Esquire Advertising, a nationally leading adtech and marketing company based in Durham, North Carolina, recently investigated in-store shopping behaviors among U.S. consumers at furniture, home appliances, and other retail stores during the Black Friday weekends of 2020 and 2019.
To conduct the study, Esquire Advertising applied its hyper-targeted marketing technology to capture mobile IDs for more than 670,000 consumers visiting 6,150+ brick-and-mortar retail locations across all regions of the United States. The company then matched these consumer IDs to demographic profiles to better assess wide-ranging patterns and behavioral changes that have developed over the year.
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After analyzing this data across nearly 30 different consumer demographic categories, Esquire analysts found the starkest differences in shopping behavior across political makeup of states.
While brick-and-mortar stores in blue states saw a combined percent decrease of 24% for store traffic, red states saw a combined percent increase of 45%. States that saw the largest decrease of in-store activity include California, Illinois and New Mexico, while Mississippi and Alabama saw the highest influx of shoppers compared with 2019. Swing states saw the least amount of change when compared to last year.
Other consumer behavior insights revealed:
- Gen X shoppers were the single most active in-store shoppers of any age demographic
- In blue (Democratic) states, Millennials stayed home even more than older groups that are more at-risk to COVID-19.
- The single greatest trait shared by active shoppers was the presence of children in the family home
- Consumers living in multi-family housing displayed the greatest overall decrease for in-store shopping
“We wanted to get a big-picture look at how in-store consumer behaviors may have changed this year in the face of a global pandemic, and we saw the Black Friday weekend as a good opportunity to compare multiple demographics across the country at the same time,” said Eric Grindley, Founder & CEO of Esquire Advertising. “Some of the results were pretty surprising and underscore the unique situation retailers are in right now. We hope retailers can use some of these insights to learn more about their customers and adjust their marketing strategies accordingly so that they can spend their advertising dollars in the most effective ways possible.”
Esquire Advertising has made available a national heat map of changes by state, as well as a chart comparing percent changes in a sample of demographic groups – here.
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