Understanding Your Customer's Behavior Can Be Worth Thousands of Dollars

Knowing a store’s customer behavior in depth can put a few extra thousand dollars in revenue on the table during a single seasonal window. An example makes this concrete faster than the general principle does.

The setup

Picture an apparel or footwear store selling almost entirely to an executive audience. For that kind of buyer, a percentage discount (10% off, for instance) at Christmas doesn’t move much. This isn’t the type of customer who spends a meaningful chunk of a year-end bonus at a store over a discount smaller than 15%. A department store audience, targeted with the same 10% off, might behave in a completely different way.

So what actually works for this audience?

Back to the executive case specifically: what’s a marketing move that could genuinely lift Christmas sales for this customer profile?

A brand collaboration might help, depending on existing brand equity. A subscription club depends heavily on how the current branding is positioned. A discount deep enough to matter without cutting into margin too far is genuinely hard to calibrate. None of the obvious plays land cleanly, which is exactly why this case is worth walking through.

What the executive audience actually needs at Christmas

At Christmas, an executive is typically giving gifts to a fairly specific list of people: the assistant who helps them all year, the doorman who receives their packages, the person who serves their coffee, the cleaner, maybe a distant relative. That adds up to a fair number of people.

They’re unlikely to buy an expensive individual gift for each one, given the sheer count. But they’ll also resist handing out a single box of chocolates to someone who helped them consistently for twelve months. That tension between “too many people” and “each one deserves something real” is the actual problem to solve, not the discount percentage.

The offer that solves both problems at once

One answer: reduce the number of decisions they have to make. Bundling something like five pairs of slippers, or another universally appealing gift, elegant and aligned with the store’s typical customer profile, lets them:

• Customize the size per unit inside the bundle.
• Access a volume discount built into the bundle itself, which lets the store work with a bigger discount overall without eroding per-unit margin the way a storewide discount would.

Executive needs to gift many people
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Bundle of universal, elegant items, sized individually, discounted per volume
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One purchase decision instead of many, and everyone receives something they'll actually like

Why this works

The customer no longer has to think through several different gifts individually, and can trust that it’s something everyone on the list will appreciate. The store has effectively solved two of the customer’s problems (decision fatigue and gift quality) with a single purchase, at a margin structure that a blanket discount wouldn’t have allowed.

Offers like this only work if the bundle actually ships as one clean order. Flow Border handles that fulfillment side for stores running this kind of strategy.