Many associate the end of summer with the beginning of the annual back-to-school shopping season – but according to Google’s Trend report that idea is a little behind the times. So who’s buying what, when and with what device? PYMNTS helps you read the Google Trends tea leaves.
Though it seems like only yesterday we were all dusting off our best linen and summer whites, summer 2015 is winding down and back to school is right around the corner.
Or so you might think, but Google’s most recent trends data tells a different tale entirely. Back-to-school season is not just arriving at the gate, it has actually been here for a while.
Labor Day used to denote the standard start date for American schools, but that is a trend of the past. Some students in California and Florida, for example, are already in the classroom as you read this, while others are all geared up and ready to start Monday. And within that drift, there are also shifting preferences in play that are shaping consumers’ new habits. The all-or-nothing back-to-school shopping trip — complete with kids, full cars and heated debates on just how many unicorn folders any person actually needs — is being replaced by a more gradual approach to the project.
That changing approach will play to merchants’ benefit this year, Google’s trends report noted, because though the school shopping season started early this year, the collective search data aggregated indicates that it is still going strong. How can merchants tap into that? PYMNTS has the trends tea leaves reading here.
While the notion that consumers search before they shop is becoming an increasingly well-worn adage in commerce, it continues to surprise just how much consumers are searching and how thoroughly researched every type of commerce is.
Searches for the phrase “Back to School” jumped 48 percent in total last year over 2013 and are, so far, 12 percent ahead of where they were this time last year. That uptick is likely accounted for in how much earlier consumers are looking. Back-to-school searches got rolling a week earlier when compared to last year and three weeks earlier than in 2013.
That’s the macro-picture — though it is interesting to note that while, on average, the pull is toward earlier and earlier head starts on back-to-school shopping, region makes a big difference for exactly how early those searches start.
In areas where school start dates are earlier — the South and West mainly — searches for items like backpacks actually start in late June — a full month and a half before back-to-school searches of any shape start appearing in the Northeast.
It also matters what exactly a merchant is selling. While American consumers are in general shopping for most back-to-school items throughout the summer, we, as a nation, seem to have agreed that back-to-school shoe shopping is not to commence, or even be strongly considered, until the last week of August.
The takeaway?
Merchants should both be aware of the general market drift but also keep an eye on where exactly they sell and what it is they are selling, since those aberrations offer opportunities to customize the retail experience (and offers) to the consumers’ observed preferences.
All that research has yielded an interesting phenomenon: Consumers are not out there to browse. This isn’t to say that browsing is dead — it’s not — but has strongly gone digital. The “thinking about it” process starts early and is carried out online, such that when consumers actually hit the stores, the data indicates they are there to buy. According to reports, 80 percent of consumers finish their back-to-school shopping in two weeks, and 70 percent indicated that they would purchase all of their back-to-school stuff from three retailers or fewer.
“The message for marketers is clear,” the report noted, “be online.”
And be in the top three.
The report noted that consumers are not blocking chunks of time for back-to-school shopping as they have in years past and are instead stealing “hundreds of micro-moments” — time in the car waiting for pickups, while the commercials are on at night — to buy instead. That means that the tool powering those micro-moments are mobile devices — particularly smartphones.
Last year 40 percent of back-to-school searches were done on mobile. This year that number will likely top out at over 50 percent.
And, because mobile devices double as navigation boxes/spacial locators, consumers are leveraging them to put the fewest number of miles between themselves and their object of choice as possible.
Take, for example, shoes — which, statistically speaking, every parent in America started searching for about two days ago. In previous years, the common search would have been “shoe store locations,” as consumers geared up to buy sneakers. But for the last two years, that search has been offset by its slightly more specific, mobile-friendlier cousin: “shoe stores near me.”
“This suggests that people aren’t necessarily planning out shopping trips the way they used to. They’re shopping in I-want-to-go moments and relying on mobile to tell them where to head.”
While back-to-school shopping is almost as old as education itself, it shows that even the classics of commerce can evolve for the digital age.
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