Menu
Are your customers Cheap or Chic?
Finding out your customers attitudes towards pricing is not always straight forward. It is also often overlooked in favor of more tangible differentiators like income or gender. Everyone falls somewhere on the Cheap vs Chic scale and, like most things involving data, it’s a bell curve with most people falling in the middle.
Cheap customers
Cheap customers are looking for bargains, it doesn’t matter if they are millionaires or just getting by. They consider saving both a virtue and part of the shopping experience. There are rich folks who will gleefully tell you they just saved a bundle on something they could easily afford to pay full price for. The savings is the reward and they may still buy a top tier item, they just really, really love a bargain. Any brand can tap into this by having regular sales and offering special discounts that reward customers. Amazon Prime Day is a great example of this. Amazon rarely has the lowest prices, they focus on, selection, convenience and fast shipping, but one day a year they remind cheap customers that they are a good place to shop. Once Amazon gets them in the door the great selection, convenience and fast shipping may turn a somewhat cheap customer into a regular customer. If you are already a bargain business, cheap customers are your bread and butter, you just have to keep reassuring your customers that they are getting the very best deal. It is highly unlikely that cheap customers will become chic customers, but they make a great addition to your list because they will buy when things go on sale.
This easy to understand seven page guide will teach you how to create useful personas so that you can market more effectively and truly engage your customers.
Chic customers
Chic customers only want the best, which is usually the most expensive. You don’t have to offer discounts but you do need to have the best. Chic customers respond to beautiful photography, and limited copy. When they buy $400 sweaters, they expect the price to be their guarantee of quality. They want to be admired for the brands they wear and the company they keep. While chic customers are usually assumed to be higher income than cheap customers, seeing themselves as chic is more about who they are than how much they make. Target is more chic than Walmart even though they sell similar items. Ikea is more chic than Bob’s, even though Bob’s furniture is probably more expensive. It’s highly unlikely that chic customers will become cheap customers, though who doesn’t love a good sale?
It’s hard to engage both
Don’t try to change these customers, just give them what they want. If you have a large group of cheap customers, put them into a segment. Most stores have customers who only shop the sale section and who interact with sale emails. Chic customers are the ones who who only look at new arrivals and don’t interact with sales emails, so that’s a good place to start. You should set up a customer person for your chic customers and another for your cheap customers so you can target the more effectively. If you’d like help putting together personas for your customers, click to download the Smart Shopify Persona Builder.