Retail Intercepts
Retail Intercepts Description
Retail Intercepts are an interesting type of research that most everyone has probably seen being done at some point. The concept behind retail intercepts is to catch the consumer immediately after a store visit in order to understand how they perceived the experience - from the channel perspective, or to talk to them about a specific purchase that they made, and what the key motivators were. A key benefit to this type of research is the immediacy of the feedback - and the fact that many of the details may have been forgotten if this type of study were conducted days or weeks later.
In general there are two primary reasons to conduct retail intercepts - the first is to study the experience of the retail environment (cleanliness of the stores, the helpfulness of the staff, the breath of options, the organization of the store, the prices charged….)
The other main reason to conduct retail intercepts is to understand the purchase decision of a specific product category that you are interested in, to understand which brands were noticed and what stood out about each one, what their perceptions were of the different brands offered, and which features or capabilities were most critical in their decision and why they finally decided on the brand and model that was purchased.
Retail Intercept Training
The people who conduct Retail Intercepts are trained to understand the breadth of factors that influence various purchase decisions and are skilled at first getting as much information from the respondent as they can remember without prompting, and after that is done, they will go through a number of other potential factors that may have also contributed to their final decision to ensure that every possible factor is considered as they put together a profile of that customers' purchase decision.
Retail Intercepts Pros
- The information that is gained from Retail intercepts is about as fresh as you can get because it's discussed immediately after the actual purchase - this often leads to uncovering more subtle factors that contribute to the overall decision, but could be lost if the interview were to take place after a substantial delay in time.
- There is also an element of honesty as the respondent doesn't have time to think of logical or "intelligent" reasons for making their decisions - so there is a purity in their responses that can be altered as a respondent thinks through what they are going to say about something (as we all have a desire to be logical and to make intelligent decisions - as most of us become accustomed to filtering what we say in order to manage how we are perceived by others.)
Retail Intercepts Cons
- Retail Intercepts can be somewhat expensive depending on how broad a category or products you are interested in learning about. If your product category is a high volume product your task of finding someone who just purchased one is much easier than it is if your product category is a low volume sales item.
- Retail Intercepts can feel invasive to the respondent and the interviewer must be well trained in order to put the respondent at ease and ensure them that they're only interested in understanding their perspectives of the purchase process that they just went through, and they won't be asked to buy anything else.
Retail Intercepts Timing
Depending on how much time is spent with each respondent it can take a long time to get a reasonable sample of a certain type of customer. The amount of time that it takes to field a certain number of respondents will depend most directly on how typical the purchase that you want to profile is. In some cases an Retail Intercepts may take an entire day with just one respondent, while with a high volume product you might get a dozen or two completed surveys. A retail intercept program may last for 2 or 3 weeks just to field the completed interviews - and then the time to combine the results and put together a presentation - could easily take several weeks.
Applications of Retail Intercepts
Retail Intercepts is good for identifying unmet needs with existing products. Retail Intercepts can also be used to get inside the head of customers, to understand what really motivates them to act in a certain way.
