Mid-market Buying Decisions

For most of the sports I partake in, I buy high-end gear. I'm a bit of a gear freak, what d'you expect?! But this winter I've had a little experience purchasing, or rather thinking, a little different.

I've needed to upgrade some of my snowboard clothing. In the past I've often bought expensive Goretex, Event, or soft-shell jackets and pants. However many of the pants have been trashed by violent falls, and the abrasion of repeatedly sitting on frozen or semi frozen surfaces – commonplace when snowboarding. It is usually the seat or knees that go first, but also around the ankle area too.

Wanting to keep my surviving technical pants in a good condition for those special occasions (ski-tours / climbing etc.) I decided to head to the shops to check out ski pants. Ones I'll comfortably wear (i.e. without embarrassment) but not feel too precious about destroying (or ones that won't get destroyed in the first place).

I went through some usual buying decisions, and retrospectively have written them down. Looking at these, I've come to realise that several factors have changed my decision process:

Different Consumer Need:
I'm not a high end user, so my needs aren't too technical. But my activity maybe niche thus requiring specific features. I don't expect fireworks and special performance at a price like this, so I expect the product to do reliably do what it claims to do. “Fireworks” without durability doesn't represent my need, and is more common with “exclusive” high-end brands who cater for posers!

Novel product concepts are a purchase risk for consumer (and brand), but a concept that appears to be good value maybe a risk worth taking. The product should leave a good impression, gimmicky brands aren't strong brands and a bad concept will stain a brand's reputation.

Different Consumer Expectation:
It isn't low-market – where I would accept a level of risk taking when purchasing. If in some way the product claims higher performance than high-end product, or some how looks flashier, then I may suspect that short cuts are being made elsewhere – less tangible properties, like manufacturing quality or durability of materials.

Some consumers will not be aware of the product or brand's status within the wider market. As an educated consumer (familiar with competition products and the claims made for them), my expectations of a mid-market product are lowered - if it is significantly cheaper than an equivalent product then there must be a catch.

Product Competition:
Premier brands target niche consumer categories more and tend to have much greater focus on a specific user-need. Lacking selling points to differentiate the product, decision factors may be purely on fit, or more superficial factors such as colour and styling.

Information Economics:
Without fabric brand labels like Goretex, Polartec etc, I have to take the performance of the garment more on trust than I would do with a higher end brand. In outdoor, mid-market brands feature less in gear tests, which exacerbates this situation. Good specialist retailers may endow the consumer with greater confidence in the product as will comparison next to .

Knowing products well, I can confidently buy reduced price high-end brands for the same price or less than mid-market products in specialist stores.

So in the end I went to TK Maxx and bought some snowboard pants by Holden, which I knew to be of high quality due to industry knowledge. They were very stylish, felt well made and had nice details.

Perhaps this begs the question... if I didn't have that product knowledge, might I still have risked making an uneducated choice at TK Maxx?

Yes, I think I would. Partly thanks to the power of branding (there is trust in large, so called “reputable” brands), but also because the virtuous feeling you get when you grab a bargain means you rarely feel buyers remorse afterwards. In my past experience I've made just as many bad purchasing decisions at specialist retailers as I have done at discount stores. It is up to specialist retailers to give consumers both great confidence in the products they sell, and a trustworthy and pleasant service and after-service.