The year-end is fast approaching. I felt it was a good time to wrap-up the news and views from the last 12 months.
When you talk about ‘shopper marketing’, even today, at the end of 2018, people think about physical retail, point of purchase materials and sales promotions. That’s simply because the shopper marketing community has done very little to challenge and evolve the traditional definition of the discipline over the years.
Originally, there was retail marketing. And then, P&G and Walmart invented the concept of shopper marketing. Thirty years later, the term is still employed by the marketing industry at large to describe retail and trade marketing activities taking place inside the four walls of a store. For most marketers, shopper marketing is essentially about using the store as a medium to increase sales. Creating a campaign is like writing a Shakespearian drama: one place, one time, one action. As coined by P&G and Coca-Cola, success comes from stopping, holding and closing when shoppers are navigating the store down to the shelf. Thousands of successful shopper marketing campaigns have been developed according to those principles but the world is changing. The relentless march of digital and retail behemoths, such as Google, Facebook, Amazon or Alibaba, is reshaping shopping – and retailing – forever.
With the rapid adoption of digital technologies, shopping is becoming more fluid and ubiquitous, spreading across places, moments and ecosystems. Introducing today’s shoppers, call them the omnichannel shoppers – or in short, the omnishoppers. Omnishoppers research products, get usage ideas, seek out deals and review the opinions of peers and experts. Not only for big-ticket items but also for everyday products. Armed with digital devices, they access content and services to help them organize, simplify and speed up shopping. Not only at home or at work but also on the go or at retail. Most of the shopper habits and behaviors are being “reshaped and replaced at a frantic pace” according to PwC. They are right.
We are all familiar with the ROPO acronym – Research Online, Purchase Offline. People research information and compare prices for an item online before purchasing it at a brick-and-mortar retailer. Interestingly, ROPO can also be interpreted the other way around – Research Offline, Purchase Online. People see, touch, test (or taste) a product in a store but purchase it online later. Webrooming and showrooming are the terms used to describe these prevalent behaviors. But it goes way beyond ROPO. Omnishoppers are adopting e-commerce ‘en masse’. Shopping behaviors are becoming more sophisticated and new acronyms are flourishing: BIMBO, BOPUS, and BORIS to name a few. BIMBO, acronym of Browse In-store on Mobile, Buy Online, is a variation of showrooming using mobile; BOPUS, meaning Buy Online Pick Up in-Store, is the behavior also known as click-and-collect; and BORIS, short form of Buy Online Return In-Store, is an emerging behavior in online apparel and footwear retailing – actually quite costly for those retailers but that’s another story.
Omnishoppers put the classical shopper marketing pillars of place, time and action in question. What is the place of purchase if they hop from one channel to another to facilitate their purchases or get better deals? When is the time of purchase if they shift from reading or watching to buying on almost every communication channel, from the brand website to Facebook, Youtube, and Instagram, in just a couple of seconds? And how can you possibly Stop Hold Close in that context? Omnishoppers also challenge the prevalence of the concepts of the shopping trip, mission, and mindset: if you can buy anytime, anywhere, how can we characterize a shopping trip? How can we assess the level of planning of a purchase? What is the mindset we should take into consideration? And the fact is that we are not watching the final act of the play. Think about voice, another step towards commerce ubiquity.
Over summer, there was no shortage of articles about the unstoppable rise of conversational commerce, powered by voice assistants like Alexa or Google Home. In one of them, Scott Galloway, the famous marketing professor at NYU Stern, was arguing that ordering goods from Alexa was posing a threat to brands by eliminating ‘the need for packaging, design and end caps, all the things that brands have poured billions and decades into perfecting’. Traditional shopper marketing so to speak. A bit provocative as you would expect from Prof. Galloway but thought-provoking.
So, if omnishopping is becoming the norm, I believe shopper marketing must evolve into “omnishopper marketing”. In concrete terms, the discipline needs a new definition, a new scope, and a new framework.
A new definition for shopper marketing
Let’s start with the definition. Even if P&G and Walmart created the idea of shopper marketing in the late 90s, the first authoritative definition for shopper marketing only came from Deloitte and the US Grocery Manufacturers Association in 2007: “All marketing stimuli developed based on a deep understanding of shopper behavior, designed to build brand equity, engage the shopper, and lead him or her to make a purchase.”
In 2008 and 2009, almost all specialists of the discipline went into this definition exercise with varying degrees of success. In 2009, the In-store Marketing Institute and The Partnering Group, joined by specialized consultants, executives from the 10 largest American retailers, as well as representatives from manufacturers and agencies, formed the “Retail Commission on Shopper Marketing”. In April 2010, the Commission released a report proposing a new definition: “Shopper Marketing is the use of insights-driven marketing and merchandising initiatives to satisfy the needs of targeted shoppers, enhance the shopping experience, and improve business results and brand equity for retailers and manufacturers.”
The integration of the journey concept into shopper marketing led to an extension of its scope outside of the sole point of purchase. In 2011, a team of researchers including Venkatesh Shankar and Jeffrey Inman, proposed a more holistic definition: “Shopper marketing refers to the planning and execution of all marketing activities that influence a shopper along, and beyond, the entire path-to-purchase, from the point at which the motivation to shop first emerges through to purchase, consumption, repurchase, and recommendation.”
Today, in 2018, companies around the world tend to use similar sentences to describe shopper marketing. For example, something like “shopper marketing integrates consumer, shopper and retailer insights, to engage shoppers along the path to purchase and win at the key points of decision in order to drive category, manufacturer and retailer sales and build brand equity”.
A good comprehensive definition, with the proviso, of course, that marketers are still in control: they engage at key points of the path to purchase, and if done right, they win. Is this really how it works these days? The truth is that omnishoppers have the power – I know we have been saying that for quite some time, but it is now a reality. Omnishoppers can purchase anywhere, anytime on any device; in marketing terms, people can switch from living mode to shopping mode whenever and wherever they want. Planned or impulse purchases have never been so easy to make. Shifting to competition too. At any point in the journey, competitive brands and retailers are just a few clicks away.
In the omnichannel world we live in, the definition of shopper marketing, and even its name needs a refresh. Here is my view: shopper marketing needs to morph into omnishopper marketing, a modern contemporary discipline that “leverages insights to influence people’s purchase decisions whenever, wherever and however they are shopping to fulfill a want or a need”.
If we deconstruct this sentence,
- shopper marketing still starts with insights;
- it talks to people who are doing something to fulfill a want or a need;
- the goal is to influence decisions related to a purchase;
- it takes place across all moments and places – not just at retail.
If we take this to a higher, organizational level, it integrates marketing and commerce to drive engagement and conversion along the shopper journey.
A bigger scope: the omnichannel journey
In the early days, shopper marketing strategies and plans were focused on the point of sale, or as coined by A.G. Lafley from P&G in a letter to shareholders in 2002, on the first moment of truth (FMOT) – the very moment the shopper was exposed to a product for the first time on a shelf. A crucial moment only lasting a few seconds. Either the shopper was finding the product, taking it and putting it in the cart, or he or she was going away to buy a competing product or eventually leaving the store without buying anything.
Entering into the 2010s, the adoption of digital started to challenge the predominance of FMOT. More and more shoppers began to use the web to prepare their shopping trips. They started to search for information about a product, read customer reviews, evaluate different options, compare prices before visiting a store. What Google opportunistically called the “zero moment of truth” (ZMOT) became crucial in most categories.
In 2018, ZMOT and FMOT still exist but there are many more moments of truth across the end-to-end omnichannel journey. The goal of omnishopper marketing is to try to influence shopping and buying decisions when and where they are made. Using again the analogy with entertainment, modern shopper marketing has more to do with the creation of a TV series than a classical drama: multiple locations, multiple times, multiple actions. The desired output is not a campaign but a holistic program leveraging the entire marketing ecosystem across channels, moments and platforms.
Sounds great, but how do you do that? Well, before thinking of influencing behaviors and decisions, you have to understand them. Shopper journeys can be long or short, stakes can be high or low, but describing and quantifying them is paramount. Not just the part of the journey taking place at retail or on an e-commerce site, but the end-to-end journey, from the time people are about to shift to the shopping mode to the time their wants and needs are fulfilled.
Some marketers tend to focus on the buying phase of shopper journeys. Wrong idea. Ignoring the early stages of the journey, when the wants and needs emerge, is a deadly sin. As reported in a previous post, McKinsey states it is the precise moment when shoppers build their initial consideration set across many categories. Disregarding the consuming – or using – phase is a mistake too as it reduces the shoppers’ goal to the act of purchase: people don’t purchase without a reason. According to the ‘Job Theory’ initially established by Theodore Levitt, and evangelized more recently by Clayton Christensen and his colleagues, people hire a brand to do a job. Knowing how your brand does its job and taking on board comments and suggestions from clients and fans sounds like a smart idea. Together with past experiences, opinions from peers on social media are more than often the most influential source of information for shoppers.
In concrete terms, understanding shopper journeys requires the collection, integration, and analysis of large amounts of data across categories and products, channels and customers, occasions and missions, mindsets and behaviors. Traditional research methods – ‘shop-alongs’, in-store observations, exit interviews or shopper diaries – do not capture increasingly complex shopping behaviors in a holistic yet granular way. A new approach, pioneered by industry specialists like Geometry, has started to replace the old ones: ‘journey mapping’.
Unique in its methodology, journey mapping recognizes that each person is different. It also acknowledges that a person can behave differently depending on the category, the moment, the mission or the mindset. Journey mapping does not force fit behavior into a prescribed model like a traditional typology or segmentation would do. Journey mapping aggregates individual patterns of behavior to provide a robust understanding of the most common ways people make purchase decisions. What triggers the journey? What steps people are taking, before, during and after the purchase? If they are taking any. What are the moments of truth when and where decisions are made? What influences people – consciously or unconsciously? What are the media or the tools they use at different stages?
Once you understand the role and the importance of those moments of truth, you can start to describe the experience people go through during those moments. Using research or just anecdote, you can identify the pain points or the gaps vs expectations. As soon as experiences are described, pain points or gaps identified, omnishopper marketers can define the actions they need to put in place to shape and transform experiences across journey maps.
But, as already written in a previous post, let’s not fool ourselves: in an omnichannel environment, you cannot manage, or even script the entire experience – there are simply too many combinations and without a doubt, not enough budget in most marketing organizations. What you can to do is to focus on the most dominant journeys. But not only that, concentrate on the precise moments of truths when and where you under-deliver against shopper expectations, under-perform against your competitors or simply want to make a difference – eg do the job better like a start-up would do. Once priorities are established, you must redefine the actions and interactions that need to happen in those particular moments, for those particular journeys. Online or offline, active or passive, machine-to-human or human-to-human. Easier said than done. All the more so that some actions might not be easy to put in place – think about the recommendation of a retail store clerk or the word of mouth on a community website for example.
To influence behaviors and decisions, omnishopper marketers have a toolbox. Initially composed of point of sale materials (POSM), the toolbox now incorporates all the communication vehicles, offline and online, that can be activated across the entire journey. Thus, they can choose to use more traditional shopper marketing tactics like packaging, retail design, in-store communications, and promotions as well as telesales operators and store associates; or digital marketing tools like brand websites, social media, retailer websites, e-commerce marketplaces, mobile apps, location-based marketing, digital POS; and, sooner than later, chatbots, augmented reality and voice search. In most cases, programs associate a combination of traditional and new marketing and commerce tools, leveraging brand, retailer and digital ecosystems, with a dose of test and learn. Considering the complexity and the cost of managing an omnichannel program, it is actually wise to test new scenarios before rolling out at full scale.
The 3W2H framework
Changing the definition and the scope is meaningless if you don’t define how to put the theory into practice. For that, you need a framework. The truth is that the framework for omnishopper marketing is not radically different from the one that shopper marketers have been using so far: you define your objectives, understand your audience, define your strategy, deploy your program and measure the results. In other words, answer 5 simple questions: why, who, what, how and how much (3W2H if you like acronyms). But if the questions remain the same, the answers vary dramatically.
- Why – Every marketer on the planet wants to grow. It’s quite logical to have a growth opportunity – and a growth objective – at the inception of every omnishopper marketing program;
- Who – Since people can purchase anywhere, anytime, any device, we must define our target audience holistically eg as people and analyze how, when and why they think, feel and behave the way they do;
- What – This is when we have to strategize and define all the actions that can influence people’s mindsets and behaviors in favor of our brands along the omnichannel journey;
- How – The only strategy omnishoppers see is the execution; in an omnichannel world, it means implementing the program across retail channels, journey steps, and digital ecosystems;
- How much – Finally, we need to assess the performance of our program across multiple dimensions: transactions, behaviors, equity, etc. Loop closed.
An entire playbook could be written around those five questions but that’s not the purpose of that article. One point transcending all five questions deserves elaboration though: collaboration. In the omnichannel world, not a single player has all the answers – even the almighty Amazon. Brand owners know a lot about consumers, their wants and their needs, but much less about shoppers; conversely retailers know a lot about shoppers, their behaviors and expectations, but not so much about consumers. Associating the two perspectives is the only way to get a comprehensive and accurate picture of a marketplace, a category or a journey.
Collaboration has been a critical pillar of shopper marketing since the origin. It’s because trade relationships were deteriorating year after year, and trust going down the drain, that Walmart and Procter and Gamble created shopper marketing in the late eighties. Fatigued by the frequency of disputes, the CEOs of both companies met to stop the fight and agree on a better way of working. P&G put a dedicated team in Walmart head office in Bentonville, Arkansas. Walmart and P&G teams started to share data they were previously keeping to themselves. They began to partner on projects benefiting both companies. And it worked. Sales and profits went up. The collaboration was so successful that Walmart asked other manufacturers to adopt a similar way of working. Manufacturers collaborating with Walmart shared the concept with other retailers. Win-win collaboration became the standard practice in North America. Shopper marketing was born.
Over the years, collaboration has experienced ups and downs – and to be fair quite a lot of downs lately. Shifts in people’s behaviors, dramatic changes in the retail landscape and disruption from new digital players have put brand owners and retailers under extreme pressure, challenging the very same idea of win-win collaboration. When times are tough, it’s tempting to squeeze the other party at the negotiation table. But the truth is that this strategy is not going to work with the new elephant in the room: Amazon. To face the challenges they are confronted with, brand owners and retailers need to partner again. They need to “turn the war room into a win room” to paraphrase the seven-point manifesto published by the American Promotion Marketing Association nearly ten years ago.
Like the shopper marketing of the origin, omnishopper marketing requires collaboration. Not only the traditional brand owner-retailer partnership but multifaceted partnerships with digital platforms, data providers and start-ups operating in the same environment. Quite naturally, collaboration must start with a growth strategy, articulated around a clear and strong proposition for shoppers, written down in a joint-business plan – a JBP in short form. A growth strategy aiming to put to market products and services that really matter and bring value to shoppers, not just buzzwords or shiny objects. Secondly, omnishoppers expect a channel-agnostic experience. Therefore, brand owners and retailers need to break down silos to develop targeted, relevant actions across omnichannel journeys. And thirdly, they have to relentlessly innovate for their customers with the obsession of putting to market products and services that people not only love but also want to purchase and recommend to others. Innovation is not an option, it’s an imperative: there are start-ups willing to disrupt your category and become the next Netflix, Chobani or Dollar Shave Club. So, new products, new services, new business models, be productively paranoid and truly innovative or you will join Kodak, Nokia or Toys’R’Us in the pantheon of iconic brands of the past.
Shopper marketing is not dead – but it needs to evolve. To influence omnishoppers, the discipline needs to expand into omnishopper marketing. A new generation of shopper marketing that blends marketing and commerce, physical and digital, human and machine, to form a holistic and data-driven practice covering the end-to-end omnichannel journey. Trailblazers in omnishopper marketing associate existing shopper understanding, retail communications and event management capabilities with new cutting-edge analytics, experience design and digital communication skills to map and transform journeys.
The ultimate measure of success? The experience. The experience resulting from what brands and retailers actually do and how omnishoppers interact with them offline and online. The experience that affects what omnishoppers think about brands and retailers and how they behave. The experience that ultimately provides a competitive edge across all channels and industries. Because in the omnichannel world we live in, people have no boundaries: they evaluate brands and retailers in a truly 360° way. Today’s great experience in a category becomes tomorrow’s expectation across all of them.
One last word: omnishopper marketing is likely to be one of those fields where there will be a steep learning curve. The sooner you start, the more chances you will succeed.
[Geometry is my employer at the time I’m writing this article but the views I’m sharing are my own and do not represent those of my company.]
Think Shopper 