Punter’s Secret: Why Millennials Love That Local Shop?

Abstract

This research explored design opportunities and challenges with the emergence of ‘buy local’ trend led by millennials. Design can provide a needs-discovery tool for exploring millennials’ needs regarding local shop patronage and implement it in practice. We built the priori coding scheme, seven types of millennial customer’s desire for shopping experience through literature review. Further, we designed and developed a data collection template, ‘Punter’s Secret’ card, on which participants can define by themselves factors attracting them to their favourite shops and assess them. A workshop with 27 millennial customers was conducted in order to discover their needs on local shop patronage and improvements of ‘Punter’s Secret’ card. In a result, a code table and customer journey map for Millennial’s Patronised Local Shop were established. The code table shows experiential factors satisfying millennials’ desire in their favourite local shops, and the customer journey map provides insights for experiential design to retain millennial customers. Furthermore, we discussed implications of design strategies for customer retention and effects of bottom-up needs discovery. The significance of this research is in that it provides evidences suggesting that millennial customers’ local shop patronage comes from capturing local shops’ authentic identities and relationship building with proprietors.