Category — Shopper Marketing

Stephanie Cota: One of the hardest things to get right with consumers today is message authenticity. Consumers are very smart, and they are very pressed for time. They are increasingly intolerant of messages that are over-complicated or over-clever.

As a consumer, I also become challenged when watching a clever commercial but can’t necessarily tell you what the brand or product was. That said, some brands have done a great job of staying true to their message, both at a mass and a class level.

From a mass perspective, Campbell Soup and Kraft Macaroni and Cheese do a really great job of staying true to who they are. In the class space, Louis Vuitton and Manolo Blahnik are authentic with their messages. Staying true to your message, but delivering it in fresh, compelling ways, is one of the more challenging things that we do as marketers … read >>

The University of Tennessee is pleased to continue the tradition of tracking shopper-marketing excellence, initiated and created by Hoyt & Company and The Hub Magazine in 2008. The intent of this study is to allow brand marketers and retailers to evaluate working relationships with agencies on 13 criteria and to let agencies evaluate working relationships with brand marketers on 13 criteria, as well.

This year we had 990 usable surveys — up 224 from 766 in 2011, or up 29 percent! That’s great! This speaks to the attention being given to shopper marketing in the industry. Brand marketers and retailers named 153 agencies while agencies named 144 different brand marketers … read >>

If that’s the case, why invest in them without understanding if and how they will enhance purchase behavior? Culturally, packaged-goods brands need to change how they approach digital marketing. Facebook is not a magic bullet for all of your marketing experiences; it’s tougher than that. Chasing a new digital tool just because a competitor is using it doesn’t work either — not without insights, analysis and an understanding of how that tool is used by shoppers.

To fully embrace digital marketing, packaged-goods marketers need to change their organization’s culture to one of test and learn. Secondly, they must position digital tools to be a solution to a program and let the metrics guide them to those marketing approaches that have earned the right to scale up for success … read >>

While the various groups were organized by demographics, I noticed a startling theme that wended its way through all groups. This theme manifested itself in varying ways — depending on who was sharing — but the message was quite clear: we have an uneasy relationship with the new marvels of technology that more and more have come to dominate our time and attention.

One woman in particular said something that struck me. We were talking about mobile devices and she said, “I had a touchscreen phone for two days. I loved it but I saw myself going down a dark path, so I returned it and went back to BlackBerry” … read >>

In today’s technologically-advanced environment, the ability to capture and report data is much more accessible. With increased data-processing capabilities, we can build more complex models that can churn out more complex data. Both descriptive and predictive analytics can now do an exceptional job of uncovering the answers to “who, what, where, when, how and why.”

So, with all of this data at our fingertips, you would also expect that we are becoming smarter, more efficient, and productive marketers. Perhaps in some instances this is true, but in many cases we have yet to optimize a data-driven creative process. We are overflowing with data, but there is a critical missing link … read >>

Is P&G simply responding to the digital hype and the pressure from the finance department to move more marketing into digital? Or, has P&G decided that even if it doesn’t have a good digital plan, the $1 billion was not generating a good return using traditional media anyway? Obviously, traditional broadcast and print media are reaching fewer people and doing so with less frequency … read >>

Sam Walton took a related view with his 10th Rule: “Swim upstream. Ignore the conventional. Think differently. If everybody’s doing it one way, there is a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.”

Others, meanwhile, offer a more “quantitative” perspective. Dr. Oz says, “The major part of good heart health is in the metrics,” and W. Edwards Deming advised: “In God We Trust; all others must bring data.” Peter Brand, of Moneyball fame, said: “It’s about getting things down to one number. Using the stats the way we read them, we’ll find value in players that no one else can see” … read >>

An insight is like a jigsaw puzzle, in that the picture only becomes clearer as more pieces are put together. Brands often have limited time and money to conduct specific research on their shoppers, but have great research that provides insights into consumer motivations and purchase barriers. However, to create programs and communications that drive demand, we must first understand the fundamentals of how our target consumer shops and where in the process we need to focus our efforts.

To help close this gap, we developed a quantitative research tool that helps us better understand the foundations of the shopper’s behavior, identify outages and translate that knowledge into informed activation that creates brand demand. This tool helps us understand the demand cycle, rather than simply tracking and recording the shopper’s interactions with a brand along the path-to-purchase … read >>

According to the Wall Street Journal, more than one-fifth of shoppers research food and beverages online, nearly one-third research pet products and 39 percent research baby products. Almost two-thirds (62%) say they search for deals online before at least half of their shopping trips.

Ryan Partnership’s multi-year study of digital shopping confirms the widespread — and still growing — use of digital tools to gather information, select retailers and make brand decisions well before the shopper ever sees a product on the shelf. In fact, this past month, 58 percent of the 5,000 shoppers in our survey told us they are more likely than a year ago to “typically” decide what they want before visiting a store. To do this, their usage of all kinds of digital shopping tools is growing. read >>

As we envision how this year’s slate will be written for the consumer packaged-goods industry, and particularly supermarkets, another baseball memory comes to mind: Yogi Berra. Who better to call on than the master of absurdity to help us fix a system that is, quite simply, broken?

“You can observe a lot by watching.” — Yogi Berra

Around 20 years ago, supermarkets were at the top of their game. They were the dominant outlet for food with 100 percent penetration and 83 percent share. Households were averaging close to 110 trips to supermarkets per year. Retailers had recently wrested information control from suppliers when scanners achieved 70 percent of ACV in 1988 … read >>

Human resources wants to retrain public-facing employees to better communicate your brand’s image. Advertising wants to launch a new broadcast campaign supported by print. Merchandising presents a proposal for new display cases and better in-store lighting. Digital insists on a redesign of the website to better accommodate social brand initiatives, and marketing wants to mirror what your main competitor, the category leader, has done. How do you decide which of these many customer-facing, brand-building initiatives to fund?

Thanks to the internet and social media, building a brand is now so much more than creating award-winning advertising and designing packages, logos, and environments. Now it’s about experiences, and experiences are the sum of thousands of touchpoints … read >>

Most notably, this is the first year we’ve published a Top 20 of brands and agencies — not just a Top 12. We did so because, quite simply, shopper marketing is growing. Heck, if Fortune can recognize 500 excellent companies, then the Hub should honor at least 40!

This is also the first year that our rankings have included a brand from outside the packaged-goods realm — LG Electronics (#11). It’s the first time a niche player — Mike’s Hard Lemonade — made the list (#8). On the agency side, it’s the first time a multicultural agency — Mass Hispanic — is represented (#12). We also have a new, number-one on the brand marketer side: Nestlé, up from number-five last year … read >>