It’s now more than ten years since Chris Hoyt coined the term “Shopper Marketing”. Shopper marketing is no longer a niche discipline for many brands and recent surveys in Europe, Africa and Asia suggest that leading brands have been applying the principles of shopper marketing for well over five years now. Much has been learnt but as our understanding of the implications of marketing to shoppers develops, yet there are many challenges. Too much of what is called ‘shopper marketing’ is merely in-store promotion with a different name. As we look to the future of I see five imperatives for shopper marketing.
Shopper marketing must become a business process
In the last decade, little has been done to clearly define ‘shopper marketing’. As a result, shopper marketing has become known by the activities created in its name. Many marketers look upon shopper marketing as a re-branding of trade activities and many agencies now label displays, promotions and shelf-talkers as “Shopper Marketing”. As a result, shopper marketing is often viewed as a secondary practice (within marketing) and a cost to be reduced.
These definitions confuse the product of shopper marketing with the processes that are needed to create them. As the discipline develops, leaders in the space recognize that shopper marketing must be defined as a business process. In our book “The Shopper Marketing Revolution”, Mike Anthony and I define this process as “The systematic application of elements of the marketing mix to affect positive change in shopper behavior in order to drive consumption of a brand”. The outcome of that process might be an in-store activity, but the activity isn’t shopper marketing (in much the same way as ‘advertising’ isn’t the same as ‘marketing’ either).
As a business process, shopper marketing has the power to drive long-term sustainable and profitable growth in sales, results it cannot achieve as merely a re-labeling of in-store activity.
Shopper marketing must become “Marketing”
Many large brands have chosen to develop functions within their organisations which they’ve labelled “Shopper Marketing”. These are often sub-functions of Sales, Trade Marketing or Marketing. This has sometimes created more silos in organisations that often already suffer from poor integration.
This has arisen mostly because companies have decided that in order to create shopper marketing activity, more, or different, head count is needed.
As brands adopt the concept of shopper marketing as a business process however, the decision of ‘where in the business’ becomes one driven by the process, rather than the other way around. Many organizations, for example, find that shopper marketing becomes a logical extension to traditional consumer marketing. As a result, business like General Mills in Europe have chosen to absorb “Shopper Marketing” into the Marketing function. This can lead to greater integration and improved outcomes.
Shopper marketing must integrate the work of commercial functions
In large organizations today, structural silos cause a great deal of inefficiency. Marketing teams and sales teams struggle to align their objectives and actions effectively. As a result, many shopper marketing activities seem dissonant with the brand and/or suffer from poor retail implementation. This leads to costly mistakes, which for many organisations results in millions of wasted dollars.
Shopper marketing, however, gives brands the opportunity to create coherent links between the consumers of the brand and the retail environment. In our book we describe how by integrating shopper marketing into the current practices of Marketing and Sales, businesses can create a “Total Marketing” process, one that reflects a brands’ need to deliver for consumers, shoppers and retailers. This process improves internal alignment and has demonstrated that brands can grow efficiently in all the environments where it has been applied.
Shopper marketing must create clearer focus
Over the last decade, brands have become more conscious of the existence of ‘the shopper’ as a discrete entity that they must target too. Unfortunately, just as there is no homogeneous consumer, shoppers are heterogeneous too. Everyone’s path to purchase is different and increasingly rich. Hoping that one size will continue to fit all is naïve.
Shopper marketers will be required to create deeper understanding of the shopper segments that exist and create more tailored and targeted approaches to influencing them. This will mean that investment will become more focused on the target markets in which brands can truly ‘win’ rather than attempting to cover the whole market with a ‘spray and pray’ approach.
Shopper marketing must become essential
The biggest shift in marketing in last decade is that brands have recognized that they need to win with consumers, shoppers and retailers. In the next decade a new generation of consumers will become the powerhouse of brand growth. They will be the first generation to grow up with the potential to purchase anything, anywhere, at any time. Retail is rapidly evolving to keep pace with this.
As result brands will need to create new relationships with consumers, shoppers and retailers in ways that will have a profound impact in the competitive environment. A direct consequence of this is that businesses that embrace shopper marketing as a key pillar in their marketing strategies are likely to gain competitive advantage. Those who do not may find that, like the dinosaurs, they are no longer fit to survive in a new world.
It’s time for a revolution!
In his book “Grow”, Jim Stengel, P&G’s CMO between 2001 and 2008 wrote, “The traditional marketing model is broken. We’re applying antiquated thinking and work processes to a new world of possibilities.” What leading thinkers like Jim are calling for is a revolution in marketing. The lessons we’ve learnt from the last decade tell us that integrating shopper marketing into the way we think and act as brand marketers provokes this revolution. Applying Total Marketing to the way marketing and sales teams work is guaranteed to deliver better business results. If you’d like to know more about how it works, or to see some case studies of how Total Marketing has transformed business performance for our clients, please contact us here.