Building on a previous post on journeys, I wanted to discuss another trending topic: the shopper experience.
Digital is reshaping shopping. Search, planning, selection, payment, every step of the path to purchase can shrink – or expand – depending on the wants, the needs or the moods of the shoppers. Selecting and buying a product has never been so easy. Shifting to competition too. At any point in the journey, competitive brands and retailers are just a few clicks away.
Everyone agrees that traditional mass media and sales activation are too blunt and simplistic to effectively influence shoppers and encourage them to buy. Shoppers don’t automatically rush to stores to buy a product just because it’s on air. Shoppers don’t pick a product on a shelf just because they can win a trip to Disneyland. Basic digital techniques like personalization and retargeting are not necessarily effective either. Shoppers will not click to buy a product just because they see the same message on every single website they visit. All the more so if they have just bought the very same product, or its closest competitor, online or in a store. It’s not because you can advertise online that you should. Actually, in many cases, it’s pretty certain you should not. The digitally empowered shopper is not a moron, it’s you and your friends – sorry Mr. Ogilvy, I twisted your quote.
In the digital age, shopper marketing has to be more sophisticated. Welcome to the experience era. The concept of experience is starting to be widely adopted by the shopper marketing community. But as for ‘journey’, ‘experience’ is one of those words that deserve a proper definition. If you look at the dictionary, ‘experience’ is a noun coming from the Latin verb ‘experiri’ meaning ‘test’ or ‘try’. Oxford defines it as the “practical contact with and observation of facts or events”. Cambridge suggests “something that happens to you that affects how you feel”. And there are a few others along the same lines. If you compile all of them, an ‘experience’ is a concrete thing, you personally see or interact with, that touches you emotionally, in a good or bad way.
If we turn the general definition into a marketing concept, a shopper experience would result from an action or a series of actions, that shoppers take or that just happens to them, and that shift their mindset or their behavior. Managing the shopper experience would mean aggregating multiple actions, active or passive, at multiple times in multiple locations across multiple ecosystems to try to influence people at the precise moments when and where they are likely to make purchase decisions. You will notice that I use the verb ‘try’ to be faithful to the etymology of the word ‘experience’. But even trying would be a daunting task.
My view is that you cannot manage the shopper experience per se – shoppers are in control. What you can do is to try to guide and transform the experience through your actions. A bit like in Westworld. For those who do not have pay-TV or simply do not watch TV at all, Westworld is an HBO TV series taking place in a theme park re-creating the Wild Wild West. Visitors are guests and local inhabitants host them. But hosts are kind of special: they are humanoid robots programmed with certain skills and feelings. Guests are free to choose the places they go to, the activities they participate in and the interactions they have – or not – with hosts. Even if the locations and the actions are the same to start with, guests are in control and the experience is truly unique for each and every guest. Guests are in control. What happens with shoppers is very similar. Shopper marketers activate or create touchpoints, program interfaces, and train sales assistants and call center operators, but they don’t manage the experience; shoppers do.
If you think about it, you cannot even script the shopper experience – there are simply too many combinations. You have to focus on the moments that really matter, when and where mindsets and behaviors can change. That’s what’s happening in Westworld. The stories are written in advance, the mindsets and general behaviors of the hosts are programmed. But not everything is scripted – and the sequence of events in a scenario evolves depending on the interactions between the hosts and the guests. And – attention spoiler – there might be bugs. Going back to shopper marketing, all end-to-end experiences cannot be described. So shopper marketers need to make a choice. They need to focus on the most dominant journeys. But not only that: they need to choose the moments of those journeys when and where they under-deliver against shopper expectations, under-perform against their competitors or simply want to make a difference. Once done, they must redefine the actions that need to happen in those particular moments, whether they are happening online or offline, active or passive, human-to-machine or human-to-human. And they should have crisis scenarios ready in case something goes wrong. Easier said than done. All the more so that some of those moments may not be easy to access and transform – think about a retailer store or a community website for instance.
How do you do that in practice? Shopper experience is a new territory but there is a rule of thumb, inspired by digital UX: before thinking of transforming shopper experiences, you have to understand them. In concrete terms, shopper marketers have to collect, analyze and integrate data about consumers and shoppers, categories and products, channels and customers, occasions and missions, mindsets and behaviors. Then, they describe the experiences shoppers go through along their journey to fulfill a want or a need. Thanks to research or just anecdote, they identify the pain points or the gaps, wherever and whenever they occur. As soon as shopper experiences are documented, pain points or gaps identified, shopper marketers can determine the actions to fix them. They can choose to use more traditional shopper marketing tools like packaging, retail design, in-store communications and promotions; or digital marketing tools like social media, mobile apps, location-based marketing and augmented reality; or, in most cases, a combination of them, leveraging the ecosystems they operate in. Once the actions are defined, messages and touchpoints are optimized or created, before being put into the test. And if shoppers react positively and budgets allow, successful pilots can be deployed at scale.
To succeed in transforming experiences – and ultimately influencing purchase decisions – shopper marketers need to simultaneously master data and creativity, journey mapping and omnichannel communications, behavioral change and shopper-based innovation, cross-platform measurement and real-time decision making. More sophisticated than creating a display, a promotion or an online ad, isn’t it?
Think Shopper 