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Is Customer Loyalty a Casualty of the Recession?
I receive an aggregate enewsletter from the National Retail Federation (NRF) every weekday. It offers a round-up of news stories from around the world about the retail scene. Over the months, I've noticed that stories from Australia or Thailand might just as easily have been written here in Canada. Retailers around the world are experiencing the same challenges you are.
With that fact in mind, I thought you'd be interested in a blog by BBC Scotland's business and economy editor Douglas Fraser, which was included in this morning's NRF newsletter. Titled "Shoppers shop around," it explores some research from Experian, retail consultants in the UK. As Fraser writes, "It's not that people have stopped spending…but there are significant changes in consumer behavior…"
According to Experian, one such change is a marked drop in customer loyalty. More than 25 percent of the consumers they surveyed reported they were now more likely to "shop around" for the best deal. Another interesting finding was that 40 percent of respondents said that companies are "not fair" to consumers. Fraser quotes Experian's Joe Stanton, who says that he foresees a permanent shift to "promiscuous bounce-back customers," consumers whose loyalty must be "re-won every day."
Is this true of Canadian consumers? Has the economic downturn brought a decline in customer loyalty? And, if it has, how do you win consumers back?
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Lori Smith, , Editor-in-Chief
Lori Smith is the editor of Gifts and Tablewares, Canada's premiere gifts and tablewares magazine. Written for retailers of gifts, tablewares, housewares, stationery and home furnishing accessories, its objective is to help readers increase their sales and run their businesses more profitably by providing information on new products, merchandising, small business management, customer service, consumer behavior and industry news. The magazine is published six times a year by BIG Magazines, LP, a leading Canadian information company.
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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on May 29, 2009 11:36 AM.
The previous post in this blog was Where's the Middle Ground in Minimum Order Size?.
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