Demographics and Product Selection/Marketing

[Mike32110]

Well this is a pretty broad topic, and I couldn't find any information while searching. I was looking to get some thoughts from the experts in this industry regarding how you notice demographics affect the product selection, and marketing of the machine.

For example, I am noticing that many of my accounts have extreme gendered demographics (e.g a metalshop is almost all male, a female clothing store almost all younger females, an office is 70-80% male, late 20's to middle age, etc).

I was wondering if you guys had any general rules as to how this would impact your product selection or choice of machines or prices?

Here are a few that I have thought of my self (I have a backgroud in psychology )

women, especially younger/concerned with appearance -Healthier products, less chocolate bars, more baked chips, less beef jerky, trail mix, nuts, etc. Diet products and juices for drinks. Reasonable prices.

women, older - I've noticed that my department store location is 80% women over 35, and it's ALL about the potatoe chips, especially plain.

Men, blue collar - Tons of chocolate bars, and generally charge higher prices since they don't seem to care . Emphasis on pop, and if diet use the "masculine diet brands" e.g pepsi max, coke zero.

Men, white collar - Even mix of everything, reasonable prices

Other general rules:

Older people- plain flaver, young people- variety of flavor

Older people- "traditional" chocolate bars/snacks, younger- newer choices

Younger people and blue collar workers - Tend to like pepsi, esp. blue collar. - white collar seems to prefer coke.

I also figured that women would be much more influenced by the style of the machine. E.g if you have two locations everything being equal except for one all male and one all female, if you replaced all their old machiens with brand new ones, I would assume male sales would increase like 10%, while female sales would increase like 30-40%, what do you guys think?

Any other input on this?

I am so sorry if this topic has been covered!

[moondog]

Well Mike,

There are a lot of demographics related to the vending industry, many of which would seem to be common sense. Demographics is a marketing tool to predict sales given various population scenarios.

When Coke or Pepsi run a TV ad, their marketing departments can figure, almost to the can, what the increased sales will be relative to that ad. The formula is called the Mass Cumulative Density Function and unless you've taken advanced trigonometry in school, don't worry about using it.

In a nut shell, the bigger the population base - the more accurate the demographic studies will be. If you've got 10 accounts these averages are not going to mean much to you. If you have 100 accounts the demographics will start to more closely match your situation and the mega vendors with thousands of accounts can really see great value in the demographic studies - at that size the averages kick in and are pretty predictable.

Most of the full line members of this forum will tell you that each account is different because we don't have enough accounts to get any accurate averages that apply to our accounts collectively.

[Mike32110]

Well what I was trying to ask more specifically, was if anyone had some good rules of thumb, maybe from reading something or just personal experience. I ask this because some of my machines are in almost entirely female break rooms, while others are almost all male. I would want to bring in the best products to maximize sales.