Fashion Segments

The UK fashion sector is highly dynamic, drawing its influences from a global market and dominated by seasonal trends, variations and aspirations. It is both market and brand driven, and therefore needs to take account of the diversity of individuals' perceptions and attitudes towards brands and fashion trends. To understand the characteristics of their customers and marketplace, retailers have traditionally relied on smallscale qualitative research applied to their own customer databases. The resulting segmentation systems are dependent on existing store locations and cannot be rolled out across the country for customer recruitment or network planning. Fashion Segments has been designed to overcome these limitations and provide retailers with a seamless approach to understanding both their customers as a whole, and the wider marketplace. Customer analysis - who are my customers? Profile your existing customer database and qualify who your customers are Enrich your understanding of your customers' attitudes, behaviour and demographics Incorporate Fashion Segments into your own bespoke segmentation system Targeting and recruiting - finding more good customers Target existing customers more effectively Select Fashion Segment prospects for direct response marketing Recruit new customers through a more tailored and personal approach Network planning - where are the best locations? Quantify the size of the market you compete in and benchmark your performance Assess the potential of different retail centres Plan your store network through the ranking of your target segments

What is Fashion Segments?

A person-level classification of everyone in the UK based on their fashion purchasing behaviour Experian Business Strategies and Taylor Nelson Sofres (TNS) Worldpanel Fashion have joined forces to develop the latest version of Fashion Segments. It places every adult in the UK into one of 35 different categories, divided by gender, and is specifically designed for the fashion retail market. These categories are based on the likelihood of consumers having different attitudes towards fashion and displaying varying fashion shopping behaviour. For example, the classification identifies consumers who are likely to follow the latest trends, those ambivalent towards fashion and those who prefer mainstream rather than aspirational brands. Additional data relating to frequency and value of purchases, types of clothes bought and shops visited enrich the descriptions of each segment.

How can Fashion Segments help your business?

Fashion Segments is relevant to customer management, recruitment and network planning. Key applications fall into three distinct areas:

Segmenting people at individual level

Unlike other systems, which segment at the neighbourhood level, Fashion Segments operates at the level of the individual consumer. All 47 million adults in the UK are given a gender-specific code. The segmentation code given to you is unlikely to be the same as that of your neighbour or other members of your household; crucially, the reason you go shopping and the types of clothes you purchase are not necessarily governed by where you live and who you live with. Fashion Segments has been built using Experian's advanced clustering technique. which has proved so effective in previous segmentation systems. Using these techniques we have grouped together individuals who, on the basis of what we know about them, have similar propensities across a very wide range of fashion attitudes and behaviours.

Who is Worldpanel Fashion?

Worldpanel Fashion is part of TNS. It employs a demographically representative panel of consumers and provides detailed insight into their fashion purchasing behaviour and attitudes, providing retailers, manufacturers and marketing agencies with detailed knowledge to position their products more effectively in the clothing, footwear and fashion accessories market. By combining this information on consumer spending habits and attitudes with Experian's demographic and lifestyle data, Fashion Segments represents one of the most powerful segmentation tool available to retailers.

How do I get Fashion Segments?

To identify which Fashion Segment each customer falls into you will need to undertake name and address matching between your customer names and addresses and our master file. Experian can enable you to do this in a number of ways: We can append codes to existing customer files, whether on an online basis, or through batch processing exercises. We can supply you with software enabling you to code customer files with Fashion Segments in-house. We can supply you with software components designed for integration with existing operational systems.

Ana: Index vs. UK

To find out more about how Fashion Segments can be used effectively in your organisation, please call Experian Business Strategies on 0115 968 5077 or e-mail retail@uk.experian.com