Summer Segmentation: Employee Orders

If your database allows you to do this, I'm begging you to do this ... create a segmentation variable for employee orders.

Then, sum employee demand for the past twelve months. Compare that sum to the sum of employee demand from 13-24 months ago, 25-36 months ago, 37-48 months ago, etc.

Go to your human resources department, and ask how many employees you had during each time period. Then calculate demand per employee.

Trend demand per employee by year. What does the productivity of your employee base look like? Is it correlated with the number of twelve month buyers you have? If sales are in decline among your employee base and among your customer base, then ask your employees why they won't buy the merchandise??!!

I did this experiment once ... my marketing department was being pummeled by management for not "promoting the brand". So I summed employee demand among all employees Director and above, showed that demand was in decline, then asked this employee set in a meeting why they were choosing to not spend as much with our brand, after all, marketing should be irrelevant to them, they live and create the brand.

Yes, the room got really, really quiet.

Employee orders are the analyst/marketer's best friend. You can cut through a lot of garbage and get down to the core issues associated with merchandise productivity by demonstrating that the Leadership team is / is not buying the merchandise.