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C2DE Consumer Market Assessment 2010
Key Note Publications Ltd, Sep 2010, Pages: 120
The proportion of C2DEs in the population has been falling for a variety of reasons, including the decline of manufacturing industry, which has provided many of the skilled and unskilled manual jobs that are the basis of the C2 and D classifications. This has been accompanied by an increased emphasis on the service sector and the `knowledge economy'. At the same time, the growth of higher education has meant that more young people from C2DE backgrounds are obtaining degrees and finding employment in white-collar occupations.
C2DEs represented 50.3% of all adults in Great Britain in the year ending March 2000, but only 44.2% by the year to September 2009. Of these, the D and E groups (representing unskilled manual workers and those on state benefits) underwent the largest decrease.
Discount food retailers such as Aldi and Lidl saw a surge in popularity in the UK at the start of the recession, but mainstream retailers quickly responded by stepping up price promotions and introducing their own cut-price ranges.
Changes in clothes buying habits since the late 1990s have included the `democratisation' of fashion; for example, the appeal of high-street discount fashion outlets has widened to include middle-class shoppers in addition to their traditional C2DE customer base. Another important development has been the strong inroads made into the clothing market and many other non-food areas by major supermarket chains.
In the authors consumer research, a significantly higher proportion of C2DEs than ABC1s buy clothes from supermarkets. They are also more likely to use high-street discount shops such as Primark for their clothes shopping, but in this case the gap between the two groups is slightly smaller.
The research commissioned for this report suggests that there may be a growing sophistication among C2DE consumers in terms of their holiday habits, with the proportion saying that they try to avoid highly commercialised areas on holiday increasing since 2005. However, confidence in making independent travel arrangements seems to be declining, with the percentage saying that they prefer to do this rather than using a travel agent lower in 2010 than in 2008. It could be that C2DEs have less confidence about booking holidays in more sophisticated `off-the-beaten-track' locations themselves, indicating that there may be opportunities for travel companies specialising in budget holidays in interesting, less widely visited resorts.
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