The motivation for grocery store loyal behavior with marketing implications

Two different grocery shoppers can be equally loyal to the same supermarket but for entirely different reasons. For example, customer A may be loyal to a store because of convenience reasons while customer B may be loyal to the same store because he or she perceives that the store overall has very low prices. Because of these differences any attempt to segment the market based on store loyalty alone will be only partially effective. A more useful approach is to incorporate a motivation for patronage as well as a loyalty level in a market segmentation classification scheme. On data collected in Bangor, Maine, four types of grocery customers were identified and named price shoppers, convenience shoppers, involved shoppers, and apathetic shoppers. The particular advantage of the four group typology is that customers are defined in terms of response to marketing mix variables. Therefore, the implementation of or changes in marketing strategy is facilitated by the use of the typology.