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The Consumer Story
Segments and Behaviour

There are many green/ethical segmentations, but they don't really tell you what consumers are actually DOING and they don't look at holistic attitudes and behaviours. From our quantitative work we found a total of 16 segments, which condensed into eight key segments based on their attitude AND behaviour.


Attitude Segmentation

There are four key attitudinal segments centred on attitudes to buying food.

Evaluators (24%)

Typically younger - under 35's but from all social grades and shopping concentrates on the Big Four grocers.

Enjoy food and happy to cook from scratch.

Value for Money is key and may lead to promotion addiction and food waste. Little time for responsible issues or recycling and see this as someone else's issue - unless it will save them money!

Providers (25%)

Lower income families with kids living at home and mum is the main shopper and food provider.

She has to deliver what her family like and this leads to shopping dominated by habit. Methodical and organised - they stick to their budget and known brands.

They will shop around to get the right food at the right price.

When it comes to responsibility they will get involved if it is simple and easy to do so... and they have time.

Achievers (23%)

A diverse group but characterised by middle class Empty Nesters or older families.

Motivated by health cues as they re-define their diet. They are resourceful and more knowledgeable in food prep and they make this work to their advantage.

They waste little and often cook in batches.

Achievers are our most active group when it comes to responsible themes and are the most committed recyclers.

Believers (28%)

Typically more affluent, well educated and professional.

Two groups exist - Believers who have a set of deep rooted values and have always behaved responsibly and those who see it as ‘on trend’ to behave this way and do so for more overt reasons.

They wear the green badge but can show conflicting behaviour.

Believers shop in different places to other groups with more emphasis on Marks & Spencer, Waitrose and Co-op. However... they show the biggest gaps between responsible attitude and behaviour.



Overlaying Behaviour

To measure our respondent's responsible behaviour we looked at all of their purchases and the open ended reasons they had given for selecting them.

This gave us a percentage of purchases that were able to be coded as ‘responsibly motivated’ from all of their purchases across the four categories. This gave us 16 segments in total clustering into eight key segments.

Our data allows you to drill into the differences between the eight segments, their triggers and barriers and we have also developed a profiling tool lets you profile your customer base by asking some simple questions.

Almost 60% of those claiming to be the most responsibly motivated (believers) actually made fewer than 1 in 4 responsibly motivated purchases.

Overlaying Behaviour

Click here to find out more about the gaps between what consumers say and what they do in the next section

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Do you have a specific question on the survey data you would like to ask?
Email us and we'll let you know if our Reality Bites study has the answer

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