After months of COVID-19 lockdown the high street fashion retailer will reopen all its stores on June 15th – and unlike many other retailers there will be no price reductions to lure shoppers in
Fashion giant Primark will reopen all 153 UK stores when non-essential retail is allowed to resume on June 15th - and has already told shoppers that it will not be offering any sales, despite sitting on mountains of unsold merchandise.
Many other retailers will be offering bargain prices to shift old stock, so will Primark’s gamble pay off?
YouGov’s BrandIndex show that former customers (those who have shopped with Primark before but not recently due to lockdown) are increasingly mulling a purchase at one of the stores. It seems that this group has a growing desire to get back to a Primark store.
But Brits who have never shopped with Primark before are becoming less and less likely to consider making a purchase from the chain following the high street shutdown. Desire among this group to shop at Primark is low and slipping lower.
If we look back to March 23rd when the UK lockdown first came into effect, we’ve seen a rise in consideration among former customers of 8.7 percentage points, from 34.9% to 43.6%.
Inversely, the number of Brits who have never shopped with the chain before, but were considering it, has fallen 17.2 percentage points, to a low of 15.5 on June 3rd.
This increasing division between former and non-customers is interesting, as before lockdown the two groups tended to display similar levels of consideration. This suggests that the memory of familiar brands is resilient to COVID-19 measures, but it’s far harder to stay on the mind of someone who you have failed to turn into a customer before these unusual times.
The same pattern can be seen in the brand’s Impression score (whether someone has a positive or negative impression of a brand) which shows that among customers, despite not offering online shopping, the brand has improved its score following the lockdown.
Click to enlargeAmong former customers Primark’s Impression score reached a high of 19.6 on June 3rd, up 10.7 points from the 23rd of March. In comparison non-customers are seeing the brand more negatively, with Impression score among this group down 18.8 points to -8.4 (a negative score indicates an overall negative impression).
There’s still a while to go before Primark is allowed to open its doors, but for now it seems that while former customers are keen to get back to the bargains, other shoppers aren’t being won over just yet.
Image: WikiMedia Commons
Learn more about YouGov BrandIndex here
