SHOPPER MARKETING
SECTION ONE
SECTION TWO
 |
Who Are Xtreme Shoppers &
How Are They Changing Marketing and Retailing?
Most CPG marketers are testing shopper marketing programs of some kind.
Everyone agrees that shopper marketing will be a big part of their company’s
future. But how difficult will it be to get there?
Alison Chaltas, executive vice president of GfK Interscope, says,
“It’s important to get in the game and build a foundation. The really hard part is to master shopper marketing and build a business for the long term.”
She says the road to mastery in shopper marketing calls for navigating exploding digital/mobile possibilities.
Recent forces such as the economic crisis and emerging technologies have accelerated shopper empowerment and created the “Xtreme Shopper” who is determined to stay in control and “win” at the game of finding the best value. According to the 2010 GfK Future Buy study, one of three shoppers (31%) has Xtreme shopping behavior and another third (37%) has Xtreme shopping tendencies.
“This has given rise to shopping ‘bots’ which combine and integrate functionalities that formerly lived in separate web portals and spaces,” explains Joe Beier, executive vice president with GfK Interscope. “Basically what they do is compile reviews, evaluate them, and provide a downstream set of recommendations about making a purchase and where to go to make a purchase. It’s a very powerful front-end to back-end tool that folks can use to get the best intelligence out there in a very convenient way - again, using that Xtreme shopping mindset.”
These “bots” are part of the exploding digital/mobile capabilities that are shifting power to the shopper. Almost
half of respondents to 2010 Futurescope survey from Interscope say digital/mobile will empower shoppers to
the detriment of retailers/manufacturers (23% say that is already here and 25% say it will be here in less than
two years).
In many ways, the linchpin of this revolution is the smartphone, which will even change the way information is shared in an organization over the next five years. Beier says massive and disruptive change is coming due to:
- Hardware and software applications driving compelling user experience
- Faster and more accessible wireless networks
- Reduced system-wide costs
- Near-field communications and mobile wallets enabling m-commerce.
“As we talk with industry leaders, there’s clearly a recognition that a wave is coming,” he says. “But there is a difference is recognizing the wave is coming and being ready for it. Clearly we are not ready.”
According to 2010 Futurescope study:
- Three of four respondents (73%) agree or strongly agree that digital/mobile will transform shopping over the next four years
- Half of respondents (50%) disagree or strongly disagree with the notion that their organization is prepared to manage the impact of digital/mobile.
- Six of ten online retailers either don’t have (26%) or are in the early stages of developing (36%) a mobile strategy.
Mobile enables a new exchange between shopper marketing parties in two ways: Inbound Insights (from shoppers/consumers to manufacturers/retailers and Outbound Selling (from manufacturers and retailers to shoppers and prospects).
Chaltas advises both manufacturers and retailers to take a step back and think about how mobile changes the insights game. “Many companies have jumped into electronic marketing with exciting, but tactical, digital and mobile promotions. Those companies that only use mobile to get the word out are missing the big promise that technology brings in insight development.”
Beier adds: “Start thinking of mobile as a two-way portal or two-way street between manufacturers, retailers and shoppers. A lot of attention is paid to the outbound selling we can do. But we think it’s important also to remember that there is a great inbound capability here, too, in terms of being about to take insights from shoppers with mobile devices and push them back to retailer or manufacturer organizations to create insights. The hope is to make us smarter about the outbound. We think it can be a self-sustaining circle. But we want to think about it as a two-way street and how do we get the best in while pushing the most effective programs out.”
Beier calls outbound mobile shopper marketing a “fragmented and opportunistic space” today with a mix of
QR codes, location-based marketing, SMS, digital couponing, social marketing, loyalty card linkages, and mobile websites.
“The tool box is vast and sort of overwhelming and folks are trying to sort it out. The landscape is such in that there is not a lot being done across many of the tactics. There’s a lot of buzz and people are dabbling a little bit. But there’s really not a predominant tactic emerging once you get past digital coupons.”
Indeed, beyond digital coupons, the 2010 Futurescope survey found that the percentage of respondents actively executing digital/mobile tactics is small:
- Digital savings loaded to loyalty card (35%)
- Social media rewards opt-in programs (34%)
- Internet-based shopping lists (31%)
- Mobile websites (29%)
- Coupons sent to mobile phones (28%).
According to Beier, in addition to providing an amazing breadth of behavioral shopping data, smartphones can mimic many human sensory methods to collect information. For example:
- Sight (still and/or video camera, scanner, high-resolution display output)
- Sound (audio input with noise correction, speech recognition, hi-fidelity audio output)
- Touch (proximity sensors, accelerometers, location via GPS and LBS).
“This is very exciting in bringing in a lot of insights through a conduit that wasn’t available before,” he says.
He singled out a few popular emerging types of mobile studies: Shopping Ethnographies (real time, pre-, during and post-shop), Mobile Diaries (ongoing feedback in the moment via photos and video), and Location Tracking (GPS-enabled shopper pathway identification).
“Organizations need to commit the resources and stay on top of mobile,” Beier advises.
This article is based on a recent presentation by Alison Chaltas and Joe Beier of GfK Interscope at the Shopper Marketing Summit hosted by the In-Store Marketing Institute.
Click on the LinkedIn logo to join the new Shopper Technology Institute Discussion Group
SECTION THREE
