Are southerners really softer?
Interestingly, the effect also differs across the country. People who live in more rural areas or areas of the country that are more used to extreme weather (for example, the southwest or Northern areas of the UK, where there are stronger costal winds, higher rates of rain, and on average lower temperatures) are less bothered by the weather when shopping. Bad weather is just a fact of everyday life, so they get used to it. Conversely people who live in London, an area that is on average 10'C warmer than neighbouring rural areas, and that has half the annual rainfall compared to the rest of the UK, are most effected by the weather when shopping. (Feel free to insert your own joke about people who live in London here….)
So far, we’ve been talking about generalisations and assuming that the weather effects all stores equally. However, that’s not the case. Typically, if it's heavy rain, sales of footwear, clothing, cosmetics, and even beverages are dramatically down (especially beer in the summer). On the positive side, rain tends to increase the sales of books and DIY equipment. It turns out if we can't go to the garden, people like to spend more time doing up their house and curling up with a good book². But even if it’s not a wet summer, and simply colder than normal, that’s enough to change sales as we’re more likely to shop online and spend more on household products.Whereas in autumn, sales of textile, clothing, footwear, and cosmetics all increase if its colder than normal.
So, fingers crossed for a nice summer – that is unless you sell books! And whilst we obviously can’t control the weather (nor retail calendars which are often planned well in advance), we CAN be aware of the impact weather will have on shopping behaviour and we can potentially use this to our advantage in planning our digital advertising spend and/or tactical real-time comms across channels such as social media.
