By Mal Higgs, Project Manager for the ALSA Retail Insights Project www.alsaretailinsights.com.au

As retailers, we tend to spend most of our time concentrating on our ‘customers’, as these are the people who make our cash registers ring! This however, instinctively means that we are focussing on the customers who walk through our front door – our regulars.

Occasionally we will read or hear about ‘consumers’ and what they are doing – drinking more or less, as is now the case, or spending more or less. But as retailers we tend not to focus as much of our energy on the term consumer as we do our customers.

The next most common term we read about is ‘shoppers’, usually in the context of a new product presentation. One very interesting sub-set of shoppers is the Gen Y or ‘Millenial’ demographic. This group represents nearly 25 per cent of the Australian population and is very important to the retail trade, yet many retailers have little or no understanding of them or their needs short of believing they carry the right range of RTDs, craft beer or cider for the “younger generation”!

Gen Y consumers are constantly connected and use social media as an essential part of their lives. As a consequence, they think and respond differently to previous generations on aspects such as advertising and promotional cues, and need to be communicated to in a different way.

Most retailers do not have access to the resources to keep up with these issues, which is why ALSA has developed the Retail Insights program www.alsaretailinsights.com.au to assist in the process of professional development. This important industry leading program contains information relevant to today’s retailers on a broad range of topics.

On top of this initiative, suppliers can play an important role in providing information to their retailer partners on the latest trends and innovations occurring in the market place. It is this partnership between retailers and suppliers that will ensure a sustainable alcohol industry in the longer term. This is especially true now that we are seeing a structural change in the way Australian’s consume alcohol.