Here at Leapfrogg, we have a panel of more than 800 premium retail consumers that we engage with on a regular basis to help us understand customer needs and expectations from the brands and retailers they buy from.

Every month, we question them on a range of areas from buying behaviours and brand opinion, to emotional purchase triggers and their recent shopping experiences.

The Insight Edit is our weekly bite size edit of the insight we gain from our panel in our search to truly understand the mind of the premium customer.

For single brands, it often feels like a David and Goliath fight to retain online marketing share against larger multi brand retailers.

As we work with a number of single brands, we wanted to find out the reasons why consumers might chose to purchase from a multi brand retail website rather than purchasing directly from the brand itself.

We asked our panel whether they preferred to buy from a single brand rather than a multi brand website and their answer was a resounding no!

We dug further into our data to determine whether gender, salary or age had an impact on response.

Although the majority of respondents in each category preferred to shop with multi brand websites, we did see that a slightly higher proportion of men prefer to shop with single brands (16% vs. 9.5% for women).

We also noticed that the desire to shop with single brand websites increases with age, with the proportion of consumers who prefer single brands increasing in the over 40’s. We also found that 20% of respondents aged 50+ preferred shopping with single brands.

This would indicate that as we get older, we become more loyal to certain brands rather than shopping around.

Therefore those single brands who have a slightly older target audience may well be better placed to compete online with the larger multi brands.

We then asked those who do shop with single brands why they do.

Being valued as a customer was selected as the most popular reason, which indicates that the investment single brands make in the experience they give their customers really makes a real difference.

Single brands must find the resource to invest in customer experience to maintain or grow market share.

The next highest reason for shopping with single brands was that they often run special offers and discounts. This was selected by 57.1% of our panel.

We always advise retailers to focus on making their customers feel valued rather than compete on price. However, if you’re able to offer an exclusive deal on certain products that are not available elsewhere, then this will have a positive impact on customer loyalty.

The next highest reason that was selected was the ease of returns (42.8%). There are still many single brands not making it easy enough to return unwanted items which is crucial to acquiring and retaining customers.

To conclude, the findings from our panel support what we have been preaching for a while now. The way for single brands to succeed and gain market share from larger multi brand retailers is to focus their resource on making the shopping experience with them better than anywhere else. They need to communicate with customers in a way that makes customers feel valued and provide the best level of customer service they can.