We know how important customer experience is to the modern consumer, which is why Leapfrogg has an ongoing quest to understand the needs and behaviours of the premium shopper. One of the most regular discussions we have about this is the difference in the way that men and women shop.

With Christmas fast approaching, we decided to ask our Premium Panel – which is made up of over 700 UK consumers – how they were intending to organise their gift-buying this Christmas.

We asked our Premium Panel two key questions and below we compare the boys to the girls.

Which channels are you most likely to use as part of your Christmas gift research?

At first glance it seems as though men and women are pretty similar in the mix of channels that they’re using for their Christmas shopping. There are, however, a few small but not insignificant differences we spotted:

• Women are more likely to use a number of different channels equally in combination to research purchases at Christmas
• By comparison, men are more likely to use individual brand websites (33%) and emails from brands (12%) than social-based channels
• Although marginal, women are more likely to use social channels than men to research their purchases with 24% likely to use them vs. 21% of men
• Overall, the percentage of those likely to be using social media channels is low compared to the high percentage of people likely to use brand or lifestyle websites as part of their consideration process

Therefore, retailers should be prioritising their Christmas marketing spend for digital channels in the following top five order to maximise on the research habits of their target consumers:

1. Brand website
2. Coverage on lifestyle/fashion websites
3. Email
4. Coverage on influential blogs
5. Facebook

Which channels are you most likely to go on to make your Christmas gift purchases through?

The key take out here is that although men and women are both shopping through a variety of channels, women are more likely to be using a combination of purchase channels than men (55% vs. 42%).

The main difference between the purchasing behaviour of men and women is that men are more likely to purchase numerous gifts in one place and use multi-brand retailers (28% of men vs. 18% of women).

Brands marketing to men, therefore, must make the experience on their site and in their email marketing stand out from multi-brand stockists to ensure they get the sale.

Those with a target audience including women need to understand the combination of channels most relevant to them and split marketing efforts across them to capture the broad spread of research and purchase behaviours women like to use.

To find out how you can understand more about your customers’ shopping habits and behaviours get in touch with us or read more about what we do.