Bloomingdale’s Finds Way to Increase Sales

It’s Thursday afternoon and Miriam is struggling to put together a presentation about one of the new cosmetic brands sold throughout Bloomingdale’s stores. The brand is not doing well and she has asked to find out what is behind its underperformance. It’s end of day Friday, and a weeks worth of going through the company’s files and customer profile sheets reveals little of value. Thus far, her only response to her superiors is ‘people just don’t like the product.’

Miriam decides to go to Bloomingdale’s private online panel and dig into the minds of its 9,000 customers. She quickly puts together an intuitive survey to unearth some humanistic truths about the brands poor sales showing. She deploys it just before end of day Friday. In a few hours she’s able to see the results of her survey in real-time, even throughout the weekend.

By Monday morning, she pulls the data collected and is able to pin-point two or three factors that are causing customer aversion to the cosmetic brand. The survey data revealed that 62% of this brand’s make-up consumer were not familiar with their treatment products (such as the anti-aging products and skin moisturizers) and 53% of the brand’s treatment customers were not aware of their make-up products.
Upon reflection of the data, both Bloomingdale’s and the product brand were able to mobilize on their marketing efforts as well providing greater clarity regarding the products uses and benefits.

Underperformance was always a key indicator that something had gone awry with the way their products were positioned, but all efforts were based on intuition and foresight rather than pure customer data and specific feedback from buyers. Since Miriam’s presentation, the brand has made a strong resurgence within Bloomingdale’s eclectic collection of consumer cosmetics and with continual consumer feedback from their online panel, the brand expects to thrive.

Benefits of an Online Advisory Panel to Bloomingdale’s:

• Deep profiling and retention of customers
• Attitudinal and behavioral data across brands and departments
• Ad-hoc and quick turnaround research

Bloomingdale’s Uses Their Online Advisory Panel for:

• Brand relaunch and strategy
• Advertising testing and media placement
• Brand tracking and perception
• Website usability and messaging

Don’t Take Our Word For It…

“In a tough economic environment, we find [the panel] extremely valuable because it’s such a cost effective method of doing continuous research in-house.”
-Miriam Shigon, Manager of Market Research
Bloomingdale’s

back