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Understanding consumer behavior is the key to unlocking insights about your customers and enabling more effective business decisions — but are operations leaders tapping into its full potential? By leveraging consumer behavior insights, operations leaders in retail, restaurants, real estate, and other industries, can answer critical questions about their customers, such as:
- Where are my customers coming from?
- Where do my customers spend time?
- What routes do my customers take to get to my stores or shopping centers?
- Where do my customers go before and afterwards?
- How long do my customers stay at my store versus a competitor’s store?
With the right insights, operations leaders can make informed decisions for staffing, store operating hours, site selection, and much more. Let’s take a look at the top three use cases of consumer behavior insights for operations leaders:
01
Customer Profiling
Learning what your customers are like and where they frequent can help operations leaders better plan for the unique needs of their stores. That’s where customer profiling comes into play. With customer profiling, you can get an accurate picture of buyer behaviors and optimize everything from merchandising, new store locations, and staffing and logistics.
For example, with Azira’s insights, we analyzed two competing shopping centers — Shopping Center A in Rockville, MD, and Shopping Center B in Potomac, MD — focusing on their trade areas, how these areas fluctuate throughout the day, detailed customer profiles, and the retail stores most frequently visited within them.
At first glance, the two centers appeared quite similar, but the data revealed notable differences in visitor profiles and trade areas. Shopping Center A attracted a younger, more regional crowd, while Shopping Center B drew an older, wealthier, and more local audience. With these insights, operations leaders can tailor their strategies to meet the needs of the shoppers most likely to visit them.
02
Site Selection
The right location is crucial for any business — whether you’re a restaurant targeting a breakfast and lunch crowd or a retailer seeking the best shopping plaza for your new store location. Azira’s consumer insights simplify site selection by providing details into trade areas, foot traffic patterns by day and time, co-tenancy behaviors, and more.
For example, Azira’s insights helped a retailer make a choice between two shopping centers in the same market. By comparing visitor patterns at both locations, the retailer could identify which center attracted a more favorable customer profile for their brand. While one location might have had more total foot traffic, the other offered stronger alignment with target demographics and had co-tenants likely to attract similar customers.
Consumer insights are also invaluable for infill opportunities. Operations leaders can identify competitors drawing visitors from uncontested areas and strategically place new stores to tap into the demand.
By leveraging consumer behavior insights to guide their decisions, operations leaders can choose sites that align better with their customers, attract more foot traffic to new stores, and capture a larger share of the market.
03
Cannibalization Studies
When chains are looking to expand into new areas, one key challenge they face is the risk of cannibalization — the concept that a new store could take away sales from an existing one. However, cannibalization isn’t always a bad thing. In some cases, opening a new location can help relieve pressure on an overcrowded store while maintaining overall market share.
To navigate this, Azira uses location insights to model trade areas and analyze sales transfer rates. By examining where customers overlap between two nearby stores, we can help operations leaders estimate how much business might shift from one store location to another.
This information is invaluable for both franchisees and corporate-owned stores seeking to balance expansion plans with profitability across multiple locations.
For example, the map below uses color coding to show the risk of sales transfer between stores:
- Dark red areas indicate a high risk, with a 50% likelihood of cannibalization.
- Green areas indicate a low risk, with less than 15% likelihood of cannibalization.
With a detailed visualization of the risk of sales transfer, operations leaders can make strategic decisions about store expansion while minimizing the impact on existing locations.
By partnering with Azira, operations leaders can leverage consumer behavior data to gain deeper insights into customer habits, preferences, and movement patterns to enhance customer profiling, optimize site selection, conduct cannibalization studies, and more. With these insights, operations leaders can develop targeted strategies that drive smarter business decisions and give their business an edge over the competition.
