Regular customers and senior citizens particularly courted by companies

Most of all companies like to court their regular customers. 93 percent of companies consider them to be important or very important for their business success. Next in the hit list of most courted clients are high-income consumers (for 70 percent of companies) and senior citizens (55 percent). These are the findings of a survey carried out from February until March among 547 executives of all economic sectors by Steria Mummert Consulting in co-operation with the Handelsblatt and the Wirtschaftswoche.

Companies are ready to spent quite a lot of money on the cultivation of their business relationship with regular customers in order to even further strengthen the business connection thereby protecting themselves from falling prices.
Regular customers are given special conditions, generous discounts, exclusive offers and extensive counseling. They can agree a date with the branch office manager and do not have to queue like ordinary customers. But the development which is most relevant economically in the eyes of two thirds of those questioned is the fact that society as a whole is getting older.
For this reason, senior citizens are becoming more important as customers besides regular customers. Nowadays 30 million of women and men living in Germany are older than 50. This number will have risen to 39 million by 2020. Thus, in Austria the first supermarkets for the generation over 50 have already opened with price tags in big print, extra-wide corridors, skidproof floor covering and trolleys which can also be turned into chairs.

Also courted are university graduates. The introduction of study fees in many Federal states increases the importance of graduates to be in particular to banks and financial service providers. Children and teenagers as well as foreign customers, however, are less the focus of companies. According to the study, this trend is going to remain virtually unchanged in the years to come. GERMAN

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