An advert can start a conversation, but a significant purchase often takes more reassurance. In the latest part of Prolific North’s Age of Opportunity series with HUB, Yorkshire Building Society and Tiger explore how customers check a brand’s promises and what businesses must do to earn their confidence.
A visit to a Tiger show site does not always end with an order. Someone may inspect a garden building, take a brochure home and return to the website when they are ready to buy.
Sam Jenkinson, pictured above, head of marketing at Woodlands Home & Garden Group, which makes Tiger garden buildings, says that sequence helps explain why the business has expanded beyond its origins as an online retailer.
Customers considering a purchase costing more than £2,000 often want to see the building before committing, he told the roundtable hosted by HUB and Prolific North in Leeds. A show site, he explained, gives them an opportunity to judge the product for themselves.
The brochure has a role too. Sam said it was involved in a significant number of the company’s orders, including purchases completed after customers had left a show site.
That figure describes its involvement in the buying process. A final online transaction may follow considerable research and contact with the business elsewhere.
Earlier in Age of Opportunity, we explored how much the over-55 label conceals and what makes customers recognise themselves in advertising. Today we look at what happens after a campaign has attracted their attention.
Checking the promise
Lauren Pyrah, brand strategy manager at Yorkshire Building Society, described the over 55s audience as one much more likely to investigate a proposition before making a decision.
“They do their own research,” she said.
These customers more often look for reviews and assess what other people say about their experiences. Lauren pointed to Trustpilot and Which? as sources that can provide reassurance beyond the brand’s own claims.
She also challenged assumptions about older customers’ digital engagement. Many are comfortable using online information to assess whether a business deserves their trust, she said.
Ofcom’s Online Nation 2025 report found that UK internet users aged 65 and over spent an average of three hours and 20 minutes online each day in May 2025. The measure covers people who use the internet, rather than everyone in that age group, but illustrates the importance of digital encounters with a brand.
With that in mind Lauren explained how businesses then have to deliver an experience consistent with what customers have been led to expect.
“Are you giving every customer the experience that they deserve?” she asked.
A positive review can encourage someone to enquire. Their own experience of the organisation will determine whether that confidence survives.
Making quality tangible
Tiger’s brochure initially helped address a particular challenge for an online business. Before customers could visit show sites, the printed material gave them something tangible through which to assess the brand.
Sam described the care invested in its production. The quality of the brochure represented the quality the company wanted customers to expect from its buildings.
Show sites subsequently gave customers a more direct way to inspect that promise. But the brochures remained crucial because visitors could take them away and consider buildings beyond those on display.
Phone conversations serve another purpose for the business. Tiger handles bespoke orders, and customers may want to discuss what is possible before deciding what to buy.
“Ultimately people buy from people,” Sam said.
Those conversations can help the business understand the customer’s plans while giving the buyer an opportunity to ask questions. Someone who has researched a product online may still want that exchange before committing.
Sam also described the importance of maintaining a consistent message across Tiger’s advertising and review sites. Each encounter gives customers another opportunity to assess whether the business appears dependable.
How the campaign connects
HUB CEO Rob Shaw describes that process in The Silver Times, the agency’s publication exploring marketing to older audiences.
“The mistake many brands make is expecting one channel to do the heavy lifting,” he said. “Someone might see your TV ad, Google you later, read some reviews, maybe order a catalogue, and only then decide to buy.”
Tiger’s experience resonates with that assessment. The brochure can remain part of the decision even when the order is made online, while a show-site visit can provide reassurance that a photograph cannot and a phone conversation resolves any questions specific to the customer’s plans. They’re all important.
For a marketing team, understanding those relationships matters when judging what a campaign has achieved. The place where an order is completed only provides part of the account of how the customer reached it.
At the roundtable, Rob highlighted a series of customer-story videos HUB produces for mobility specialists CareCo. The agency visits customers at home, interviews them about why they need a mobility product and shows the difference it has made to their lives.
“These are genuine customer stories,” he said. And the genuine testimonials give prospective buyers more to judge than a written review or a model delivering someone else’s words. They can see the customer using the product in their own home and hear them explain its impact. For someone considering a similar purchase, Rob says those experiences can make the benefits easier to understand and the brand’s claims more credible.
Sam said Tiger plans to use more customer testimonials, alongside photography and video showing the people who make its buildings. Both give customers a closer view of the business and the people behind its claims.
Proof that holds up
Research commissioned by the Department for Business and Trade and published in 2023 estimated that 11–15% of reviews across three product categories on widely used e-commerce platforms were fake.
The research covered consumer electronics, home and kitchen products, and sports and outdoor products. Its experiment found no evidence that the effect of fake reviews differed by age, reinforcing that experience alone does not make someone immune to misleading information.
For brands using reviews and testimonials, genuine customer experience is therefore essential to the case they present.
HUB’s The Silver Times highlights a business whose absence from social media left dissatisfied customers to establish their own Facebook community. People searching for the business encountered a conversation shaped by negative experiences, without an active brand presence responding to them.
It illustrates why customer service belongs within a discussion about marketing. Customers can publish their verdict wherever they choose.
Sam made the responsibility even more explicit. “Marketing doesn’t stop with them coming to the website,” he said. “Marketing continues with making sure operations and customer services do their bit.”
For a customer who has taken time to research a purchase, the delivery of the promise is the decisive test. A carefully produced brochure or reassuring conversation creates an expectation that the rest of the business must meet and those experiences can then become the reviews the next prospective customer reads.
Tomorrow, Age of Opportunity goes inside HUB’s campaign for Assistive Bathing, exploring how stylish bathroom settings and expanded TV sponsorship helped present mobility support as a positive choice that preserves independence, identity and personal taste.
