Consumer and Demographic Data Archives

How Kirklees Council enhanced its digital service efficiency with the help of demographic insights

Posted on: 18 December 2024

Background

Kirklees Council has a population of 437,593 and covers an area of 157 square miles. It is the third largest authority in West Yorkshire and is a constituent member of the West Yorkshire Combined Authority. Like many local authorities, Kirklees Council faces a dual challenge of managing budgetary constraints while addressing increasing demand for services. To maintain the quality of services that residents value, the council has focused on encouraging the use of lower-cost digital self-service options wherever possible. One key area identified for improvement was the handling of council tax inquiries, which placed a significant burden on call centre resources. Following conversations with CACI about the impact that demographic data insights could bring to alleviate this challenge, it was clear to Kirklees Council that this was the solution to the challenge.

Challenge

With over 190,000 households in the Kirklees area, the council’s call centre received a substantial volume of calls related to council tax. During the 2022/23 period, approximately 16% of these households contacted the call centre about council tax issues. A significant portion of these calls – 47% – were categorised under ‘check or query a bill,’ with 60% of these queries related to checking instalments or outstanding balances and seeking advice. Additionally, 16% of callers made payments through the call centre. Notably, 31% of accounts had repeat callers, with 5% of households calling four or more times within the year. The council recognised the need to delve deeper into not only understanding the reasons behind these calls, but also the demographics of the callers, particularly repeat callers. This insight was crucial in shaping the design of effective strategies that would reduce the volume of calls and promote the use of digital self-service solutions. Lacking data or insight about these callers heightened these challenges, which is where CACI’s data would prove to be essential.

The Council recognised the need to delve deeper into not only understanding the reasons behind these calls, but also the demographics of the callers, particularly repeat callers. This insight was crucial in shaping the design of effective strategies that would reduce the volume of calls and promote the use of digital self-service solutions. Lacking data or insight about these callers heightened these challenges, which is where CACI’s data would prove to be essential.

Solution

To address this challenge, the Council’s project team collaborated with their Data and Insight (DI) team to analyse call centre data using CACI’s segmentation tool, Acorn. Acorn supplied a detailed demographic and socioeconomic profile of the households contacting the council. The profiling revealed that a significant proportion of both first-time and repeat callers belonged to younger and less affluent Acorn demographic segments, specifically Cash-Strapped Families, Urban Diversity and Hard-Up Households.

Acorn’s Knowledge Sheet, which includes over 800 variables from digital behaviours to channel preferences, helped illustrate that these groups should be the ones to utilise self- service capabilities instead of calling. As these groups continued to call, the Council was compelled to investigate additional factors that could bolster self-sufficiency for residents, such as their website. They quickly realised that if they were to redesign the website to better support self-service options for these target groups, the Council would have a better chance at encouraging behavioural change and telephone enquirers online, thus reducing service demand and achieving cost efficiencies.

Benefits

With an evidence base provided by Acorn’s detailed analysis, the Council is set to undertake several initiatives to reduce the need for phone calls by further enhancing digital self-service options, including:

Implementing chatbots: Implementing chatbots capable of answering common queries related to council tax will provide immediate relief and reduce call volumes.
Council tax balance checker: The Council is developing a quick and easy-to-use online tool allowing residents to check their council tax balance and instalment details without having to call the council.

These initiatives are guided by the insights gained from Acorn, which identified specific demographic segments and their preferences. By focusing on these insights, the Council can effectively target improvements that will encourage the use of digital self-service options, resulting in fewer calls. The enhanced website, combined with the introduction of chatbots and the balance checker tool, will provide residents with sufficient alternatives to calling the Council. These changes will not only improve the customer experience, but ensure the Council allocates resources more effectively to achieve further cost efficiencies.

Furthermore, the Council will be planning targeted outreach activities with landlords and tenants—identified through Acorn segments—to further reduce call volumes. This initiative aims to educate these groups on the available digital self-service options and encourage their adoption.

Find out more

Please view the full customer story here. If you want to learn more or have any questions please get in touch with us.

Which Klepierre retail centres in France would benefit the most from Gymshark?

Posted on: 17 December 2024

In our previous blog in this two-part series, we uncovered why France would be a good option for a Gymshark European market expansion and key considerations the brand could take for a successful expansion. Today, we’ll assess which Klepierre retail centres in these high-potential French cities would benefit most from housing a Gymshark in their centre as part of a hypothetical Gymshark French market expansion.

How Retail Footprint Europe could help Klepierre understand which retail centres would benefit from a Gymshark store

While there are many centres in France that would be suitable to bring Gymshark into based on the best shopper profile correlation in a hypothetical Gymshark market expansion, Retail Footprint Europe, CACI’s machine learning catchment model defining catchments for thousands of destinations, has helped determine three particular Klepierre centres that would ultimately become a good fit. With key Gymshark shoppers comprising Affluent Singles & Couples, Affluent Young Families, Middle Income Singles and Student Life profiles from Acorn, CACI’s geodemographic segmentation, these insights were cross-referenced against Retail Footprint Europe insights to equip the business with granular insights and tangible actions to help landlords deduce which centres would work and why.

Finally, to gain insight into actual footfall and compare actual versus expected footfall against these Gymshark profiles and conclude which centres presented opportunities to attract more of Gymshark’s core shoppers, Mobility Data was leveraged.

Saint-Lazare Klepierre in Paris

According to our findings, one of the Klepierre centres that would benefit most from the presence of a Gymshark would be the Saint-Lazare in the Haussmann-Opera retail area. This centre is expected to attract the highest potential of Gymshark’s core shoppers at 43%. Saint-Lazare also has the most affluent profile at an expected 34%. However, the area is home to lower levels of Student Life profiles, with just 1% expected to visit the centre.

Paris houses a strong proportion of premium retailers that align with Gymshark’s offering, with this particular Klepierre centre featuring a blend of competitors and complementary retailers, already housing the likes of Adidas and Nike, which both have similar offerings to Gymshark. Its shopper demographic also lends itself to those who are likely to either be existing Gymshark customers or will become ones once the brand enters the physical market.

Retail Footprint Europe insights for Saint-Lazare Klepierre

The Haussman-Opera retail area holds the third largest clothing and footwear store presence across France, with many premium and broader retailers and a higher percentage of affluent and younger consumers. Our findings also show that people travel well outside of Paris into this area to shop, making it a fantastic location to quickly grow brand reach and exposure.

Acorn insights for Saint-Lazare Klepierre

Saint-Lazare appears to perform the most in line with Gymshark’s core shoppers, with 44% originating from its expected profile according to our Mobility Data findings. This data provides insight on actual footfall and illustrates the comparison between actual and expected versus the Gymshark profile to understand if a centre had an opportunity to attract more of Gymshark’s core shoppers.

As a more premium brand, Gymshark achieves particularly high indexes for affluent consumers, but also performs well with aspiring, younger and urban consumers within the Gymshark core shopper profiles outlined by Acorn. Compared to fellow sportswear brand, Adidas, the brand has a much broader appeal and can perform in-line with their average consumers, while Gymshark performs significantly weaker in these segments.

Centre Commercial Centre Bourse Klepierre in Marseille

Retail Footprint Europe insights for Centre Commercial Centre Bourse Klepierre

Centre Commercial Centre Bourse would be a strong runner up to Paris thanks to its high-performing site in terms of its Clothing and Footwear Score and its high proportion of premium retailers that align with Gymshark’s offering, according to our Retail Footprint Europe findings. However, this centre has a rather low proportion of a young and affluent shopper demographic compared to Saint-Lazare in Paris, which could see the brand running the risk of not attracting the right shoppers upon opening.

Acorn insights for Centre Commercial Centre Bourse Klepierre

Another defining factor behind Centre Commercial Centre Bourse being a suitable location for a French market expansion is due to the city’s likelihood of having the highest proportion of Affluent Young Families (15%) compared to the other locations. According to Acorn, Centre Commercial Centre Bourse in particular attracts 36% of Gymshark’s core shoppers.

Mobility Data insights for Centre Commercial Centre Bourse Klepierre

Marseille sees a 14pp higher proportion of footfall from Gymshark’s shoppers than expected, driven by the centre attracting significantly more Affluent Singles and Couples than expected, according to Mobility Data findings. Centre Commercial Centre Bourse highly reflects Gymshark’s core shoppers (both in expected and actual footfall) and has strong proportions across the different core shopper groups, while Paris is much more concentrated on a singular Affluent group.

This centre ranks 9th out of over 10,000 retail centres for its Clothing & Footwear Score and has a strong premium retail score, even higher than that of Paris. Marseille also only has one competitor in its centre, meaning the addition of another sportswear brand wouldn’t saturate the market, but shows there is demand for this category in the area.

Les Passages Pasteur Klepierre in Besancon

Retail Footprint Europe insights for Les Passages Pasteur Klepierre

Surprisingly, despite this smaller size of this city and inevitably lesser likelihood of Gymshark opening here, it is actually home to a high level of one of Gymshark’s core shopper demographics, Student Life, as seen in our Retail Footprint Europe data. As with Centre Commercial Centre Bourse in Marseilles, Les Passages Pasteur has a strong Clothing and Footwear offering, a substantial percentage of which are classed as premium retail. While Besancon doesn’t have any direct competitor or complimentary brands, this could be navigated with the help of clever marketing strategies.

Acorn insights for Les Passages Pasteur Klepierre

Les Passages Pasteur has a much younger profile that comprises 31% of Gymshark’s core shoppers, with 12% of its catchment expected to be Student Life, based on findings from Acorn. Unlike Centre Commercial Centre Bourse, Les Passages Pasteur has a high percentage of young and affluent shoppers (even higher than Paris), which would ensure that Gymshark was opening to a shopper demographic most likely to shop with the brand. However, the city has the least affluent profile out of the three.

Mobility Data insights for Les Passages Pasteur Klepierre

Les Passages Pasteur appears to attract the most significant amount of Gymshark’s shoppers in real footfall, with 53% of its actual footfall being from Gymshark core shoppers, as seen in our Mobility Data findings. This is because the centre is significantly over-achieving in attracting Student Life (+21pp versus expectation), showing the centre resonates very well with younger shoppers.

Using the data, which Klepierre centre would best perform in France?

With the aforementioned data to consider, the strongest contender for a successful French market expansion for Gymshark would likely come from Centre Commercial Centre Bourse Klepierre. This is due to its strong representation of Gymshark’s core shoppers, both in expected and actual footfall, as well as the proportions across the different core shopper groups compared to the other two cities and centres being more concentrated on a singular group (e.g. Affluent groups in Paris and Student Life in Besancon). With only one competitor in the Centre Commercial Centre Bourse Klepierre, the addition of another sportswear brand won’t oversaturate the market. Instead, it’d reiterate the demand for this category in the area.

Ready to Find Your Next Market?

With insights from Retail Footprint Europe, pinpoint the best locations for your brand’s growth across Europe.

How Zero Gravity use Acorn to support underrepresented students

Posted on: 11 December 2024

Background

Zero Gravity is a digital platform connecting low-income students in years 12 and 13 with undergraduate mentors for app-based mentoring into highly selective universities. Zero Gravity has previously worked with CACI to enrich their understanding of the backgrounds of thousands of applicants through CACI’s Acorn. This is a geodemographic segmentation of the wider UK population used to assess students’ socio-economic backgrounds based on their postcodes.

Challenge

Matching social and economic needs with educational and career opportunities is one of the major challenges that Zero Gravity has sought to address. Every year, around 50,000 students from socially mobile backgrounds achieve top GCSEs. However, only a third of these students make it to highly selective universities, and even fewer progress into top graduate careers. This discrepancy underscores a prevalent issue: while talent is evenly distributed across socio-economic backgrounds, opportunity is not.

The underrepresentation of socially mobile talent at elite universities and in prestigious careers is not due to a lack of ability. Instead, factors such as the “Network Advantage” (the intangible advantage of having access to a broad professional network identified in Zero Gravity’s Gap Zero report), resource shortages and imposter syndrome often hold these students back. The challenge for Zero Gravity is to bridge this gap, ensuring that talent from low-opportunity backgrounds can access the education and careers they deserve.

Solution

To address this challenge, Zero Gravity developed a sophisticated ‘potential identification system’ to identify and support socially mobile talent. A key component of this algorithm is the integration of contextual student profiling from Acorn. Insights drawn from Acorn provide a granular understanding of the socio-economic environment faced by students at home, enabling Zero Gravity to accurately evaluate their academic potential and their challenges.

By combining this information with Zero Gravity’s own academic performance data, the algorithm indexes top-performing students within the bottom groups of social advantage. This allows Zero Gravity to connect with socially mobile talent at the earliest stages of their educational journey.

By providing rich socio-economic insights, Acorn enhances the precision of Zero Gravity’s talent identification process, ensuring that support is directed towards students who are not only high achieving, but also from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Benefits

In the most recent academic cycle, Zero Gravity has achieved remarkable success by helping over 8,000 students from low-opportunity backgrounds secure places at top-tier universities – all free of charge – due to the social value the organisation drives. Notably, 800 of these students gained admission to Oxford and Cambridge, both of which rank among the top 10 higher education institutions globally. Additionally, Zero Gravity has launched the Zero Gravity Fund, directing nearly £1.5 million towards scholarships for its latest cohort of students.

The success of the current model has enabled Zero Gravity to focus on other opportunities to support disadvantaged students. The university mentoring platform has been such a success that they’ve now developed an innovative new service to help students into the workplace following graduation. Zero Gravity now pairs these young people with industry mentors and provides them with tailored support to access leading universities and, ultimately, successful careers. This enhanced approach not only equips students with the tools and guidance needed to reach their full potential but also contributes to a more diverse and inclusive talent pipeline for employers.

Find out more

Please view the full customer story here. If you want to learn more or have any questions please get in touch with us.

Why France would best suit a Gymshark European market expansion

Posted on: 5 December 2024

A new sportswear retailer emerges on the international stage.

Gymshark, a fast-growing activewear brand, has been rapidly expanding its global reach and brand presence as it ventures into the world of brick and mortar. Having recently opened new stores in the UK (Stratford City), the Middle East (Dubai) and a pop-up concept in New York City, this brand with a prominent social media and predominately online presence is now rapidly infiltrating physical retail.

Despite not yet launching across wider Europe, it’s only a matter of time before these markets will be ventured into via physical pop-ups and stores. Selecting the right locations out of countless options may be a daunting task that comes with the territory, however. So, once the time comes for Gymshark to decide which locations to expand into that will maximise their increasing growing brand recognition and ROI, how should they effectively go about it?

In this two-part blog series, we’ll walk you through a hypothetical European market expansion for Gymshark in France, sharing how the brand can use data to accelerate and enhance their international store network strategies. Three French cities that demonstrate viable market expansion potential based on insights taken from CACI datasets and segmentation tools will be focused on, as well as key takeaways that Gymshark (or brands in a similar position) could consider when it comes to international market expansion.

How France was identified as an optimal location for a Gymshark European expansion

CACI possesses a complete universe of defined retail areas to consider, a detailed understanding of different types of consumers and where they shop. This enables us to guide a brand like Gymshark to maximise success and value from go-to-market strategy and launch through to expanding into broader brand recognition and market share capture. With this in mind, and with Gymshark expanding into physical and new regions, we investigated European markets that might fit their need should they decide to expand into Europe.

With Gymshark already a brand on CACI’s Brand Dimensions, a dataset tracking hundreds of the UK’s most popular and emerging brands to reveal spend, sales and average transaction value insights, key groups in French Acorn could also be identified. Key Acorn groups were identified by using Brand Dimensions data followed by selecting key Acorn groups within French Acorn data, which correlated accordingly. In France alone there are over 10,000 retail areas, each with differing levels of existing premium clothing shops and competitors, types of customers, footfall, population and spend.

By comparing this to the expected view from Retail Footprint Europe, we could identify locations that were currently failing to engage Gymshark’s key shoppers but had the opportunity to. From these collective findings, we were able to conclude the following three French locations that could benefit from the opening of Gymshark: Paris, Marseille and Besancon.

Why Paris would perform well in a Gymshark France expansion

According to our findings, Paris presents the highest performance potential and should be a primary focus for Gymshark. Aside from being the biggest city in France– an obvious bonus for any brand– Paris presents the best shopper demographic, a strong array of existing premium retailers and the ability to attract the relevant demographic groups that would align to Gymshark’s brand identity of being a premium retailer with similar retailers already in the centre.

Retail Footprint Europe enables the use of transactional data across brands to develop an understanding of the typical Gymshark shopper, brand positioning and establishing criteria for the most suitable locations for Gymshark to consider regarding new store openings. Considering these criteria, Paris ranked incredibly high on Clothing and Footwear, with the Haussmann-Opera retail area Klepierre centre ranking among the top three across France.

Why Marseille would perform well in a Gymshark France expansion

Marseille presents itself as another viable option as our findings show it to be the middle ground between high affluence profiles and younger, ‘student life’ populations found in other larger, prominent French cities. The city’s strong clothing and footwear and high proportion of premium retailers also contributes to its performance potential. However, its lower ‘young and affluent’ target demographic runs a potential risk.

Why Besancon would perform well in a Gymshark France expansion

Despite Besancon presenting itself as more of a curveball, the granularity of our Retail Footprint findings demonstrate that in spite of its smaller size and lesser known location, the city is home to a strong clothing and retail offering including premium retailers, a high percentage of young and affluent shoppers and is overall more likely to attract the right shoppers.

Key takeaways that Gymshark can consider for a French market expansion

These aforementioned insights would enable Gymshark to better understand their long-term audience capture of sites through physical retail and experiment with different formats and experiential offerings. Combining Retail Footprint data across Europe with demographic, transactional, brand alignment and footfall data can ultimately be used to shape an evolving store network strategy, and the national view further solidifies an understanding of the entire retail landscape of France. Through these insights, Gymshark would be able to accelerate store openings with greater confidence and success if or when they decide to expand into Europe.

Ready to Find Your Next Market?

With insights from Retail Footprint Europe, pinpoint the best locations for your brand’s growth across Europe.

Stay tuned for next blog in this two-part series, where we’ll assess which Klepierre centres in these high-performing potential French cities could perform well in a Gymshark French market expansion.

The importance of interpretability within machine learning: A case study with Acorn

Posted on: 30 October 2024

In today’s data-driven world, understanding and leveraging data effectively can transform how we approach various challenges. One powerful technique in the realm of data science and machine learning is K-means clustering. This is the algorithm behind Acorn, CACI’s flagship data product which groups together postcodes with similar characteristics into segments. Whilst this process can all be done fairly easily with modern ML techniques, one crucial component is often overlooked: human interpretability.

What is K-means clustering in the context of Acorn?

K-means clustering is an unsupervised machine learning algorithm used to group data points into clusters based on their features. The goal is to minimize the variance within each cluster and maximize the variance between different clusters. To demonstrate how this is done in practice, the following steps are used in the build of Acorn, although the same process will broadly apply to any K-means algorithm:

Initialisation: The number of clusters (K) for initial segments is chosen
Assignment: Every UK postcode is assigned to the nearest cluster segment based on information such as average house price and children per household before the mean distance between postcodes and their segment is calculated
Update: The cluster centroids are repositioned and mean distances for each segment are recalculated
Repeat: The assignment and update steps are repeated until distances are minimised and centroids no longer change significantly

The need for human interpretability

This process looks like it requires very little intervention from a human at any point – and that’s because it doesn’t – in theory. However, in practice as with all unsupervised ML techniques, for Acorn to be of any use as a segmentation tool, information must be scrutinised at every step along the way.

First, the number of clusters must be chosen either randomly or with prior domain knowledge. Acorn has been around for nearly 50 years and the last iteration featured 5 marketable segments, making it a good starting point. However, after stakeholder input from across the business, a conscious choice was made to increase the number of groups to 6 to reflect changes in society since the previous build.

Next, input variables need to be decided on before the clustering process begins. With a wealth of data from the 2021 Census as well as newly available information such as disposable income data, this list of variables needed to be carefully refined for Acorn to be both a mathematically and commercially sound product. As an example, the inclusion of planning extension data was tested as a promising new input to highlight areas undergoing gentrification. However, the results from this didn’t make intuitive sense and so this variable was excluded from the model. Such conscious decisions were also made to ensure that Acorn is fully compliant with the UK Equality Act and exemplify the need for human input before even running a model.

With the input variables decided on, K-means clustering can be applied, but the element of human input does not end here; the segment outputs must be dissected to ensure they are dissimilar from each other and contain an acceptable minimum number of data points. In the context of Acorn, this meant looking at the number of postcodes in a segment and measuring average values for the input driver variables. For example, averages for percentage of houses that are detached and household income were measured for each segment. These figures were found to be highest for groups containing individuals more likely to be in managerial roles, which acted as a useful sense check and allowed such groups to be labelled as more affluent. The number of postcodes within each group also needed to be sufficiently large to allow different marketing strategies to be applied for each segment.

Postcodes were also analysed visually on a 2D scale using a Python package to identify overlaps between segments. The difference between the old and new versions of Acorn can be seen below.

Figure 1: A representation of old (left) and new (right) Acorn postcodes drawn down from a multidimensional space to a 2D visual, with each colour representing an Acorn segment.

The reduced ‘bleed’ of segments into other segments as seen from this visual made it clear to analysts that this newer version of Acorn has much more well defined segments – a result of new data, advanced ML capabilities and of course, stakeholder input.

Finally, and arguably most importantly, the ultimate question must be answered: will the outputs of the model be valuable to the end user? If the answer is not a definite yes, then the process needs to be reviewed and, more often than not, this will involve decisions around the human element of the process rather than consulting the ever-growing list of ML techniques and tweaks. To increase the value of Acorn for clients across sectors including retail, finance, charities and utilities, questions from survey partners were mapped onto Acorn to provide insights such as digital attitudes and channel preference by segment. These questions are updated on an annual basis based on stakeholder feedback to ensure questions are current and relevant to clients.

Conclusion

Ultimately, results need to be useful for individuals or teams and there is currently no way of achieving this without human interpretation and intervention to some degree at every stage of the process. This rings even more true in consumer segmentations, where there is no ground truth or right or wrong to compare to. Lots of packages will allow you to build a model with very little input or intervention, especially with the rise in autoML capabilities, but to build a trustworthy, useful product, humans need to be on hand at every step along the way.

Challenging areas for the grey belt: London and the South West

Posted on: 28 October 2024

In this final article in our grey belt series combining CACI’s housing demand data with VirginLand’s grey belt site identification, we take a deeper dive into two areas where the impact of the grey belt will be less obvious: London and the South West.

This is not to diminish the overall value of the initiative, but to point out that it is not the single answer to the UK’s housing challenges. To be most effective, grey belt reallocation should be considered alongside other mechanisms to accelerate housing delivery such as brownfield, infill, repurposing and urban regeneration.

How will the grey belt initiative affect London?

Home to over 7 million adults, London is by far the most densely populated region in the UK. As a result, demand for housing is particularly acute in the capital and the conversation is dominated by affordability. It’s easy to see why; house prices are 11 times the average household income, and private rent is 37% of income. Although households in London earn 17% more than the national average, these high prices mean that homes are 59% less affordable to buy and 32% less affordable to rent.

In this context, any initiative to increase the overall supply of housing in this region is welcome; particularly if it’s targeted at the more affordable end of the scale. So, what impact will the grey belt have in London?

Although home to 14% of the population, London can house just 0.4% of all grey belt homes – a total of 1,955 dwellings across 31 sites. This is not for want of green belt (22% of the London region, by area, is currently designated as green belt), but for want of suitable locations that could be re-designated. Analysis by VirginLand shows that just 0.2% of the available green belt land is likely to be reallocated grey belt, with much of the London’s green belt holding additional designations like Designated Open Space, Country Park, Woodland or Nature Reserve and Conservation Area and Grade 1-3b agricultural land grades.

The challenge in London is also compounded by the location of the sites relative to movers. Being on the outskirts of the urban sprawl, just 11% of all London home movers live within the catchment of the identified sites; roughly 192,000 individuals. Although more than enough to absorb any new homes delivered, the scale of movers puts into perspective how limited the impact would be on demand; if all sites were built out to their fullest, there would be 98 movers for each home.

While there is little doubt that the 31 identified locations would be additive to the overall housing stock, the question is over how much of an impact these limited sites can have on a particularly strained market. With the population set to grow by another 6.1% in the next 10 years, London will need other initiatives, alongside the grey belt, to accelerate housing delivery in more urban neighbourhoods.

How will the grey belt initiative affect the South West?

Just 4.5% of the South West is designated as green belt, well below the national average. It therefore follows that grey belt opportunities in the South West will be similarly limited, and just 228 potential sites have been identified with the combined potential to deliver 11,868 new homes.

While this is not an insignificant number of homes, it represents just 2.2% of the total grey belt opportunity spread across 9.4% of the population. The location of grey belt sites also limits the initiative’s regional impact, as just 18% of the 1.6 million potential South West movers live within the grey belt catchment, against a national average of 36%.

Although limited in scope for the region as a whole, there are some pockets where the grey belt will be more impactful, and the characteristics of the catchment movers in these locations point to the type of homes that should be prioritised.

With concentrations of sites close to urban populations in the likes of Bristol, house-to-earning ratios and rent-to-earning within the grey belt catchment are higher than those outside of it (7.1 times income and 27.4% of income respectively). High concentrations of Family Renters, Tenant Living and Cash-Strapped Families within this catchment, and relatively large sites averaging 1.7 hectares, suggest a particular opportunity to deliver larger mixed neighbourhoods with high levels of rental product.

As with London, the grey belt initiative has the potential to support some of the housing needs of the South West, but an overarching housing strategy for the region should also be mindful of the 82% of home movers that live outside of the grey belt catchment.

How CACI can help?

To learn more about how you can ensure that your developments are meeting the demands of local movers, contact CACI.

Missed the previous blogs? Find the links to the series so far below:

How grey belt sites will help tackle the UK housing crisis – CACI – Tolga Necar

Grey belt sites: what they are, locations & impact on housing – CACI – Steve Norman and Sam Bedford, Virgin Land

Assessing the impact of the grey belt initiative on a National scale – CACI – Tolga Necar

How will the grey belt initiative affect North West England & Scotland? – CACI – Tolga Necar

How grey belt sites will help tackle the UK housing crisis

Posted on: 30 September 2024

The UK has not been meeting its house building targets for some time. This is not new news, but it is worth reiterating the scale of shortfall. Over the past five years, we have consistently delivered 20% fewer homes than were targeted: a total miss of nearly 300,000 homes (or put another way, an entire year’s target).

Couple this with projected population growth and we can see why house building has made its way up the political agenda. The population is expected to swell by 3.8 million people over the coming 10 years, and naturally, these people will need somewhere to live.

In this blog series, CACI and Virgin Land will uncover key questions around the future of house building targets and how they can be addressed via grey belt sites, including their locations and desirability, whether they create suitable opportunities for inhabitants and how they vary by region.

Where should new house building targets be focused?

Population growth will concentrate around major towns and cities, especially given that 14 of the largest 15 towns and cities have projected growth rates that outstrip the UK average. However, cities are not always where the market has delivered new homes. In fact, eight of those top 15 towns and cities have housing delivery rates that lag behind the national average. Therefore, new housing targets should be geographically directed to the places that people want to live.

Who should be the focus of house building targets?

Housing growth should be targeted at the people that need it most. Left to its own devices, the market has delivered new housing that concentrates around a few demographic groups. Using CACI’s Acorn segmentation to profile new homes delivered in the last five years, we can see clear trends in the data; Tenant Living (young, urban renters) comprise 18% of new homes but just 12% of the population, Semi-Rural Maturity and Mature Success (two affluent, older groups who are likely to be downsizing) collectively account for 20% of new homes but just 13% of the population. Lower affluent, urban families such as Limited Budgets, Hard-Up Households and Cash Strapped Families, however, have received disproportionately little housing development.

This is not to lay blame on housebuilders; the commercial challenges of development in urban environments are clearly contributing factors, however, the impact is one of acute supply challenges in specific demographic groups who are coincidentally the groups most likely to be living in over-occupied housing. To maximise the impact of housebuilding initiatives, the route forward requires a more collaborative approach, which the newly formed MADE Partnership may well deliver.

How will the grey belt make a difference for house building targets?

Central to the Labour government’s housing policy is the rezoning of poor-quality green belt sites into the “grey belt”, effectively opening swathes of previously unavailable land for development. But how influential could this policy change be? CACI and Virgin Land have partnered to uncover the potential impact that opening up the grey belt can have on housing market dynamics.

How CACI can help?

Stay tuned for the next blog in this series, where we’ll dive deeper into grey belts, their locations and their impact on housing. In the meantime, contact CACI to learn more about how you can ensure that your developments are meeting the demands of local movers.

Why retail destinations should invest in consumer experiences & perceptions

Posted on: 9 July 2024

Want to increase your visitors’ spend by 25%? Invest in your amenities.

Facilities are a vital part of retail and leisure destinations. Despite not directly producing turnover, they play an essential part in driving performance. Through research from our Shoppers Dimensions dataset– our database of over 1 million respondents across 270 UK-wide destinations which enables key performance indicator (KPI) benchmarking of assets against similar locations across the UK to contextualise performance and enhance decision-making– we analysed how various KPIs are impacted by consumers’ experiences and perceptions.

So, how exactly are services and amenities within retail destinations affecting consumers’ behaviours? How can retail destinations leverage these insights to bolster experiences and perceptions?

How do consumers’ overall shopping experiences influence their spending behaviours?

According to our research, retail destinations capable of improving their rating of a person’s overall shopping experience may recognise an increase in their average retail spend by £21. There is an uplift across the board when overall shopping experience is rated 5 out of 5, with average retail spend increasing by 25% and catering spend by 17%.

How do experiences & perceptions of toilets impact retail destinations?

It may not be a glamourous topic, but toilets are often called out by customers as an issue. They are expensive to renovate and maintain, and without a direct revenue stream associated with them, it is easy to think of toilets as a cost. Despite this, our data shows that investing in facilities can actually drive performance.

Firstly, when looking at shopping centre locations of those that rate the toilet facilities 5 out of 5, our data shows that this leads to an uplift in time that a person stays at the destination by 16%, which accounts for 12 additional minutes per customer. But how does this additional dwell time translate into spend? Customers that give toilets a top rating record a 26% uplift on their average retail spend, an increase of approximately £21.34 per customer.

Retail is not the only category affected. In fact, catering conversion experiences an uplift of 5 percentage points and the average spend on catering increases by 19%. There is therefore direct value to unlock by maintaining and improving these facilities, even if that means you have to spend a few pennies to do so.

How to attract more family groups from further afield

Family groups can be a hard group to target, but once at the destination, they are likely to come for ‘Big Day Out’ trips which are associated with a higher average spend. For many destinations, this group tends to live further afield, such as in the suburbs of a city. When family facilities are rated higher, there is an uplift in their drivetime by 23%, an increase in their dwell time by 17% along with an uplift of 25% in associated retail spend. Showing that better family facilities draw in these high-spending visitors from further away

How do car park experiences & perceptions impact interactions with the rest of the shopping centre?

One of the most interesting findings we came across when looking into the impact of ratings was with overall parking experience. This is another topic that consumers are passionate about; ever hard-to-please, the consumer wants it to be cheaper, with more spaces and of a better quality. But do better perceptions really lead to stronger key performance metrics? In short, the answer is a resounding “yes”. Those who rate the overall parking experience 5 out of 5 see an uplift in dwell, retail and catering average spend and conversion. The greatest uplifts are in dwell time and average retail spend. On average, dwell time will see an uplift of 17% (14 minutes) while average retail spend will see an uplift of 30%, leading to an average increase in spend of just over £25.

Key takeaway: higher perceptions equal higher spend

Overall, our data shows that the higher the perceptions, the more people will spend and the longer they will stay. This is the case when we look at the ratings for overall shopping experience, cleanliness, overall parking experience, family facilities, customer services, signage, architecture and toilet facilities. While it might not be glamourous, strong perceptions of parking experience and toilet facilities do lead to an increase in key performance indicators, proving that there is value to be unlocked by investing in these facilities.

How can CACI help?

At CACI, we understand the impact that driving improved perceptions of facilities within a retail destination can have on consumers’ behaviours, such as which amenities encourage people to visit from further away, stay longer or spend more on their trip. To gain a better understanding of how consumers interact with places, reach out to us to discuss how we can help you measure your performance and identify growth opportunities.

Most substantial challenges for healthcare organisations to address in 2024

Posted on: 25 June 2024

Tackling health inequalities is a tremendous challenge. It requires healthcare organisations to understand the demographics, lifestyles, behaviours, needs, and external pressures that individuals across the country face daily with greater accuracy. Access to accurate and detailed data significantly impacts an organisation’s ability to develop a robust response to inequalities and determine which services will meet local needs.

In our recent webinar for NHS England on “Tackling Health Inequalities with Effective Data & Insight”, we explored the impact of our datasets and insights on NHS England’s ability to tackle current health inequalities and devise strategies to improve future outcomes.

So, what have the findings from our various datasets and our Voice of the Nation (VOTN) Q1 2024 survey shown regarding the behaviours and health concerns of different demographic and affluence groups across the UK? How can healthcare organisations apply these findings to improve outcomes for their local communities?

Half of the survey respondents are concerned about their personal wellbeing and mental health

Personal wellbeing and mental health are incredibly important considerations for the NHS. According to our survey results, these have been hugely concerning for people of various ages across the UK, with 50% of our VOTN Q1 2024 survey respondents claiming to be concerned about both. This is the highest number of respondents for these sentiments that CACI has ever seen in the four years of this survey being conducted, demonstrating the need for healthcare organisations to review their current offering of personal wellbeing and mental health services avoiding a ‘one size fits all’ approach that targets all ages.

Millennials are the most concerned of all age groups about their health

While the traditional assumption may be that younger generations are more carefree and less preoccupied with the concerns of the world, our survey results have shown the opposite. Millennials were the most concerned of all age groups (from Boomers to Gen Z) for their personal wellbeing and mental health, with more than two-thirds feeling this way. This further reiterates the necessity of ensuring that all age groups—particularly Millennials—are offered relevant personal wellbeing and mental health services.

Affluence does not shield from health concerns

Our survey results indicated that personal wellbeing and mental health concerns have been affecting individuals across all affluence levels. While one might assume that higher-affluence individuals experience fewer wellbeing and mental health concerns, our findings revealed that as many as half of the respondents from the higher-affluence Acorn categories of Luxury Lifestyles and Established Affluence expressed concern about these aspects of their lives. Respondents from the Low Income Living Acorn category expressed the highest level of concern for both areas.

These insights provide concrete evidence for healthcare organisations to tailor their services based on the specific needs of different affluence groups, rather than relying on open data or assumptions. These results demonstrate the right healthcare services must be accessible across all affluence levels.

How can CACI help?

CACI can help healthcare organisations tackle health inequalities, supporting a range of clinical areas of health inequalities from severe mental illness (SMI) to maternity and chronic respiratory disease (CPD) to early cancer diagnosis, hypertension case-finding and more. Our partnership with NHS England provides all 42 integrated care boards (ICBs) with free access to a variety of datasets that are being used to tackle health inequalities.

Contact us today to learn more about our partnership with NHS England or to find out how our datasets can improve outcomes for your healthcare organisation.

Most impactful food-to-go transaction trends into 2024

Posted on: 12 June 2024

With the continuing trend of hybrid work within worker hubs, consumers’ food-to-go spending in quick service restaurants (QSRs) remains concentrated on some days and displaced on others. Consumers’ wallets also continue to face an ongoing squeeze, resulting in pressures on day-to-day convenience spend.

So, what transactional trends are being observed across different demographic groups, geographies and price-points as these trends continue? What impact do these trends have on operators’ future openings strategies and overall performance?

Food & beverage have become increasingly prominent on High Streets

Over the course of 2019 to 2023, most retail centres in all asset classes have grown their share of food and beverage (F&B) outlets, noting an increase in over 90% of centres in the top four classes— City Centres, Regional Malls, Major Town Centres and Satellite Centres. Despite F&B having become increasingly prominent in shopping and retail parks, there has been a mixture of increases and decreases observed in towns, transport hubs and leisure parks, raising the question of whether oversaturation has had a role to play in some locations.

Centres are polarising

Over the same time period, city centres, regional malls, major towns centres and satellite centres have dropped in their overall level of consumer attractiveness in line with consumers’ changing behaviours. So much so, that the four largest asset classes have seen declines in over 90% of their centres. The picture is a bit more mixed as the retail hierarchy descends into towns, transport hubs and leisure parks, however, with an average of 40% of centres in these asset classes seeing a decline. The ever-increasing proportion of consumer spend moving online has undoubtedly prompted these downward trends.

Given the vast differences in changes at an asset class level, and with many exceptions at a centre level, having access to detailed data on the changing attractiveness and demographics at centre level is vital.

Customer behaviours towards QSRs continue to change

Many may think that post-Covid QSR demand is just about Tuesday to Thursday, driven by changes in working behaviour, but this is an over-simplification. CACI’s local centre mobile app data analysis within our Location Dynamics suite shows that while areas like Fleet Street/St. Paul’s in the City of London now do have a pronounced Tuesday to Thursday peak, it’s far from the universal norm. As shown by the dark-shaded time segments in the graphs below, places like Barkers Pool in central Sheffield have a very pronounced Friday and Saturday night economy. This further contrasts with central Eastbourne, which has maintained a more traditional Monday to Sunday 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. custom and a strong weekend daytime custom.

Ultimately, locations are different, and successful operators must understand the different ‘missions’ their customers will be on to ensure they meet their customers’ needs and ensure that they staff their outlets to provide the right level of services at times demanded by their customers.

For food-to-go retailers to engage with consumers at the right time and in the right place, it will be critical for them to consider:

The F&B offers in local areas
Changing consumer behaviours as a reflection of new and embedded worker patterns,
Centre attractiveness
Overarching market shifts that impact footfall on specific days and times.

How CACI can help?

With these trends in mind, it is critical for food-to-go retailers to have a detailed understanding of who their customers are, where they are located and what times of the week they are most likely to interact with your chain or restaurant. It is equally important to understand your place in terms of its attractiveness to customers and the effect of its location on driving footfall.

Data is key to maintaining a competitive edge amidst evolving trends, an area where CACI excels in providing support. Find out how we can keep you and your team ahead of the curve by reaching out to us today.