Goldfarb Consultants has a comprehensive mix of marketing information in its subscriber product, ‘The Goldfarb Report.’

The Goldfarb Report was established in 1980 as a means of tracking the attitudes and behavior of Canadian consumers.

The report is based on an annual national sample of 1,600 adults.

For a Home Store type of retailer, The Goldfarb Report offers trend data on the proportion of Canadians who are do-it-yourselfers on a variety of tasks, including rewiring a room, fixing plumbing, building a deck, installing an extra bathroom, doing general repairs around the house and doing home decorating.

The report will help Home Store go beyond the basic demographic target of people aged 25-54 cited in the briefing document.

We can pull out the people most likely to be do-it-yourselfers, and develop a profile that includes not only demographic insights such as their age, income, education and family structure, but a complete psychographic description as well.

More likely

For example, a brief examination of the data suggests that ‘disinterested self-indulgents’ are more likely than the other five Goldfarb segments to be do-it-yourselfers around the house.

Part of the report package is an attitudinal description of the Goldfarb psychographic segments, complete with marketing implications.

This will help the retailer understand whether it is attitudes or demographics which drives do-it-yourself behavior. It will also help the retailer understand how to motivate and communicate with target consumers.

The Goldfarb Report offers a description of the media behavior of the people who prefer to do their own work around the house.

Media selection

It can assist in terms of media selection by giving insight into the types of magazines they read, the tv shows they watch, the radio programming they prefer, the parts of the newspaper they read, the types of unsolicited mail they read, and so on.

The report can offer this retailer insight on how these people like to shop, their attitudes to price, their ideas on what constitutes good service and which credit cards they own.

It can provide the client with a listing of some of the tools the do-it-yourselfer already has in his or her workshop.

Historical data

It can also examine the proportion of do-it-yourselfers in the population of b.c. and Ontario, for example, over the past 10 years to determine if there has been parallel growth, and if the demographic and psychographics of these do-it-yourselfers has changed.

All of this data would provide good background information without jumping into a more expensive custom piece of research.

We are not suggesting this data would replace the need for custom research, but it has the propensity to provide some data structure to early market investigation.

For more information, contact Allison Scolieri, vice-president, Goldfarb Consultants, 4950 Yonge St., Suite 1700, North York, Ont., M2N 6K1. Tel: (416) 221-9200, fax (416) 221-2214.