eDirections

If you said Economic issues then you are in the majority. According to the recent online poll run by Directional Insights, 68% of Australians view Economic issues as the highest area of concern in the coming year, a slight increase from 64% in 2011, but this is still a large increase over the result of 43% in 2010, showing how prevalent the economy has become in people’s minds at the moment.

Environmental issues have been declining in people’s minds since 2010, from a high of 27% down to 20% in 2011 and now at a low of 15% in 2012.

In 2010, Environmental issues had two thirds the result of Economic issues at 27% to 43%, but plummeted to a third of the result in 2011 at 20% to 64%, and now to less than a quarter, at 15% to 68%.

Social issues experienced a strong drop in importance from 2010 to 2011, from 30% down to 16%, effectively halving. This has not changed in 2012, with the new result being only 17%.

Australian Males are slightly more likely to be worried about Economic issues at 70%, and less worried about Environmental issues at 13%. Comparatively, Females were more likely to be worried about the Environment at 16%, and less likely to be worried about the economy at 67%. Men and women stood toe to toe on Social issues, both at 17%.

When looking at age groups, some notable changes have occurred between the 2011 and 2012 results. The major proportional increase for Economic issues comes from Australians aged 25-34 years, up to 71% from 63%, and from Australians aged 65 years and over, with a jump from 55% in 2011 to 70% in 2012. All the other age groups were minor shifts at most.

Looking at different areas of Australia, there are some strong changes between 2011 and 2012. Australians in regional Victoria were less likely to be concerned with Environmental issues, decreasing from 26% down to 16%, but the increase is in Social issues, going from 12% in 2011 believing these are the most important issues, up to 21% in 2012. Similarly Regional Queensland had a decrease in people believing Environmental issues are most important, to 14% from the previous result of 20%. However for Regional Queensland the difference was picked up by Economic issues, increasing to 73% from the previous result of 64%.

When dealing with Metropolitan areas of Australia, there were two areas that showed strong changes. Brisbane had a strong increase in Economic issues, from 62% to 76%, and a subsequent decrease in Environmental issues, from 24% in 2011, down to 10% in 2012. Similarly Adelaide showed a strong increase in Economic issues being most important, up to 77% from the previous result of 57%, while Environmental issues dropped to 7% in 2012 from 23% in 2011.

By Stephen Richard

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The Residential Aged Care sector provides accommodation and care for older people who can no longer live at home and cannot manage living independently. Aged care homes can be offered as either low level care (general care) or high level care (continuous nursing care) or can be an incorporation of both (ageing in place).

The Retirement Village sector provides accommodation and services to those aged over 55 years and those that are retired from full time employment. A retired person can either live in an independent living unit (Self Care) or a serviced apartment (highest level of care).
The Retirement Village Association has estimated that a total of 138,000 people are accommodated in 1,850 retirement villages around Australia presently, while the Australian Government projects a growth of five million people aged 65 years and over in the next 40 years. Based on the current penetration rates of retirement villages, this means 2,800 villages will be required to meet demand.

This means on the lifecycle curve we use the describe the retail market, the retirement industry is very much in the growth corridor. Making sure your portfolio is tapping into this growth market is essential, but just like when building retail facilities, offices or residential estates, “build it and they will come” is just not the case. Understanding what your potential target market requires from a retirement village is essential. In order to do that, you need to understand what sorts of difficulties residence may experience when moving into an aged care facility or retirement village. On a broad scale, these difficulties can include complex to navigate services, limited consumer choice, variable quality, coverage of needs, pricing, subsidies and user co-contributions are sometimes inconsistent or inequitable.

The Productivity Commission released Caring for Older Australians in June 2011. The report outlined methods to redesign and reform the current aged care system so as to encourage operators and developers to improve the quality of their services, ensuring Older Australians receive the best care possible.

As a result, spending into the healthcare system by the Government is to rise from 4.0% of GDP in 2009/10 to an estimated 7.1% in 2049/50.

These proposed changes will try and address current and future challenges in the aged care system. Current challenges include delays, discontinuities, constraints and shortages, while future challenges include the increase in demand, the increase in specific disability and diseases, higher expectations of quality of care that is received and the decline in carers and high skilled workers.

These proposed changes are aimed to give older Australians a greater level of choice towards accommodation and a wider range of services, while encouraging innovation and driving higher expectations for value and quality amongst operators.

Operators and developers will need to invest heavily in infrastructure and improve their current services and contracts to meet the logical consumer expectations. However, as more operators enter the market there will be increasing competition between service providers, which will drive service innovation and consumer choice for older Australians.

Developers and operators need to understand why aging Australians use Retirement Villages and Aged Care facilities, and this is where Directional Insights come in.

For further information or a discussion on how Directional Insights can assist in your Retirement Portfolio contact Kylie Newcombe.

By Brooke Chebab

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Using the Directional Insights’ Benchmark series, The Lifestage Shopping Report, released in April 2012, we are able to observe and compare nine Lifestage groups of modern Australia and their consumer behaviour while visiting shopping centres. We will be focusing on three of the nine Lifestage Shopping Reports to illustrate the differences, with the help of our volunteers Teenagers, Young Families and Older Couples. We can see the lifestage impact on shopping behaviour.

By starting with Teenagers, we see that the youngest of the Lifestages enjoy their shopping experiences. Teenagers are defined as individuals aged between 15 and 19 years old, who have no children and are single, living either at home, in a lone person household, or single sharing with others.

Among shoppers in this Lifestage, 62% are Female with an average age of 17 years. Almost three-quarters are not employed and they are more likely than average to be at the shopping centre in a leisurely mode to purchase, clothes, shoes or takeaway food. It makes you nostalgic for the carefree days of the 17 year old, doesn’t it?

Teenagers usually spend less than an hour in a shopping centre, and on average they spend $33 per visit in a shopping centre.

When teens shop, they want lots of choice, they want it cheap, and they do not want to be ignored. Just over 12% of Teenagers shop online, which makes sense when you think of the requirement for an independent income and a credit card before shopping online.

As the Teenage years pass like sand through an hour glass into Young Families, we see some major changes as well as some similarities in the use of a shopping centre. Young Families are defined in the Directional Insights’ Lifestages Report as couples with children aged under 15 years living at home. Shoppers in this Lifestage are predominately female and have an average age of 39 years.

The Young Family Lifestage is time poor, juggling the competing demands of young children and careers, which explains the higher proportion of shoppers who are at the centre on a mission to top up or shop for food and groceries. They usually spend 61 minutes in centre, slightly higher than the teenage result. In addition the average group size of 1.59 shows they shop in roughly the same size group as Teenagers, but they do spend considerably more at $91.

Young Families place the highest importance upon ease of parking, level of service and stores that offer good value for money. They want their shopping experience to be convenient, but they also want to be well looked after and to get a good price on their purchases, similar to teens. 17% of Young Families shop online, which suggests that their easy access to credit cards and desire for convenience translates into a higher proportion spending online.

Older Couples are our third demonstration Lifestage and with an average age of 61 years, this age group gives us a view as to how Australians in their senior years may shop. Of Australians in this life stage, 71% of the shoppers are Female and both the proportion not employed and the average income have increased and decreased respectively compared to the Young Families Lifestage, to 59% and $69,300 respectively.

The proportion of leisure shoppers increases slightly compared to the result for Young Families, up to 28% but is still below Teenagers, although the main reason for visiting remains top up food/groceries at 31%. They spend slightly longer in centre, are more likely to shop alone than the other two Lifestges and have an average spend that is closer to Young Families than Teenagers.

Similarly to Young Families, they place value on ease of parking, and similarly to both Young Families and Teenagers they place importance upon level of service. However this is the only Lifestage group of these three to put offers excellent fresh food in the top three most important attributes.

From Teenagers to Older Couples, how Australians shop depends heavily upon their personal circumstances, and so the shopping centres need to not only know how they shop, but how best the shopping centre can fulfil those needs.

Directional Insights has released nine lifestage reports in the latest benchmark series:

For more information on the lifestage benchmark series or to order your copy click here.

By Stephen Richard

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Online retail is here to stay and many clothing retailers have already attempted to take advantage of these trends by selling their clothing brands online through a dedicated website, however eBay has come up with a more effective online strategy for fashion retailers which will save them time and money.

Since October 2011, eBay has partnered with premier clothing brands such as, Alannah Hill, Supre, WISH, Witchery, Bardot, Bras N Things, Charlie Brown, Crossroads, Jigsaw, David Lawrence and Ed Hardy to launch Fashion Gallery, giving retailers the opportunity to tap into a larger audience. “We get over six million unique visitors, and three out of five of Australias entire online shopping population comes to eBay each month” Jo Hicks Head of eBay Fashion says.

How does this new online ‘fashion precinct’ compare to the in-centre experience?

It mirrors one of the advantages of the shopping centre, the grouping of a number of different stores. Many customers love to shop around for their clothing, going into a number of stores and comparing prices and styles. Now the new eBay fashion gallery can almost replicate this with large numbers of brands both local and international.

But note that I said ‘almost’ replicate this. More than any other area of retail, fashion loves the ‘try before you buy’ methodology, with change rooms and mirrors to see how the new purchase looks on you, something online retail cannot yet match. Furthermore the social factors of the fashion shop – shopping with friends and getting their opinions – are only in the infancy stage online, with some fashion retailers trying to integrate social networking sites like Facebook into the online purchase.

Overall the creation of the eBay fashion gallery is not a change in online retail, but another method of accessing it. However it is a method that plays to the strength of the online experience, convenience, by including a variety of options in the one online location.

By Brooke Chebab

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That is where Vox Pops comes in.

They are a series of short clips (usually about 30 seconds long) showcasing the opinion of ordinary people on the desired topic, edited down so the conversation between interviewer and interviewee shows the perspective of the normal person in an efficient way. Short for Vox Populii, Latin for ‘Voice of the people’, Vox Pops are a way of broadcasting the voice of customers directly and are proving to be effective in property based market research, adding a sense of texture to the numbers.

Vox Pops can be done in a number of ways. One option is that they are taken after focus groups, giving clients an inside look at people involved and what they actually think. Another alternative is that they can be taken by going to the location researched, such as the shopping centre, and interviewing people in situ. After obtaining hours of footage, this is whittled down into a far more manageable representative view of what people are saying.

By adding the shopper’s voice to the results, Vox Pops can really bring home to the observer the opinions people hold. For example, reading on a piece of paper that 45% of people do not believe a shopping centre has adequate child care facilities is one thing, but it becomes far more real when hearing a mother’s heartfelt plea for somewhere she can drop her child off at to be cared for while she does her shopping in peace.

So when you are planning your next research, an important question to ask yourself is “Should I get some Vox Pops with that?”

If you would like to see a sample vox pop, click here to get an idea of what you can learn from this research method.

By Stephen Richard

The most recent comparable internet usage numbers from the ABS are from the 2008-2009 Household use of Information Technology report, which shows that 72% of Australian Households had internet access in 2008-2009. At this time our data showed that approximately 7% of customers used Online shopping as a competitor to physical retail stores.

An Australian Bureau of Statistics estimate of households with internet access continues to improve steadily up to 75% in 2010, but in this time 10% of Australians had shopped online in the past 6 months, jumping up to an incredible 15% in 2011, a 50% increase.

It is important to note that this is the figure of Australians who have purchased from an online store in the past six months from the time of the interview being conducted. This is not a record of what proportion of retail spend occurs online.

What this shows is the value of the early adopter. With technology there is the customer at the front of the bell-curve, adopting the newest technology, giving it a chance to grow and develop before being taken up by the mass consumer.

This seems to be the case with internet shopping. For years the proportion of Australians who stated they had shopped online in the past 6 months hovered around the 6%-7% range, staying steady as people dipped their toe into the waters and tested it out. Then it began to hit mainstream as more and more people started shopping online.

Where the danger lies in this is in those ever-present early adopters. Although the proportion of retail spend that is occurring online is not too large at the moment, if we continue to assume the early adopters are forging a path forward into use of online sales, then the continued growth of the online medium as competition with retail is a strong possibility.

However, the use of the internet for shopping is still in its relative infancy, and to try and predict where it will go in the future is incredibly difficult, if not impossible. It is important to keep in mind that retail, like the entirety of society, is constantly shifting and in a state of flux where actions lead to reactions lead to further reactions.

Online retail is a reaction to the growing use of online resources in our lives, allowing us to explore possibilities that did not exist before. But there are limiting factors, areas where online simply cannot compete with the in-store experience. These include:

1. The inability to try before you buy. When purchasing a product online, unless you have already seen it in action or done your research in a physical store, you cannot hold the object in your hand, observe it in action or get tactile with it at all. You are relying purely on the descriptions of a website or the description from a few websites if you take your time and do the online research. Imagine for a moment the disappointment of purchasing a lounge set online, only to find the arm rest digs into your ribs when you try to relax in it.

2. The Wait. A lot is said about the convenience of online purchasing, go to the site, click a few buttons, put your credit card details in, and you are now the proud owner of the product you wished to purchase. Or at least you will be when it arrives. With the exception of a few areas where you can download the end product, such as music or electronic games, online purchasing then requires you to wait until the item is delivered to you. Purchasing the item is quick and convenient, but this is not the case for receiving it.

Both physical shopping and online shopping have their strengths and their weaknesses, which means that neither may be able to completely ‘conquer’ the other.

However it is going to be very interesting to monitor how each channel compliments and competes.

By Stephen Richard

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