Study Into Australia’s Top 1000 Brands Proves Unparalleled Insight Into Customer Spending Patterns

Global data and insights company Pureprofile has announced the newest iteration of its SaaS solution.

Audience Intelligence: Top 1000 brands is a data platform that showcases the verified, transactional data of Australia’s top 1000 consumer brands. The platform is a powerful tool for businesses looking to gain insight into industry market share, understand how they stack up against their competition and track consumer spending trends – all from anonymised raw data.

Comprising transactional data that amounts to over $6 billion dollars in spend via more than 115 million transactions a year and sourced from financial institutions, businesses will be able to understand when, where and how often people are spending within a range of industries.

The unfiltered data accurately presents a business’s position in its sector and will enable them to leverage their strengths by building deep consumer profiles – helping them drive better research and marketing outcomes, as well as verify the effectiveness of advertising activities.

The platform consists of more than 30 categories, such as: accommodation, entertainment (including recreation, sport and streaming services), financial services, food and beverages (including alcohol, food delivery, meals and takeaways, and groceries), service stations and various retail sectors (books, apparel, gaming, sporting, furniture).

Businesses will have access to a plethora of insights via the platform, including:

• Performance – average transactions per customer, average revenue per transaction and the share of market customers,
• Trends – showcasing the fluctuation of performance over time
• Demographics – including customer location and market share breakdowns by state and suburb

These insights can be further filtered to analyse spending patterns over specific time periods, by generation, location and by online or in-store transactions.

Report: Cost of living impacts on retail spend from Boxing Day to Back to School (2021-22 versus 2022-23)

A report generated by the Top 1,000 brands platform, analysing the anonymised spending of Australians from Boxing Day (26 December) to the Back to School period (31 January) in both 2021-2022 and 2022-2023.

The report reveals that the rising cost of living has led to an overall decline in average retail spending. The books category was the most affected with an eight per cent decline year-on-year, followed by clothing, shoes & fashion with a 4% decline. Gaming and fitness, sporting & outdoor equipment both observed a three per cent decline, while furniture, household goods & appliances was the least affected retail category with only a two per cent decline.

By Generation 

Overall across categories, Boomer spend was found to have declined the most, followed by Gen X. Average spend for Gen Z also declined in 4 out 5 categories, but saw a sharp eight per cent rise in the fitness, sporting and outdoor equipment category. Average spend for Millennials saw the least decline overall, with a four per cent spend increase in the furniture, household goods & appliances category.

By Brand

While the books category saw the most decline, online ebook subscription service Scribd was able to achieve a 13 per cent growth year-on-year. Interestingly in the clothing, shoes and fashion category, despite spending declining as a whole,12 out of 14 luxury and up-market brands were found to have an increased year-on-year spend. Ralph Lauren saw an impressive 38 per cent increase with only one per cent market share. Pureprofile believes this spending anomaly is an example of the Veblen effect in action.

By State and Territory

 New South Wales had the greatest market share in all sub-categories but did not see the greatest spend decline. Instead, the greatest decline in spend was most commonly seen in regions that had the least market share (1-12 per cent), namely the Northern Territory, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia.

CEO of Pureprofile, Martin Filz, said, “It is evident that rising cost of living is affecting Australian consumers in a tangible way. The launch of Audience Intelligence: Top 1,000 brands comes at such an opportune moment . With this data, businesses better know how consumers are approaching recreational spending in 2023. Put simply, it’s challenging to rely on previous sales trends to map out an effective advertising and marketing strategy because this year is going to look very different.

“Our Top 1,000 brands offering is very unique and something that Australian businesses need right now. Unlike other solutions that look to measure brand value or trust by overlaying complicated formulas over annual report results or consumer perception, our platform gives you the facts. It is 100% raw spend data; there’s nowhere to hide with the results. This product is for companies who want an authentic picture of where they stand in the marketplace so they can build solid strategies to either increase or maintain their standing.”