I know that car manufacturers undertake area market surveys. They get updated to monitor shifts in population, changes in the socio-economic shape of the areas being studied and a whole bunch of other information. The vast amount collected is crisscrossed and correlated to assess current dealers’ performance expectations in the area, the region and the country. The data also support allocation decisions regarding models and volumes for vehicle inventories, as well as parts and service facility sizes and so on.
The studies look at the competition, of course, and whether a new point should be established in support of the existing network.
I’m sure that other industries undertake similar methods to ascertain performance and placement of outlets and stores. We live in an area that has and continues to change significantly from a relatively sleepy backwater near Hilton Head Island, to a bustling and vibrant community of its own. Large subdivisions abound, populated by families but increasingly by retirees. These folks, like me, have moved in from elsewhere – mostly the Eastern seaboard from Florida to Maine.
Infrastructural projects are going on all around – roads, hospitals, and schools are being built to accommodate the needs of the growing and shifting profile of the new population. It’s that shifting profile that now dictates changes in tastes and buying power. Expectations in customer services also go up. It’s not necessarily a question of speed, after all, retirees have more time to take things easy than most. The Low Country is often referred to as ‘The Slow Country’ and that’s fine by me – it’s why we moved there.
Grocery stores are a case in point and regular readers know that I love to cook so I spend a fair amount of time in them. But just because one belongs to the same chain as the one a few miles away, service and attitudes can be as different as chalk and cheese. Prices have risen at an alarming pace for all kinds of reasons, most of them political, but service levels don’t keep pace and you finally tend to begrudge giving them business and start to look elsewhere for more economical means. We have a large chain around us, I believe founded in the South, where at one store you’re greeted with curmudgeonly, grudging staff, avoiding eye-contact (that really frosts me) even to a point of belligerence with a tut-tut to go with it. The pharmacy staff couldn’t organize a barn dance in a brewery – I had one of those on-going mess ups worthy of a Monty Python sketch – you get the picture. At the other everything is all bright and shiny, matching the efforts of the people who work there – smiling, attentive, efficient– kind even. The prices are the same, so guess where we go.
A word on pricing leads me to another peeve. I think they adopt the ‘boil a frog’ method of upping the prices until the strain starts to show, blaming everything but economics. I don’t understand the rate of rising prices, and we may be staring inflation in the face. Incomes and pensions certainly aren’t there to meet the increases. The meat and produce counters at Costco are a good weathervane, where some prices have even quadrupled over two or three years.
Maybe market area studies should include customer sentiment studies, too.
