If you’ve used a credit card to shop or eat out in the Emporia area recently — or used a Dillons Plus or Chopper Shopper card, or subscribed to a magazine — chances are you’ll be lending a hand to the city’s new retail development study.
For Buxton, the Fort Worth, Texas-based customer analytics firm performing the study, knowing what local customers buy, where they eat out and how they live their lives is key to determining the city’s retail potential.
So for Buxton territorial business manager Lisa Hill and her colleagues working on the Emporia project, local consumer data that can be purchased and analyzed becomes the window through which Buxton can see and profile the Emporia consumer.
“Every time you swipe your credit card, your debit card, if you have a grocery store work card,” Hill said, “if you fill out warranty cards, subscriptions to magazines, your media habits, what you watch on TV — knowingly or not, we’re constantly giving away information about ourselves. The way we live our lives leaves a data trail about us. We (Buxton) buy that information.”
Buxton, with its psychographic consumer studies, has earned a reputation for giving cities information they can use to decide which retailers are likely to listen to their recruiting pitches. City Manager Matt Zimmerman said he talked to a number of cities who had used Buxton for retail analysis, and those cities were pleased with the results.
The company works on both sides of the retail development game. Hill said Buxton has more than 1,700 retail clients for whom they perform site selection services and more than 300 community clients, such as Emporia, who are looking to recruit retail.
“The development strategy that we’re doing for Emporia is a proven one,” Hill said. “It’s designed to uncover specific retail and restaurant opportunities that are a unique fit to the customers in Emporia. ... Who are the consumers, where do they have a propensity to shop, where do they have a propensity to dine relative to other consumers in that market, and what retailers are really focused on them?”
Answering those questions is the heart of psychographics, which Hill refers to as “demographics on steroids.” She said Buxton will identify Emporia’s customers based on lifestyle, purchasing behavior and media habits.
“For retailers, it’s really about customers. It’s not necessarily about people,” she said. “So, your demographic information — your age, sex, race and income — tells you nothing of where they shop, where they dine.”
Buxton’s work begins with the city selecting three sites for retail development analysis. Kent Heermann, president of the Regional Development Association for East-Central Kansas and the city’s project liaison for the Buxton study, said the city’s chosen points are Sixth Avenue and Commercial Street, 15th Avenue and Industrial Road, and Americus Road and U.S. Highway 50.
Hill said Buxton uses a “15-minute drive time methodology” to analyze the trade areas for the sites.
“I don’t know how many miles I drive to work every day, but I can tell you exactly how many minutes it takes me to get there,” she said. “Based on time of day, work of the road, on and on and on, that’s how we’re looking at it. ... Once you get past a certain point, they’re not willing to drive as far.”
City Manager Matt Zimmerman said the city’s last retail development study, performed by the St. Louis-based group Development Strategies in 2005 and presented in early 2006, did provide useful information for the city. For example, it concluded that Emporia had too many gas station mini-marts, and within a year after the study, two of those mini-marts closed.
“It was designed to tell us where we have too much capacity compared to demand, and where we had less capacity than there is demand,” he said.
But Zimmerman likes the fact that the Buxton study also matches Emporia with specific retailers to market to.
“It’s not only demographics on steroids with psychographics,” he said, “because it’s telling us not just what people have, how much money they have and where they spend it, but it tells us how they match (for) individual retailers.
“So we can go out and contact them, and hopefully they’ll express some interest in coming to our community.”
Zimmerman and other city officials will be happy if Emporia’s success mirrors that of Marion, Ind., a town of about 35,000 that commissioned a Buxton study about 3 1/2 years ago. Marion Mayor Wayne Seibold, who took office shortly before that time, said the study has been “a big hit” for that city.
Since Buxton performed its analysis of Marion, the city has seen five major retail developments spring up. And those results have led to benefits in other areas, such as housing. Behind one of Marion’s retail developments, there’s now a 285-home subdivision the likes of which Seybold said the city hasn’t had in more than 30 years. Near another one, the city plans to build a “technology village” that will include technology firms from Southern California, as well as retail and housing.
“Every area that we had studied now has multimillion-dollar projects going on,” Seybold said.
Zimmerman said that if a taxpayer expressed skepticism that the Buxton study was a good use of his or her money, he would say that Emporia is investing in its future. He said the city needs to grow its retail base to reduce the reliance on property taxes and to improve quality of life, which in turn will attract more employers and university students.
Emporia’s Buxton study will take about 60 business days; it’s scheduled for completion in early March.
create (anonymous) says...
One thing I'm sure they'll conclude is that Emporia has too many payday loan joints.
Good to hear about Marion, Indiana's success. Did all that new subdivision, etc happen during the recent building boom? Will all that likely happen again on the news of folks tightening their purse strings? Hints of a near recession? Just listening and thinking 'bout stuff like that. How can you compare the two time periods? The largest mortgage company in the U.S. has been bought out by Bank of America for $2 billion. How does that affect all this?
January 11, 2008 at 2:43 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )