In our experience, one of the most effective ways of understanding a consumer’s buying behaviour is to accompany them on a shopping trip – something we call 'accompanied shopping trips'.

Accompanied shopping trips enable us to simulate a typical trip at your outlet with the added benefit of having more time with respondents to explore their expectations and experiences in greater depth.

By pre-recruiting respondents we can specify exact recruitment criteria and also spend up to an hour with each respondent, allowing us to fully explore their experience in specified areas or your premises.

During the accompanied shopping trip, which typically lasts around 45 minutes, we can probe the participants on certain aspects to get a detailed response, thus gaining rich, qualitative data. There is usually 15 minutes or so to spare at the end where the researcher and respondent can sit down and discuss other topics from the topic guide. Alternatively, this time can be used to visit a competitor store and make comparisons between the two. 

Accompanied shopping trips primarily focus on the pre-determined objectives which have been set-out, but they can also unveil additional pointers and thoughts along the way.

Wherever possible, we try to capture film footage of our accompanied shopping trip interviews using small hand-held Flipcam video cameras. This film footage is then edited in-house to provide our client with a brief film summary of the research. We have found this has proved very popular on previous projects where a summary is required for dissemination across senior buyers, as it allows them to see the customer experience first-hand.

As well as accompanied shops, we also carry out 'Intercepts'. These are similar to accompanied shops but respondents are recruited in situ during their shopping trip. We use recruiters to approach people in store and ask them to take part in an interview. The interview tends to be shorter (10-15 minutes) rather than the 45 minute pre-recruited accompanied shop.

Intercept interviews offer an excellent time efficient and cost effective means of capturing customer opinion while they are conducting a ‘real’ shopping mission. We speak to customers as they shop, ensuring their reactions, responses and attitudes are not only fresh but ‘real’ rather than purely reported or post-rationalised, as can be the case in focus groups, or other methodologies using pre-recruited respondents.