Meet the new marketing persona who’s not afraid to shop during work hours
A new breed of Workday Consumers aren’t afraid to shop during work hours, and flit between personal and work tasks with ease. This is not a temporary evolution that will fade along with the pandemic. Is your brand adjusting its marketing to fit?
Once a strict 9-6 allocation of in-office hours, the definition of ‘workday’ has transformed to laptops on kitchen counters, guest rooms used as makeshift workspaces, and conference calls taken during a walk with the dog.
Online, these boundaries have blurred even further. People switch back and forth between employee and consumer modes throughout the day, hopping onto calls, followed by a quick browse through their favourite online stores.
In today’s era of anywhere-work, consumers have forged new habits and preferences that aren’t going anywhere. In order to analyse and understand this shift, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the consumer behaviours at the heart of this work/life collision and dig into the rise of the Workday Consumer. The research uncovered how well brands have adapted their online advertising strategies, and how PCs have a part to play in the puzzle.
Forrester conducted an online survey of 5,329 employed adult consumers who made an online purchase via PC in the previous six months, along with a survey of 1,301 directors, VPs, and heads of marketing or advertising at brands around the world.
The rise of the Workday Consumer
Nearly two-thirds (62%) of consumer respondents said they regularly research or purchase products and services during worktime, while more than half (51%) said the number of online purchases they make during their worktime has increased since the beginning of the pandemic.
This new behaviour, dubbed the Workday Consumer, typically mixes work and personal tasks in their work time to-do lists and considers work and personal tasks equally important during their work time.
Whether for convenience or building in breaks from work, the Workday Consumer is comfortable ordering groceries online, planning weekend activities, or researching upgrades to their home offices, all during the working day.
Working mode and mindset tell just a small part of the picture, with other measures such as demographics, online behaviour, and purchasing times playing an important role. While consumers are in a work mindset, they are shopping for high-consideration items underlined by a task-completion mentality.
The Workday Consumer seeks high consideration and complex purchases, and despite the rapid growth of mobile commerce, PC remains a key touchpoint in their journeys. While 76% of all respondents said they use a mix of devices when researching and buying products and services online, device preferences for high-consideration, complex purchases suggest a preference for PC.
The Workday Consumer is not a temporary evolution that will fade along with the pandemic. In fact, 44% of respondents expect the number of online purchases they make during work time to increase during the next 12 months.
Speaking to the Workday Consumer: what’s holding us back?
Over the past few years, brands have been rushing to retrofit their marketing and advertising strategies, with pre-pandemic tactics and underlying assumptions about buyer personas no longer fit for purpose.
But despite clear shifts in how marketers do business, most brands still tend to lean on traditional factors such as demographics, device and channel preferences, and behaviour history when defining their target consumer segments.
When defining target consumer segments, brands rarely consider the consumer’s working mode, such as if they are office-based or remote, their mindset or activities, such as whether they are in the middle of performing productive tasks or are browsing during lunchtime or downtime throughout the day.
Microsoft’s own research shows 52% of Australian consumers work from a home office (3% above the global average) and 63% use a work PC for personal tasks.
With 39% of consumers spending more than one hour on personal tasks during worktime, the most common tasks during the workday include: trading, funds or other stock investments (54%), researching products/services (48%) and browsing social media (46%).
The top 3 products or services Australian consumers research/purchase are: grocery/food (76%), clothing/footwear (67%) and cosmetics (59%). Australian consumers are the biggest shoppers for financial services products during their working hours (35% tend to purchase during the workday). For travel products, Aussie consumers use their work PC the most (25%).
Brands can target new and emerging personas across their online purchasing journey by engaging and re-engaging consumers as they shift between work, life, research, and shopping. Consider campaigns that appeal to this segment’s desire to save time, and ensure all imagery is rich and attractive to these high-value searchers.
Brands still use traditional factors for targeting consumers. These include: demographics (60%), purchasing device preference (57%), and past purchases (51%).
Nick Seckold, APAC VP, Microsoft Advertising said, “so much has changed in our lives since Covid first hit forcing us to reimagine how we live our lives and do things we once took for granted.”
“We work differently, we holiday differently, we shop differently so it is surprising that 60% of the brands involved in Forester’s research said they still use their pre-Covid strategy when designing their marketing programs,” he said.
“Marketing has always been about meeting your customers where they are and making your messages relevant and valuable. If you are working in a marketing role and you’re not thinking about evolving your strategy to accommodate the modern Workday Consumer then you are missing a huge opportunity. Big rewards await the brands who are leaning into this change.”
As things stand, the data shows brands have not fully acted on this huge opportunity and are missing out on a huge chunk of revenue as a result. Outdated consumer persona strategies and challenges have resulted in brands doing their digital marketing on autopilot, instead of purpose-building their marketing to reach every person’s unique workday.
Ultimately, brands must update their persona-design assumptions and rethink their online targeting strategies to attract, convert, and retain emerging personas like the Workday Consumer. There is a huge untapped opportunity within this emerging consumer behaviour, with big rewards for the brands that take it seriously.
For more insights on the Workday Consumer, download the Forrester study and learn more about how your organisation can prepare for success.
Got a tip?
topics
consumers
Marketing
Microsoft
Microsoft Advertising
online purchases
online shopping
workday
workday consumer
CONTENT SPONSORED BY Microsoft Advertising
