The Things Your Shoppers Are Doing That Your Data Probably Hasn’t Told You Yet
- Jamie Rayner
- 16h
- 3 min read
Customers don’t think how they act and don’t act how they think.
It’s a line we use a lot at Shoppercentric, because it captures something our industry knows but keeps forgetting: the gap between what shoppers say and what shoppers do is where strategy goes wrong. Categories get built on claimed intent. Positioning gets validated against stated preference. And then the numbers don’t move.
WindowOn StockTake exists to close that gap, by tracking what shoppers actually do, year on year, in enough depth to know when something has genuinely shifted and when it’s noise.
For those who haven’t come across us before: every December, Shoppercentric runs a nationally representative survey with UK grocery shoppers, tracking behaviour and attitudes across measures that in some cases go back to the Credit Crunch of 2009. This is our 55th edition.
This year’s data has some things in it that we think will surprise you. The group feeling the sharpest financial pressure is no longer who it was two years ago. Vegan identification has fallen below 1% - the lowest we have ever recorded - while 72% of shoppers now describe themselves as omnivores, the highest since we started tracking. In addition, our early data on GLP-1 users shows a behavioural profile that goes well beyond ‘eating less’: these shoppers are changing when they eat, where they shop and how they cook. They are another lens through which to review the market, not a segment!
None of these are small signals. They are the kind of shifts that, if your category strategy is built on assumptions from 2022 or 2023, are worth knowing about now.
This year we’re also doing something new. Instead of our annual ezine, we’re publishing WindowOn StockTake 2025 as a series of standalone articles on LinkedIn and our website over the coming weeks. Each piece stands on its own; together they build into the fullest picture we’ve published for a while. The articles cover:
The financial and anxiety landscape - who is really struggling and why the profile has shifted in ways that matter for targeting
Health and wellness: protein, fibre, gut health and the blurring line between clinical and consumer
GLP-1: the early behavioural signals - what they are, how far they reach and what brands and retailers should be considering now
AI and technology: what real UK shoppers actually do and think - including some interesting pushback from those under 25
Baby Boomers and Gen X: the generations we have perhaps examined least in recent years, and who turn out to be considerably more complex than just ‘older shoppers’
Low and no alcohol: how the category is evolving and what it tells us about changing relationships with drinking across age groups
Follow our LinkedIn Newsletter and you’ll get each article as it publishes. As usual, if you’re on our WindowOn mailing list, you’ll get all the articles collated together into one handy email, direct to your inbox once they are all released. If any of it touches on something you want to explore fully with your own categories and shoppers, you know where we are.
Enough from us. The shoppers have the floor. And, as it turns out, your Q4 bonus. Over to them. We hope it changes what you think you know.
Thank you for reading this introduction. Our first full article will be dropping tomorrow, followed by weekly articles covering all the topics above and more. Be sure to subscribe to our LinkedIn newsletter to be alerted when these go live.
Jamie Rayner
Managing Director, Shoppercentric
Assumptions cost money. Understanding behaviour makes it.
Comments