Editor’s note: Pam Danziger is president of marketing consulting firm Unity Marketing, Stevens, Pa. 

As a young girl, I discovered Nancy Drew, the young reader detective series by mystery writer Carolyn Keene. I was hooked on the mystery genre. I later graduated to Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie, then other mystery writers, preferring British authors such as Dorothy Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, Ellis Peters and P.D. James.

I’ve often thought I missed my true calling – to be a real-life detective. Yet as a market researcher, I’m just about the closest thing you can get to a detective without having to deal with blood and gore.

As market researchers, it’s our job to understand and identify the best potential customers. At its core, the detective and the market researcher’s role share three critical perspectives:

  • means – identify who has the means to do the crime or make the purchase;
  • opportunity – discover who had the opportunity to commit the crime or need and inclination to make the purchase; and
  • motive – find out who has a reason to do the crime or make the buy.

Seeking new customers

In my work with B2C marketers much of my focus is on using research to find new customers. Researchers and brands can analyze consumers and discover new prospects using the three perspectives – means, opportunity and motive – in much the same way I did to discover the HENRYs, high-earners-not-rich-yet, as new prospects for consumer-facing luxury brands.

1. Means to buy: Understanding the demographics of your target market is the first step to understanding the consumer. Demographics give us the facts and figures that allow marketers to zero in on their best prospects. Age, gender and, increasingly, income demographics help us find who is most important for success, giving brands a road map to target them.

Today, American businesses are stuck in a slow-growth mode, desperate to find new opportunities and new customers with both an appetite for goods and services and a budget to afford them.

The HENRYs are the mass-affluent who think of themselves as middle class. With household incomes ranging from $100,000 to $249,900, they are doing better than nearly 80 percent of all U.S. households. Yet they remain below the ultra-affluent income levels of the top 2 to 3 percent, on which the luxury brands traditionally focus.

There are about 27 million American HENRY households, less than 20 percent of the nation’s 125 million households. Yet they control nearly 40 percent of total U.S. consumer spending. With the traditional mass-market shrinking, HENRYs are a growing customer segment with discretion to spend.

2. Opportunity to buy: Understanding the opportunity to buy involves studying consumers’ past purchase and shopping behaviors. Past purchase behavior is often the best predictor of future purchase behavior, so studying your customers’ behaviors, along with those target consumers who may not be part of your established customer base, is key.

The story today of shopping and buying behavior is one of disruption. Shopping malls are becoming the 21st-century version of ghost towns. It’s not because of the shift to Internet shopping. Though online retail is growing far faster than traditional retail, it captures less than 10-15 percent of all consumer shopping. Some mall owners blame the loss of traffic on the closing of anchor stores, like Macy’s. which just announced it will close 100 more flagship stores in 2017, but that isn’t it either.

Today, the ubiquity of the mall and big-box store experience is beginning to show fatigue. Since 2010, more than two dozen enclosed shopping malls have closed and an additional 60 are on the brink, according to Green Street Advisors. Walk through any of the nation’s 1,000 or so enclosed malls and you might notice they all look much the same. Filled with the same stores offering the same merchandise at the same sale price, it’s too much of the same thing.  

This emerging retailing trend will reshape the retail landscape over the next decade. Demographic shifts, with both aging Baby Boomers and young Millennials looking for a more personal shopping experience – as well as heightened expectations from affluent consumers – will bring favor to small businesses, both online and traditional stores, that can establish a close and personal relationship with its customers and deliver on their needs and service expectations.

As a result, growth will slow down and profits will shrink. The next decade will see the restructuring of mass-market retail, which will give an unprecedented opportunity to independent specialty retailers and online retailers that offer new shopping experiences that capture the attention and imagination of customers.

3. Motive to buy: This is the psychology of your customers and target customers. It explains why people make purchases so that you can make sure, through marketing efforts and shopping experiences, that what you’re offering meets their specific needs.

For example, if marketers aim to draw more HENRYs, they need to combine strategies borrowed from high-end brands, along with more mass-market tactics to send a clear message that these high-potential customers are understood, respected and catered to.

Specifically, mass-marketing strategies must focus on value, so that the HENRYs see they get a greater return on their spending investment. Meanwhile, the luxury-focused strategies are directed to delivering high-quality goods and services, including careful attention to superior materials and workmanship, and making customers feel pride of ownership for the items bought. 

Ultimately, success in marketing to HENRYs is less about what you sell and more about how you sell it. Knowing why consumers buy your brand, product or service is essential for future marketing success.

Think like a detective 

Today the darling of the detective genre is the criminal profiler, like BBC’s Cracker, CBS’s Criminal Minds and NBC’s The Blacklist. Profilers use a study of the crime to identify the criminal, including the perpetrator’s demographics, behavior and emotional makeup and personal motivations. As researchers, our work is remarkably similar. We use detective skills to profile our ideal consumer, using means, opportunity and motive as our guide.