Capability: Consumer and Demographic Data
How does a challenging economy affect consumer choices and priorities that shape the UK market for elderly care?
It’s no surprise that the cost of living squeeze is having an impact on elderly care operators. Private residential and domestic care cost money: consumers are looking for ways to economise. Older people want and need comfort and care as much as ever, but they and their families are tightening their belts. Inevitably, they’re considering the cost of different care settings and options.
What does this mean for residential and domiciliary care providers? It’s early days, but as for every other consumer sector, you need to be prepared for the market to change. A proactive approach to understanding current and future customers and modelling potential demand in your locations can uncover opportunities to maintain occupancy and optimise your services to match evolving priorities and needs.
If you don’t have a crystal ball to hand, that may sound like a tall order. But knowing and anticipating market demand in your locations doesn’t depend on magic or guesswork. Consumer and location data together provide reliable evidence that can help you identify ways to stay relevant, accessible and financially stable.
Not all groups are impacted to the same extent by the rising costs of living. The majority of Acorn Groups still have a sizeable disposable income despite the recent 5% average fall.
Source: CACI Paycheck Disposable Income 2022 v2
Despite the bleak headlines, the economic impact varies considerably for different household types and in different areas. Many older consumers still have savings, disposable income or assets that allow them to choose the care they want. If you can understand the profile of your current and future customers in detail, it’s easier to identify and reach out to local prospects.
Location intelligence data is a well-established source of insight for care home operators and domestic care providers that are considering expansion or new sites. Mapping the age and affluence of the local population in a potential catchment helps to indicate where there’s likely demand for elderly care services.
But alongside age and income, there’s a lot of more subtle data that can help you market your existing services, confirm or reshape your propositions, benchmark your pricing and adjust the range and type of services you offer. This type of insight is extremely useful in a fast-changing market.
CACI data insight can answer crucial questions about your customers and market:
• What are the characteristics of your local and target customers?
Acorn profiling groups UK consumers by affluence, life stage and priorities
• What are your current and potential customers thinking, feeling and intending to do differently?
Quarterly Consumer insight surveys of the UK population
• How has customer spending on different outgoings changed?
Transactional spending data shows the split of spend with different brands and operators
• Whose disposable income is affected?
Postcode model of income in different locations, showing how it’s being spent.
• What’s around the corner?
Dynamic modelling forecasts what could happen to consumer spending if inflation, fuel and other costs rise in a range of different ways
CACI’s current disposable income model reflects the changes we’ve observed in the last few months. Although all households are affected by rising costs, the majority of our Acorn consumer profile groups still have a significant disposable income. It’s groups like Student Life and City Sophisticates that have seen the largest decline, driven by property costs.
There has been major growth in spend on private healthcare, with a wide range of demographics prioritising health over other non-essential spending.
Source: CACI Transactional Spend, June 2022
For elderly care operators, it’s encouraging to note that Comfortable Seniors, Countryside Communities and Successful Suburbs, who are likely to form far more of the target market, have some of the highest levels of disposable income, reflecting smaller or non-existent mortgages, good pensions and comfortable savings accrued over previous years.
Spending on private healthcare has increased in the past year. The Covid-19 pandemic and concerns about NHS waiting lists are driving this change in priorities for households across most Acorn groups. Despite rising essential costs, many consumers now regard healthcare expenditure as a necessity, not a luxury. This could have a positive impact on perceptions of value in elderly care.
These are just the headlines from our latest national data. Every elderly care provider has a different operating model and works in unique locations. CACI’s health and social care team can select data and build customised reports that directly reflect the opportunities and changes happening in your catchment areas today and tomorrow. For mid-sized operators, it’s vital decision-making information to inform strategy and tactical decisions that will help your business compete and thrive in a challenging economy.
We can help you:
• Continuously analyse, monitor and adapt – stay ahead of policy and new competitors when finding new customers and recruits
• Tailor marketing engagement and recruitment key messages to reflect the requirements of local potential pools of customers and staff
• Understand your staff and customer base and how its segments are impacted by different cost of living challenges, to identify risk and opportunity
• Tailor your offer to changing consumer and staff requirements
CACI’s specialist elderly care and senior living team work with clients in the UK and internationally to help them improve operational and financial performance with access to vital insights into their customers, employees and locations.
To find out more, contact us.
Over the last three years, we have seen a more significant shift in consumer habits than we could have imagined. Currently challenged by the rising cost of living and an economy in recession, the post-pandemic spending bubble was cut much shorter than initially anticipated by economists.
Like everyone in January, CACI reflected on the last few years, and as part of this, we revisited predictions that we made during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. Consumer behaviour changed significantly in the space of several days, triggered by widespread temporary store closures during the lockdowns. Some stores were never able to reopen; whilst online platforms boomed, in light of these significant behavioural shifts, CACI rebuilt predictions to reflect this new normal.
How close were CACI’s consumer online spending predictions to actual results?
Mirroring our spend predictions, a phrase we maintained at CACI at the time was that “online spend jumped forwards five years in one month”. What we have come to realise was that three years on, these spend predictions, shown in the below chart, highlighting a return to in-store, were very close to the true picture.
How can CACI track consumer online spend behaviour?
CACI can unpick these new trends in spend behaviour using our new and exciting tool kit of Spend Dimensions and Brand Dimensions, which tracks over 200 shopping centres and 300 brands across the UK.
What we can see demonstrated in the above chart is a post-pandemic slump in online spend as a proportion of total spend. In 2023, online spend falls to 38%, before gradually rising again in the preceding years.
Whilst the current split in online and offline engagement provides us with an overall national average, it is important not to expect all shoppers to follow suit. We have seen asset type, product category, brand, region and demographics all play a big part in the extent to which a shopper might engage online.
Who is most likely to shop online?
Demographically, the split between those engaging in-store and online has become less distinct, highlighting the closing of the digital gap between young and old, with the difference between online market share across all groups dropping from 10% to 5% over the last year.
However, the big picture doesn’t change. Key online shoppers continue to be younger shoppers across the affluence spectrum as well as more affluent shoppers, likely driven by greater access to e-commerce platforms and the ability to afford delivery costs.
How does this vary by product category?
The recent shift back towards in-store engagement isn’t clear-cut and does vary by product category. CACI expectations were that the drivers of the overall return to the store would be clothing and footwear, household and health & wellness brands. This has been the general spend trend that we’ve been seeing across the UK since 2020.
The variation by category gets further exacerbated by the time of year. For example, comparing the months of October to December 2021 and 2022 in the chart below, there was a clear shift for household and kids’ goods spend to in-store, likely driven by the desire to experience before purchasing. Whereas, General Retail painted an interesting picture within the final quarter of 2022. Both in 2020 and 2021, with Black Friday and Cyber Monday taking place in November, Christmas hit online earlier than in-store, boosting online’s share of the market temporarily. In December, our Christmas survey reiterated this sentiment, with over half of those shopping online citing a main drive of this being concern with the rising cost of living and saving money, whereas over half of those shopping in-store did so for the experience. The experience-focused, in-store shoppers drove the resurgence year-on-year of in-store spend in December.
What does the return to in-store mean for retailers?
Across the 300 brands we tracked, many pure online brands are experiencing a decline in market share, in-store brands have typically performed well, and those blended brands have seen a shift towards a greater in-store market share. The power of the store can be seen through brands such as Decathlon, Nespresso, Build-A-Bear and Denby, who have all shifted to greater reliance on the store over the last quarter. In comparison, online disrupter brands such as Vinted and Shein which thrived through the year began to see a drop off.
What does the future of consumer online spending behaviours look like?
Whilst 2022 did represent a return to bricks and mortar, we are still at least a year ahead of where we would have been if the pandemic hadn’t happened. We expect to see continued growth in both on and offline retail spend, although proportionally online spend will increase.
However, it is undoubtedly true that we are currently, and will continue to, experience unexpected macroeconomic challenges which will impact different brands and destinations in different ways. Brands can no longer rely on their name as we have seen with the casualties of too many well-known landlords and retailers. Therefore, making informed decisions through the use of CACI data will help retain a competitive advantage and stand out from the market.
To learn more about how CACI can help your brand navigate changing consumer spending habits, get in touch with us here.
Change within the financial services sector is complex. There are multiple stakeholders, regulatory needs, and often a base of legacy data and technology to unpick.
From our work with major brands, we know that the change is achievable and worthwhile. Investing in customer centricity will pay dividends in the long-term by reducing competitive threats, winning new customers, and ensuring retention of base customers.
To succeed in an increasingly competitive market, financial services brands need to establish change that encompasses:
- A coherent data-driven strategy – where customer data is of a high quality and securely democratised to enable meaningful messaging to the individual
- Establishing the right business targets and success measures – moving from short-term outcomes to long-term value for the customer and the organisation
- A focus on your customers and the market context – understanding the needs and behaviours of both customers and prospects to better engage them
- Maximising data and tech ROI – having the right tools to deliver the outcomes the business needs and then sweating the technology assets to deliver long-term ROI
- Measure and optimise what matters – ensuring accurate reporting is fed through the business and that teams are empowered to act on those insights to optimise performance
Our challenge to leaders within financial services is to create a vision and become an agent of change. We want to work with brands who care about their customers and are making changes to show it. Therefore, our catalogue of services is developed to do amazing things with data and connect your brand with the individual.
At CACI, we can improve marketing ROI through detailed attribution modelling. Our customer demographics and bespoke segmentations provide a more accurate profile of customer needs, market size, and even financial vulnerability. Technical decisions around investment in AI, decisioning or identity resolution are made by defining clear use cases for technology and designing future technical architectures.
This work led to CACI developing a framework for customer personalisation at scale. Working with leading vendors Tealium, Braze and Snowflake, we created a technology blueprint that can achieve full integration between enterprise data and the omnichannel experience.
To find out more about the CACI Customer Personalisation Platform or to discuss issues related to customer transformation, please get in touch.
You may also be interested in downloading this report which uncovers a surprising disconnect between what banks think and how customers feel about the customer experience, with statistics and insight gathered from 1,500 marketing leaders and 5,000 consumers.
You can also check out the previous parts of this blog series below:
Blog 1 – How the banking and financial services sector can lean into a changing market
Blog 2 – Creating human banking experiences through data-led marketing
Blog 3 – Three ways to stand out in a crowded insurance market
Highlights
- Granular demographic data for a dense urban population
- Accurate insight reflecting rapid urban change, updated annually
- Data to blend and visualise with other specialist datasets
- Local population profiling to provide relevant services
- Supporting local accessibility and inclusion
About Impact on Urban Health, Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation
Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation was previously known as the Guy’s & St Thomas’ Charity. It is an independent foundation whose mission is to invest, partner, engage and influence to come at big health challenges from all angles. The Foundation and its family of organisations collaborate with communities, partners and hospitals, using its assets to transform lives.
Impact on Urban Health is part of the Foundation, with a specific remit to make urban inner London and similar areas healthier places to live.
The Challenge: Understanding the impact of the Snowsfields life sciences hub
Guy’s & St Thomas’ Foundation has created a 300,000 square foot life sciences hub with world-class lab facilities. The development is adjacent to the Guy’s Hospital campus in Southwark and will form part of a new health innovation cluster in central London.
To assess the impacts and benefits of the development for the local community, the property team asked Impact on Urban Health to help them understand more about the needs, lifestyles and characteristics of the people who live nearby.
The Solution: Acorn demographic data for a densely populated catchment
Data Analyst Alessandra Denotti is responsible for generating insight for Impact on Urban Health projects. She used CACI’s Acorn demographic data to map profiles of the population in the immediate area around the proposed Snowsfields development.
The Benefits: Detailed, accessible and actionable population data visualisations
Project Director Emma Davies studied Alessandra’s insight presentation to understand the local population better, in order to design and propose relevant services within the Snowsfields development plan for local residents to use.
Emma explains:
The data insight work was done to review the make-up of the local community in the area surrounding the Foundation’s Snowsfields development site. Acorn enabled us to determine who we have living in and around our place at Snowsfields using the Acorn classification tool which shows demographic and lifestyle demographics at a postcode level. It was a really interesting exercise. This enabled us to better determine what services we should look to provide in the development scheme, to be more inclusive to the local community, at a very early stage in our proposals.
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.
For many banks and building societies, legacy systems are a barrier for real-time, personalised customer engagement. Migrating experience platforms to a scalable, cloud-based platform, coupled with well-engineered decisioning, will enable banks and building societies to establish trust with consumers and subsequently maintain it.
The need for robust and reliable customer data
Banks and building societies are bound by financial services regulations to know the identity of their customers. Proper customer identification seeks to prevent criminal behaviour such as fraud, money laundering, or tax evasion. It is also a requirement for credit checks.
Having well-managed customer data enables lenders to identify the next best action for the customer, and create a customer strategy and journey tailored to each individual customer.
Inbound and outbound digital channels should be the ideal place to deliver these messages. But the use of digital technology is hampered by unfit processes and operating models that are combined with unscalable technology and batch processing.
With the right efforts to unlock the wealth of data held, the promise of real-time personalised messages that cut through the noise is very attainable for lenders.
Covid-19: a catalyst of change
The financial services sector responded quickly and earnestly to the challenges created by Covid-19. Payment holidays were offered, and staff were quickly relocated to home working setups to continue providing a good service.
The catalyst of change we all lived with created new levels of trust and empathy. This needs to be maintained by showing customers that the financial institutions really do care about them as individuals, especially in the current climate.
Mass mailings that push irrelevant products or services will erode that relationship. It shows a lack of care for the customer and a view of them as being a source of revenue and profit.
Making technology change last
To move forward, financial services marketers need to set a vision for the type of relationship they want to have with their customers.
This vision will determine the way that data is used, it will be at the heart of all campaigns and communications, it will alter working processes so that the organisation becomes more empathetic.
Through a clear and uniting vision, marketing technology will really be able to prove its value. Not just in delivering a better campaign, but by shaping the very experience and interaction an individual has with a brand. It will be about two-way interaction.
For useful input from over 200 financial services brands, 1,500 marketing leaders in the financial services industry and 5,000 financial services consumers, on how you should be evolving your customer marketing strategy to meet the needs of a changing consumer, download this recent report from CACI and Braze.
Check out the previous parts of this blog series below:
Blog 1 – How the banking and financial services sector can lean into a changing market
Blog 2 – Creating human banking experiences through data-led marketing
Blog 3 – Three ways to stand out in a crowded insurance market
With new guidance in the FCA’s Consumer Duty directive, the financial services industry is being asked to get to know their customer better and meet their diverse needs. In a recent report produced by Braze & CACI, providing insight for financial services brands, it was found that 42% of EMEA consumers only use one financial services brand – so how can you retain their loyalty, trust and keep them engaged?
1. Technology Innovation
The general insurance market has always been challenged with engagement, as the frequency of communication with its policy holders is low and concentrated at the point of policy inception, claim or renewal.
However, building trust is still crucial in this market.
Every insurer is now looking for new ways to harness technology for growth and competitive advantage. The use of AI and innovative tools is becoming more prevalent in the underwriting, claims and CRM process.
Harnessing your customer data through modern decisioning tools, and leveraging third-party demographic data to build a more holistic understanding of who your customer is, enables you to interject hyper personalised communications throughout the life of the policy, via the most appropriate channels, and actively give policy holders transparency over potential changes in premium.
2. Building Trust
Whilst insurance may be seen as a “necessary purchase”, the payments aren’t usually greeted with good sentiment or the feeling of value for money.
However, the data and insights that much of this new technology generates creates the opportunity to engage policy holders more during the life of their policy.
For example, in car insurance, the use of telematics data could be used to talk to customers regularly about how they can improve their driving whilst reducing the cost at their next renewal. It’s well understood that people feel a sense of dread when a renewal comes around, fearing a policy price increase without a clear reason. As an insurer, why not reduce this surprise and help your customers maintain or reduce their premium?
If the data used to run the underwriting model changes, meaning that the car insurance policy may go up at renewal, it is better to let the customer know this early and explain why this has happened. This would increase trust and loyalty, reducing the likelihood that they might go to an aggregator when the renewal is due.
Even better, utilise predictive analytics to warn customers early of changes, enabling them to make changes in behaviour to help keep premiums down.
3. Understand your competition
The insurance market is made up of large general insurers through to niche specialists. Whilst brand reputation has a role to play, the heavy use of aggregators to seek out favourable deals is commonplace.
The opportunity is there for the more established brands to innovate and use their capability to invest in and truly leverage marketing technology and data to create a more trustworthy experience. For niche players, they can utilise their positioning to clearly communicate the benefits of their USP to customers.
With restrictions on the use of incentives for new consumers, all insurers need to consider other important elements of their offering and communicate this throughout the experience.
Throughout this blog series for the financial service industry, we break down the opportunities for marketers to build trust, loyalty and a superior customer experience with data and technology. Continue reading at the links below:
Blog 1 – How the banking and financial services sector can lean into a changing market
Blog 2 – Creating human banking experiences through data-led marketing
Report – Banking on the Customer Journey: 2022 Financial Services Insights
Our recent report, created in partnership with Braze, found that only 53% of financial services brands use advanced techniques like event-based and attribute-based personalisation when it comes to customer communications.
Using modern customer engagement technology will help financial services brands humanise the experience with their customers – as personalising each interaction using sophisticated decisioning algorithms will make the individual feel acknowledged. Real-time customer MarTech can manage two-way dialogue with customers, engaging them with the right content at the right time.
Great experiences start from the first contact
As the market grows ever more competitive and it becomes easier than ever to switch providers, creating the right first impression for your customers is essential.
It’s often thought that successful customer onboarding requires the customer to share a lot of data, but with the right customer strategy, marketing technology and third-party demographic data you can create an onboarding process that’s right for your customer without asking for more than your customer is willing to provide. Registration processes should be simple, not prohibitive to engagement, and show clear reasons for data collection. Consider neo-banks such as Plum who gamify their onboarding journey and make it simple to become a customer.
Collecting marketing consent is an often-neglected part of the sign-up process, with a series of check boxes tucked in at the end just before the terms and conditions acceptance. Improved consent processes are geared towards signing up for specific engaging content or benefits.
Education and transparency
Even though people are visiting branches less, it is still possible to create real trust through educating customers to support their decision making via your digital channels.
Many progressive banking and building society brands are now using interaction and behavioural data to point their customers to educational posts or feature tutorials. Brands can therefore help their customers to meet their individual goals, whether it’s to stay on budget, boost their credit scores, save for a new home, or other major life purchases.
Teaching customers to make the most of the digital tools available to them, and explaining how to achieve their financial goals, will demonstrate care and support. Additionally, being connected with the customer’s long-term ambitions means that bank and consumer are together for the same reason.
Humanising the experience
With Covid-19 accelerating the use of digital channels, the online experience needs to build trust by clearly acting in the customer’s best interests, like an in-branch customer service representative would.
Humanising the experience using empathy is key to this. Creating warmth and understanding around life events, in the same way a customer service representative would, is a powerful way to build that bond with your customer.
It’s critical that the customer journey promotes the value your brand brings by using every interaction, no matter the channel, to reinforce how each individual customer can financially better themselves.
Throughout this blog series for the financial service industry, we are breaking down the opportunities for marketers to create a personalised customer experience, and build brand loyalty through central decisioning engines, marketing attribution models, data modelling, machine learning and AI-driven recommendations. Continue reading at the links below:
Blog 1 – How the banking and financial services sector can lean into a changing market
Blog 3 – Three ways to stand out in a crowded insurance market
For recent insights on how your customers feel about the experience they receive from their financial services providers, and for guidance on how you can better understand and meet shifting customer expectations, download our recent report – Banking on the Customer Journey.
Highlights
• Bespoke data dashboard and InSite tools
• Acorn geodemographic data for multiple propositions and locations
• Customer and employee profiling to assess community need
• Enabling demand-led growth for genuine customer value
• Rapid report generation to inform many stakeholders
About Bright Horizons
Trusted by families to look after their children for over 30 years, Bright Horizons is an award-winning nursery provider. The company operates over 300 community and workplace nurseries throughout the UK: each is individually designed to serve the needs of its community. Bright Horizons provides tailored childcare for corporate clients and for families, at home, at work and in local settings.
The Challenge
Bright Horizons initially approached CACI for data to support their new site opening and acquisition insight programme. Property Asset Manager Oliver Brookes needed reliable data that was quick and easy to interpret for new site and location decision-making.
Marketing Manager Eddie Thorogood saw a further opportunity to use demographic data to support Bright Horizons’ proposition development and to better understand existing as well as potential catchments.
The Solution
CACI provided Acorn demographics, profiling and mapping, giving insight into specific postcodes and communities. High level demographic maps are instantly visible in InSite’s Locator tool.
Eddie explains: “The blend of data creates reliable and up-to-date information about the demand for our services, to support decision-making about how and where we can expand our operations so we can deliver high quality childcare where it’s needed. It also helps us improve our business model, so we can manage our portfolio and flex and balance our sites to meet changing needs.”
The Benefits
Bright Horizons’ three pillars are ‘people, quality, growth’. Eddie emphasises, “We’re not about just growing for the sake of it. We always want to be where we are needed – where parents can find us and our services will be useful. With this data insight at local level, we can provide a clear picture of community and workplace need to our senior leadership team, so they can sign off new facilities.”
Eddie explains
We have a complex business where everything is audience-centric, so we have multiple offerings. It’s a deeply human business – it’s all about nurturing young children.
The CACI data and dashboard reporting gives us tools to look through every single lens, to understand all the factors that matter to people.
Eddie Thorogood, Marketing Manager, Bright Horizons
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.
The evidence is clear, Covid-19 accelerated the pace of consumers’ changing behaviours.
Our analysis on consumer attitudes towards returning to branches highlighted a 32% reduction in bank branch visits post-covid, with even the most resistant to channel shift turning to apps and websites to manage their finances.
This is against a backdrop of other changes in the UK’s financial services sector that are impacting marketer’s abilities to connect with customers and prospects.
Retaining your savvy savers
Rising interest rates mean that people are becoming incentivised to both start saving again, and to switch savings accounts again, with savvy savers searching for the best deals.
Our recent consumer insights have found that the younger demographic are still expecting to save in the next 12 months. And it is to be expected that your competitors will increase their efforts to attract your savers to their products. You need to be ready to retain them!
Buoyant lending with a shift to the suburbs
Across the UK we saw a shift from the cities to the suburbs, driven by the opportunity to work from home more regularly. A reduced commute and a chance for more space was an opportunity many felt could not be missed.
Coupled with the government provocation of the housing policy, using changes to the stamp duty tax threshold, there has been an incredibly active homebuyer market.
However, recent economic factors have driven up the interest rates available on new mortgages and to those coming to the end of their fixed deals. Consumers are therefore incentivised more than ever to find the best available deal. This becomes a potential flash point for marketers who need to develop trust with customers so that the retention battle can be won.
Insurers need to rethink incentives
New legislation from the FCA means that insurers must be willing to offer the same incentive to new and renewing customers. Past use of aggressive incentives to win new customers’ needs to adapt to regulatory challenges.
Like the other macro conditions, this requires marketers to engage in longer-term marketing journeys with potential consumers, to win them and retain them with value driven propositions.
The need to communicate with the individual
Whichever way you cut it, there’s a lot of change to contend with for the financial services marketer.
From CACI’s perspective, we see there being winners and losers in the market across banking, lending and insurance.
The winners will be those who utilise data and technology to serve customers as individuals. To maintain engaged relationships based on trust and demonstrate how the brand is taking care of the financial interests of the individual.
Throughout our new blog series for the financial service industry (starting with this blog), we will break down the opportunities for marketers to address these challenges through central decisioning engines, marketing attribution models, data modelling, machine learning and AI-driven recommendations. Continue reading at the links below:
Blog 2 – Creating human banking experiences through data-led marketing
Blog 3 – Three ways to stand out in a crowded insurance market
For insights on consumer attitudes towards their financial services provider’s marketing and communications, download this report, created by Braze in partnership with CACI. With input from over 200 financial services brands, 1,500 marketing leaders in the financial services industry and 5,000 financial services consumers, the report uncovers a surprising disconnect between what banks think and how customers feel. It also provides guidance for brands in the financial services industry to better understand and meet shifting customer expectations.