Category — Shopper Insights
Walmart Life
Marketing chief Stephen Quinn taps into Walmart’s past to shape its future. When you get right down to it, everything — and nothing — has changed about Walmart in the 50 years since Sam Walton built his first store. Stephen Quinn, Walmart’s marketing chief, appears determined to keep it that way.
“What we’re really selling to people,” says Stephen, “is that they can count on us for their everyday needs at the lowest price. Keeping that interesting is tricky because it will be the same promise three years from now.”
It was also the same promise 50 years ago, which is why Stephen drew on something Sam Walton said a long time ago to arrive at Walmart’s modern-day tagline: “Save Money. Live Better.”
“Sam Walton talked about how Walmart would help the world save money and have a better life,” says Stephen. “We had reams of research and tested all these different taglines and then we just looked at what he had said and thought, hey, that’s pretty good.”
Living up to that deeply rooted principle is very much at the heart of Walmart’s past, present and future. Stephen is convinced that Walmart’s growth depends on “keeping that promise to more people.”
Such fidelity to the past requires changing with the times, too. It means navigating the vagaries of today’s fragile economy while pioneering the frontiers of social media and the newly empowered shopper.
These and other realities has Walmart launching a Facebook page for each of its more than 3,500 US stores, as well as tweaking the role of its famous greeters and communicating “low prices” in new ways.
It also has Walmart realigning its merchandising and marketing operations, so it can better integrate the two and keep the focus where Sam Walton always said it must be — on the shopper … read >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Got Smarts?
A roundtable discussion on consumer and shopper insights, with Stephanie Cota of Mattel Brands, Hermann Deininger of Adidas, Sally Grimes of Newell Rubbermaid, Alfredo Martel of Caribou Coffee and Kevin Lane Keller of Dartmouth College.
What is the hardest thing to get right with consumers today?
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 >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Test & Learn
Packaged-goods brands must change their culture to capitalize on digital. By Seth Diamond. Much to the contrary of current belief, there is little connection between shopper influence and “liking” a brand on Facebook. Even when you entice with a coupon, or throw in a branded, exclusive piece of swag to “buy” a like, the consumer experience pretty much stops there. Frankly, it’s unknown whether any of the tactics like Foursquare, Pinterest or QR codes are really moving your business.
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 >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Digital Empathy
Listen closely to real people to develop emotional insights. By Whitney Browne. I recently sat through a series of focus groups in which a broad cross-section of consumers in Atlanta and Los Angeles spoke about their relationships with technology, particularly their mobile devices. The participants ranged in age from early twenties to late sixties, and they came from a wide array of socio-economic backgrounds.
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 >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Divining Insights
Let your creative people take a bath in data. By Beth Ann Kaminknow. Data, and its sister, analytics, are the new sexy in advertising and marketing. Every agency and company now has an in-house data and analytics practice. It is blasphemy even to think of making any business move without the aid of sifting through mounds of data, given its ability to lead to better (more accurate) decision-making.
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 >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Little Big Data
Don’t confuse digital dialing for dollars with building brands. By Spencer L. Hapoienu. The last days of a very warm winter brought new heat to the digital frenzy when Procter & Gamble announced it would cut $1 billion from its traditional media spending and replace it with digital marketing over the next few years. It used to be as P&G goes so goes the marketing and advertising industry. P&G isn’t as omnipotent and prescient as it once was, but it still creates at least a 5.4 on the industry Richter scale when it announces a radical change, especially one with so many zeroes.
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 >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Follow the Money
An insight is only as good as the money it makes. By Sharon Love. Henry Ford said: “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have said, ‘a faster horse’.” Steve Jobs famously echoed that sentiment when he said: “It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”
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 >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
80/20 Insights
Demand-cycle research reveals the 20 percent of insights that make the difference. By Randi Moore. We all know that great shopper marketing begins with shopper insights — the same way a great day starts with a healthy breakfast. More often than we would like to admit, we start without either. The common obstacles cut across both situations: time, money, and inspiration.
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 >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Cellular Levels
Digital tools offer new clues into shopper behavior. By Kim Finnerty. Shoppers have long put effort into researching high-involvement and expensive purchases like cars and electronics before heading to the store. Suddenly, because of technology, it is now also worth the “effort” to research toothpaste, canned tomatoes and laundry detergent.
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 >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Cool News
“Improvement merely lets you hit your numbers … creativity is what transforms,” says JC Penney CEO Ron Johnson. That was the main lesson Ron says he learned while he was at Target after gambling on introducing Michael Graves designer products.
“The math was simple,” says Ron. “If I didn’t sell one piece but people looked differently at the other 96 percent of products we’d win. It’s always about mind share, not market share.” Ron is now bringing a similar sensibility — which of course he also brought to Apple stores — to JC Penney.
The essential vision, once again, is to create “a place where the experience (is) as important as the products themselves.” This apparently was as much Ron’s vision at Apple stores as it was Steve Jobs’s … read >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
The Hub 48
The Hub Magazine, Vol. 8, Issue 48. The entire issue of May/June 2012 edition of The Hub Magazine, centered on consumer and shopper insights, featuring a cover story interview with Stephen Quinn, CMO of Walmart
Also featuring the 2012 Hub Top 20 of Excellence in Shopper Marketing as well as a roundtable on consumer and shopper insights, with Stephanie Cota of Mattel Brands, Hermann Deininger of Adidas, Sally Grimes of Newell Rubbermaid, Alfredo Martel of Caribou Coffee and Kevin Lane Keller of Dartmouth College and 13 other articles … download pdf >>
May 1, 2012 Comments
Blue Tree
Former Hollywood actress Phoebe Cates casts herself as a friendly, neighborhood shopkeeper. As a little girl, Phoebe Cates loved playing store. She loved all of it: Setting everything up, pretending to wrap packages and making her toy cash-register ring.
Her first few jobs, as a teenager, were in retail. But Phoebe’s path soon took a different turn, first as a cover model for Seventeen and then as an actress in Hollywood films including Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Gremlins. She met her future husband, actor Kevin Kline, at an audition. He landed a part and she didn’t, but they got married and had two kids. Phoebe gave up acting and became a full-time mom.
When her kids began to fly on their own, Phoebe knew she wanted to work again, but didn’t want to go back to acting. The idea of opening a store just kept coming back to her and she kept thinking, "wouldn’t it be great?" Phoebe’s neighborhood, Carnegie Hill on New York’s Upper East Side, needed nothing so much as a neighborhood shop … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
Trading Places
Retail is where cyberspace meets the marketplace. A discussion featuring Kensuke Suwa of Uniqlo, Jon Abt of Abt Electronics, Christophe Garnier of Totsy, Stephen Hoch of the Wharton School and Tina Manikas of Draftfcb.
How do you see the future of retail?
Kensuke Suwa: The gap between what is sold in the store and what is sold online is getting smaller and smaller. More people are becoming accustomed to operating the smartphone and also e-commerce. So, the ratio of sales coming out of e-commerce is becoming bigger and bigger.
For Uniqlo, this means the online experience has to improve, because you can’t try on clothes online the way you can in the store. That is the biggest challenge for us. What is the best way to buy something without touching it? That is more difficult compared to what we do at the store level. It is a big part of the future of retail … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
With a Smile
How good is the customer service at the retail establishments you frequent? An executive summary of a Hub survey. If you are searching for excellence in the retail experience, you likely will lose your way in the customer-service department. According to our latest reader survey, only four out of 23 retailers were rated as “excellent” in customer service by more than 50 percent of respondents. Fourteen retailers languished in single or low double-digits.
We simply asked readers to rate the customer service at each retailer as “excellent,” “good,” “fair” or “poor,” and invited comments. Zappos was most highly rated as “excellent” (68%), followed by Trader Joe’s (58%), LL Bean (58%) and the Apple store (54%). Happy, friendly, knowledgeable and accessible employees were frequently cited as making the difference for these retailers … read >>
March 1, 2012 Comments
The Demand Cycle
Technology re-defines the traditional path-to-purchase. By Mitch Blum and Jeff Williams. The current era of consumer empowerment is a wonderful thing — if you’re a consumer. From a marketer’s standpoint, things have gotten exponentially more complex and challenging. Time-shifting, customization, social integration, personalization and real-time customer service are all examples of how consumers are demanding more from brands while simultaneously expecting to pay less.
Underneath this consumer empowerment is one consistent catalyst: technology. Digital innovations have trained consumers to expect exactly what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and all at the best value. Woe betide the brand that fails to deliver on the consumer’s heightened expectations. They’ll be punished with a scathing blog post, a negative review, a mocking hashtag and perhaps even a YouTube video about a broken guitar that receives more than 11 million views … read >>
January 1, 2012 Comments
Hub Prize Winners: 2011
Announcing the 2011 Hub Prize competition winners! From more than 80 entries, our distinguished panel of judges selected the 36 boldest and brightest ideas in retail and shopping excellence, which earned either Gold, Silver or Bronze medals. For a complete list of winners, in alphabetical order by prize level, click here.
September 1, 2011 Comments
Best Buy Next
Barry Judge of Best Buy re-imagines retail in 140 characters or less. By Tim Manners. With some 18,000 followers on Twitter and more than 2,000 tweets to his name, few marketing chiefs have embraced emerging media as personally as Best Buy’s Barry Judge.
“The idea that anyone can be a publisher and have a platform — all you have to be is relevant — is interesting,” says Barry, explaining his Twitter attraction. And yet Barry’s digital embrace plainly is more business than personal. It has to be. Having outlasted Circuit City, Best Buy still faces the most daunting of rivals — most notably Walmart and, maybe most of all, Amazon.
As music and movies migrate from discs to downloads, and consumer-electronics devices grow ever smaller, the acres of retail that once were so formidable suddenly may not be so desirable anymore. As a big-box retailer, Best Buy has no choice but to figure out how to make digital media part of its solution, and Barry is thoroughly absorbed in that challenge … read >>
September 1, 2011 Comments
