I am a Millennial and so are a fair few of my colleagues at Retail247, as it turns out. We are a diverse bunch ranging roughly from the ages of 23 to 36 with varying lifestyles, living environments, and views on the world as well as retail, making us a very difficult group to market to. The word ‘Millennial’ has a lot of different connotations and we generally have a bit of a bad reputation with many people still viewing us as young, precious and selfish but whatever your thoughts and feelings may be towards this generation, we are moving into our prime earning and spending years and are the new generation of retail.
How do Millennial’s shop?
Most Millennial shopping starts with their phone. With almost all Millennials owning a smartphone and it being their primary access to the world, the search engine seems the logical place for them to begin their retail journey and before that all important purchase we tend to research our options, a lot. Talking to my colleagues we have some common shopping habits. We will hunt for the best deal, read the customer reviews (and leave many of our own whether they be good or bad) and look for the ‘best’ product on the market within our budget. Also, generally speaking, we avoid a full day trip to the shops like the plague only visiting when strictly necessary and often mixing this with another activity, for example picking up a quick purchase before meeting a friend for lunch or whilst waiting for a train, perhaps.
With this in mind, when visiting a store in person, we want to get a feel of a product and try it on. This helps us avoid the somewhat inevitable trip to the local corner shop or post office to return a multitude of often ill-selected online purchases. Sometimes, we just want to get inspiration for our next purchase and see what is on offer. We seem to be a mildly grumpy group (perhaps stemming from the general financial difficulties for the generation compared to older Generation X or Baby Boomers) so we tend to make our own decisions about what we want rather than seeking input, fashion advice or opinions from sales associates. However, don’t let that fool you into thinking customer service doesn’t matter to us.
How Millennials use customer service
When we do enlist the services of a sales advisor we expect a high level of product knowledge, information on the best way to care for the items, or suitable alternatives if our item is unavailable. We are fussy and generally irritable preferring to be left alone in a store environment, and from personal experience, I will abandon online shopping baskets half way through a transaction because the checkout process was just too convoluted, the delivery options weren’t convenient or the website just wasn’t user friendly and I was too annoyed with it before I’d even put anything in my basket.
A recent example is a beauty website showing products on the main page and only showing as out of stock when I clicked through to the individual item. Then only showing me in the small print after finally getting to checkout which items were included in a promotion and of course, one of the ones I had selected was not. Our time is precious and these experiences leave their mark, often we are loyal to a brand purely for something as simple as their ease of online checkout, collection options or open and honest promotional activity.
So, what kind of retail experience do we enjoy?
If we go into a shop, we want to know the thing we need is in stock to avoid a wasted journey – either having ordered it before and visiting the store to collect, try on and potentially return or exchange there and then (whilst also getting inspiration for our next purchase) or having a live view of the store stock to know we won’t be disappointed by our trip.
We want the sales advisors to be knowledgeable but certainly not in your face – the quicker we can get out of the shop the better!
Additionally, we want excellent and intuitive online retail journeys, no sneaky marketing or promotions, no multiple logins to get through checkout and realistic size guides that work for us.
Furthermore, we want good loyalty schemes; believe it or not we can be loyal! Given the right package of tailored discounts or even accurate product recommendations (not just blanket marketing emails) we can most certainly be persuaded to shop with the same brand on multiple occasions.
I think, unlike the Gen Z customers who are used to everything personalised to their previous purchase history and like attention grabbing, instagrammable and exciting in store or online experiences, all Millennials want is a way of getting their products via a no fuss, smooth and easy to use mechanism, regardless of location (physical vs virtual). Is that really too much to ask?