding features with no defined benefit simply sound like unneeded extras.

Clienteling and the Male Shopper

Clienteling in Menswear

While clienteling is an applicable skill in most service-focused retail, with my 15 years in retail management in the men’s apparel industry I thought I would write a little bit about how to apply capabilities of clienteling to the menswear business in particular.

As I have discussed in previous articles, clienteling is a colloquial term that came about to describe the activities a sales staff might take with their clientele.  As such, it is a verb which describes the actions an associate takes to better service their customers, and to establish long lasting relationships. In practice these activities can be grouped into two buckets: collection of information that establishes a learning relationship, and the personalized actions one takes based on this information.

While the menswear business is not unique, the shopping habits of men and women are often different. In fact, according to an article by Jay H. Baker Retail Initiative and the Verde Group titled “Men Buy, Women Shop”  the differences are significant. Women enjoy the shopping experience, and more often look at shopping as an experience, while men look at is as a necessity, something to accomplish quickly and with little interaction. For men shopping is a means to an end, while for women it is in fact often the primary goal.

This can be a critical distinction in how to service male shoppers in nearly any retail environment. The quicker you can assist the customer in locating a product, the more likely you are to make a sale. So how is this relevant to clienteling? Isn’t Clienteling about regular interaction with the hopes of bringing the customer into the store more regularly, providing them recommendations of add-on items, and providing targeted personalized communications?  Yes, that is precisely what clienteling is designed to do, and in fact what it is highly effective at doing entirely because of the male shopping habits. If a retailer embraces these tendencies, they can in fact become even more effective in clienteling.

Here are a few simple rules:

1.  Help men to shop.  While this sounds common sense, it is not the act of helping the male shopper when he is in the store that is particularly effective, it is helping him before he arrives in the store. Schedule appointments if possible, but even if not possible, at least plan in advance. Put outfits together that are specifically aimed at what you know about the customer, and do your cross-selling in the form of coordinating items prior to the visit. Check for wish list items, notes and preferences to be sure you have all information that is relevant.
2. Understand what motivates the customer by asking questions and making note of their propensities. This is covered more as a sidebar to this article called “What Motivates Men to Buy”. Use these primary motivators when selecting products, and don’t be afraid to remind the customer of the added benefits they may not have considered. With each interaction, engage customers so you are equipped with more knowledge the next time. Note sizes, preferences, lifestyle, and add items to wish lists.  
3.  Facilitate the customer’s ability to get in and out as quickly as possible. Have a fitting room ready, get a fitter queued up in advance. Use look book tools to find where a product might be in the enterprise if not in stock, and work with the customer so items can be shipped directly to the customer.
4. Schedule the next follow-up. As men like to visit stores less often than women, they typically are less likely to come back if they have an issue. Set a follow-up a week out to be sure the customer is satisfied. Also schedule an outreach 3 or six months out to remind you to reach out to the customer and get into a scheduled routine. For products with limited lifespans such as dress shirts, set a replenishment – even if its two years out. Knowing when a customer needs to replace their wardrobe enables you to get ahead of the customer, so that they don’t shop the competition to replace these items
5. Contact the spouse. Women do a disproportionate amount of apparel shopping, so working with the wife or significant other can pay dividends in the form of more frequent visits, both from the customer and the spouse. While there is still often a need for the customer to enter the store (clothing that needs alterations for example), having the spouse as an ally can pay dividends in bringing the customer into the store, and women are far more loyal to their sales associates, so this also helps to solidify relationships.

By understanding the shopping habits of the male menswear shopper can help to increase sales through effective clienteling. Leveraging your knowledge of these habits can help to increase frequency, increase units per transaction, and most importantly, increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Effective Principles of Clienteling

Clienteling

The word clienteling came about as a rhetorical use of the noun clientele. It was used to describe activities one might take when working with their clientele, and is used now primarily as a verb to describe those activities. The word Clienteling now also describes initiatives or programs (manual or software-based) which revolve around these activities, much like CRM describes solutions for managing customer relationships.

Looking at the broader definition of Clienteling, I often define it as a philosophical approach to better serving ones customers (clientele). An approach focused on highly personalized service that is established over time through a learning relationship.

While the verb clienteling might describe most activities associated with the sales process, the more common activities can be summed into three key elements:

1. Access to information to assist the customer while in the store 
2. Customer profile enhancement (likes, preferences, wish lists, etc.)
3. Personalized customer communication (outreach)

While personalized communications finds itself last on the list, it is in actuality the primary goal of a long-term Clienteling program. It is through the successful completion of the other two items, however, that this communication becomes meaningful and effective.

The Customer Life-cycle

As described above, relationships are established over time. Selling is like any other relationship in that the more you know someone, the more you understand their needs and wishes. You don’t learn everything about a person in a single encounter. But over time, as the relationship matures, your understanding of them improves, and your ability to relate to them and to guide them improves as well. It is through the enhancement of the profile over time, that the communications can be more targeted and meaningful for each and every customer.

The following graphic highlights how a customer/associate life-cycle can change over time. From the first time encounter, whereby the associate needs to identify the immediate need, to a long-term relationship, where they are able to anticipate needs, make personalized suggestions, and follow-up regularly.

The Pareto Principle

Any Clienteling initiative should be designed in such a way as to get the most benefit for the least cost. The Pareto Principle states that roughly 80 percent of the effects of an activity are derived by 20 percent of your efforts. This principle holds true for retail as well, where for most retailers roughly 80 percent of all sales come from 20 percent of the customers. This 20 percent are the most loyal customers, and most often shop the most categories of merchandise. 

With this general understanding in mind, many clienteling activities focus almost exclusively on the Top 20% of customers. The logic being that an increase in sales of 10% with this segment represents an increase of 8% for the enterprise as a whole. It would take an increase of 40% in sales for the remaining customers to equal this same 8%. Obviously the cost to reach 80% of your customers is also significantly higher than for the 20%, so this approach makes sense on a number of levels.

There are three items to consider, however, with using this approach exclusively:

1. Over time customers attrite, albeit at a much slower rate with the 20 percent, so a focus solely on this group of customers at the exclusion of other will see your pool of customers diminish
2. First-time customers may take some time to qualify as a top customer, and without appropriate guidance from the store associate the relationship may never mature to this point
3. These customers are most often already your loyal customers, and may already be benefiting from some form of Clienteling, so the gains might not be as immediate as with customers previously ignored in these efforts  

So, while there is tremendous benefit to focusing on these top customers, you can see that this effort alone will have diminishing returns over time. For this reason, it is important to also nurture elements of the 80 percent, but to do so in a highly targeted and strategic manner. The most effective approach is to focus most energies on the top tier of customers, but to design targeted in-store “campaigns” around segments of the remaining customers. These in-store campaigns for non-clients might include one year follow-ups, replenishment items, birthday/anniversary wishes, in-store events tied to past purchases or noted wish lists and preferences, etc.

The below graphic demonstrates these principles. In this diagram the word Customer defines a consumer that may not be in an associates “book”, while the word Client defines consumer that belongs to an associate’s book (or multiple associates’ books).      

     

Note:To a large degree the success of clienteling activities, and most specifically outreach, is tied to basic math. The more of your clientele you work with, the more successful you will be. While the old manual process only supported a limited book, and therefore the same customers were contacted over and over; this has changed dramatically with clienteling applications.  If we assume the average associate has 125 customers in their client book, and reached out to each customer every 2 months, that will consist of 750 interactions. While that number sounds good at first, if you break this down to the workday it is far less impressive. This 750 communications averages only three a day. By augmenting this list of clients with targeted customers, an associate can double their outreach without losing focus on their best customers.   

Putting It All Together

The typical customer life-cycle goes from a first-time buyer, to a repeat customer, ultimately to a long-term client. It is the goal of every retailer to move customers from point A to Point B, and eventually to Point C.  Working exclusively with customers who have reached Point C in the life-cycle has immediate value, but diminishing returns if new customers are not brought through their own journeys.  So the question becomes, how do you focus most efforts where they have immediate benefits, but not at the expense of those efforts that will pay off in the future?

This is accomplished by designing a program that enables the associate to keep their primary focus on their top customers (their Client Book), but to augment this activity with pre-defined scheduled and automate campaign types that support the nurturing of a larger segment of customers based on customer needs, life events, interests, and other relevant and personalized outreach.

Quantifying Clienteling

Quantifying Clienteling

I have been involved in dozens of Clienteling projects over the years, and am quite actively engaged in consulting on the topic with retailer to this day. One question that invariably arises is how do you go about quantifying the results of clienteling efforts?  If we are going to commit to a broad-sweeping change, how can I know if the efforts will work, or are working?

While it is a simple question, the answer is a bit more complex. This is the case for a number of reasons.

First, many retailers that have previously implement Clienteling did so with the intent of using this heightened service as a competitive advantage over their competition. As such, they are hesitant to discuss real-world successes, as they are content to be among the few who reap the benefits for as long as possible. So while there are clear benefits, you are unlikely to get much detail on them.  

Second, many of the retailers that undertake a new software-based clienteling initiative have already been practicing clienteling activities manually; so any measurable gain can really only reflects the incremental value of systematizing an already existing practices – not the entire gain of performing an activity versus not performing an activity. For retailer that are looking to implement clienteling for the first time (manual or software), the potential gains are even greater.

Third, many factors can impact the sales at a given point in time including staff, product, management, weather, Marketing efforts and events, seasons, etc. Isolating the value of one specific initiative if often fairly complex, especially as retail typically has numerous initiatives design to impact revenues.

So how then can we measure the effectiveness of clienteling?

The Scientific Method is the most accurate way to measure the success, or lack of success, of new methods, practices, or activities. Using this Scientific Method a retailer would identify “like” customers, associates, stores, etc. then divide these combinations into two groups – a study group and a control group. Using the study group they would then take the new actions, and in the control group continue to perform business as usual. Regrettably, as described above, there are so many factors that can impact sales that the combinations of these various factors make the Scientific Method impractical if not impossible.  

There are, however, a number of useful measures that can be used which in their combination serve to be more scientific in their approach, and help to quantify the value of Clienteling. 

1.        Affiliated Sales – affiliated sales is a concept that tracks the sales as a percent of total sales which can be attributed to “Affiliated” clients.  An affiliated client is one who belongs in a store associates book. A common measure for this ranges from 20-40% depending on the retailer. High-end luxury retailers tend to be on the higher side, while mid-priced retailers more toward the lower side of this range. What makes this number perhaps less valuable, however, is that simply affiliating with more customers can grow this number, even if no actual clienteling actions are implemented.
2.       Outreach Sales % – whereas Affiliated Sales does not focus on the actions taken by an associate, Outreach Sales shifts the focus primarily to the impact of a very specific activity – outreach communication. Outreach Sales % is a measure of the percent of all business that happened in a defined time-frame as a direct result of a personalized communication from an associate. If an associate proactively reaches out to a customer, and the customer makes a purchase (within a defined time-frame such as 14 days), this is then considered to be a direct result of the outreach. This is then expressed as a percent of total sales for the time period (most often 1 month). This is a common metric I suggest tracking, as it is rewarding measuring the effect of the efforts, and not just the activity.  This Outreach Sales number most typically ranges from 15% to over 25%, meaning that as much as 1 in 4 dollars can be a result of associate outreach activity. An interesting point of note on the topic of outreach is that one to one personalized communications coming from the store associate are far more effective than those coming from the Marketing department. In fact, a very typical response rate (making a purchase) to a personalized communication falls in the range of 12-20% -- exponentially better than even the best marketing campaigns.
3.       Affiliated Outreach Sales – an argument can be made that many of the customers who received an outreach communication may have wished to shop regardless, and therefore even this number is not 100% proof of the effectiveness of personal outreach to a customer. Affiliated Outreach Sales attempts to address this issue head-on. It is a measure of only those customers who are affiliated, and then looks at the percent of business derived from the affiliated customers who received an outreach communication in comparison to the percent of business for those who had not received a communication. A recent 1 month analysis showed that associates had communicated with approximately 1/3 of their affiliated customers, and this third represented 2/3 of all sales to affiliated customers. Literally ½ the number of customers generated twice the sales for the given month demonstrating the clear value to associate outreach communications.       

While the above metrics help to prove the viability of Clienteling, they are not always the only metrics tracked in a clienteling initiative.  In fact, the most common measures used to gauge the success of Clienteling are much more common statistics most often already in use. It is the impact on these metrics that helps to demonstrate the benefits of the initiative. Some of these include:

•          Total Sales
•          Average Transaction Value
•          Items/Units per Transaction
•          Margin
•          Sales Per Hour
•          Customer Frequency

Looking at these measures on the whole provides the most value in gauging the success of a program, but looking at these metrics as they relate to a specific set of customers (for example affiliated customers, prospect lists, targeted segments used for outreach tasks, etc.) can provide even more insight, and can help to prove the value of the efforts being performed.

Over the years I have been involved in a number of Clienteling deployments, and have had the pleasure of monitoring their success through most of these performance metrics. By focusing efforts in the store toward a specific measure, all of the above metrics can and have been impacted by clienteling activities with great success.