Customer-driven retail

How to use customer personas in design, merchandising, retail, and marketing

Imagine that your brand wants to reach the Creative class. The Creative class refers to a category of individuals whose status is defined by cultural sophistication rather than income. To them, aspiration is taste, knowledge, creativity, social capital. In their relationship to brands, they are part of one of the four consumer types, and in broad strokes, they occupy the fashion territory of signaling belonging and differentiation, and of functional and/or emotional relationship to dressing below:

The three segments have different motivations, values, and lifestyles, and consequently, relate to brands differently. To recognize and address this, brands need to adopt and implement persona-driven design, assortment planning, retail planning and marketing and communications strategy.

Customer-driven design

By introducing customer personas at the beginning of the design process, design teams are focused on specific lifestyle cases and wear scenarios and adopt a holistic view of the collection. This holistic view allows them to balance the design offering to cover their entire customer market. It also prioritizes early on the categories and items based on the size of each of the customer persona they are designing for. Commercial and brand objectives are thus baked in from the beginning of the design process, and do not need to be reconciled later in the market buy and retail channel allocation stages. Design segmentation per persona also helps marketing and merchandising later in the process, as it pre-narrows down the product messages.

Customer-driven merchandising

Customer-driven assortment planning prioritizes categories and products based on the size of each of the customer persona market, and based on a brand’s growth objectives. Knowing that not all customers demand newness will help with marketing

Read the rest of this analysis on the Sociology of Business.