On the way home on Monday night, I picked up a free paper, thelondonpaper, to read on the Tube. I was very interested to read the article with the same heading as this blog post, written by Katharine Hibbert.

According to the article women in the UK are becoming smarter when it comes to shopping, and through careful planning and organisation are spending more money faster. Based on a study of 2,000 women at Brent Cross, one of London's largest shopping centres, 4 out of 5 of the women participating in the study planned their purchases using the internet or magazines, and to ensure they were not disappointed checked the item was available and if possible reserved it before leaving home. This tactic has allowed these women on average to spend 18.5% more money, whilst spending 17% less time doing it.

I found this particularly interesting for two reasons; firstly the growing realisation in the online marketing community that we could be doing a lot more with regards to marketing targeted specifically at women, and secondly the impact that this method of shopping will have on high street chains. Not only are more and more of today's consumers spending their hard earned cash online, but even when they do make offline purchases increasingly they would have selected those items in advance online. Ok we all knew that this was increasingly common practice when purchasing many electrical goods or big ticket items, but I didn't realise it was such common practice when purchasing clothes and shoes.

So that means that stores and chains that do not have an online presence or, do not manage their online presence as well as their competitors do are not only going to lose out on revenue online, but will also lose out on offline sales as well. Yet another reason, (as if there were not enough already) for high street brands to invest in their online branding, marketing, and customer portals before it is to late. Next time you walk pass a store and see it is particularly busy, chances are they have a first class website, with great search rankings, a well executed PPC campaign and a facility allowing customers to pre-order goods. The empty store next door, is far too busy trying to figure out why everyone is next door to worry about online marketing.

You will be glad to know that in this rapidly evolving world there are some things that will never change; the most common excuse or justification to partners for high expenditure down at the shops is still "it was on sale, so really I saved money."