I was chatting with a senior industry individual recently. His thesis was that as retailer competition is driven in part by the so-called “Discounters” (read our blog - “Discounter”), that meant that supplier-retailer relationships were increasingly about getting to the lowest possible “no frills” price, which meant, in turn, drastic cutting of any non-essential overhead
Winning in category management can come down to many things, but the one certain way to get your buyers to listen to you rather than competitors is to bring a totally new perspective that’s a game changer on merchandising, planograms and ranging. It's rare that such a breakthrough becomes available in the UK. Your goal
To some extent, this is the same debate that affects all research. But the polar opposites of commercial impact range from projects that are seen to be ‘game changers’ and generate massive ROI, to those that perhaps never even see the light of day. I was talking to a banking type recently, one who works
My starting point here is that there is a shopper in the store, with a need for your category or product. They may not be thinking about it, but they are at least an occasional buyer and right now they don’t have any at home and/or they could happily use or consume one. Clearly, not
Humans have a natural psychological bias to be unhappy about losing what they already think they have rather than being excited about getting something extra. A recent study showed people would pay more to stop the aircraft passenger in front from reclining into “their space” than they would to put their seat up if it
We know that it may be a little awkward for us to talk about the elephant in the room, but although a manufacturer is often funding the shopper research, we all know that unless it “delivers” for your retailer, it’s not going to get very far. So, it must be worth taking some time to
‘Insight’ surely a leading candidate for the prestigious title of the most overused term of the decade. Everyone seems to have a different view of what it is, but – let’s face it – the word gets applied to almost everything and anything. So, time for us to weigh in here. To us, shopper insight
Before we get to the crux of this blog, first a story. I was on holiday in a lovely part of Southern Italy. I went on a tour of an old Olive Oil farm and visited the ancient on-site olive press. Their set-up was brilliant and had been in use since Roman times. I took
OK, we should probably re-phrase our question for this blog - does shopper marketing waste too much time in our companies? But what exactly do we mean by that? In our business lives*, there are two key things that contribute to time wasting. Firstly, spending too much time and effort on the wrong activities. Secondly,
It’s a truism to say a research project is only as good as the brief. But how much time really goes into the planning of research versus the doing of research and the attempt to land the learnings from the research? All too often the bias of the time and effort is on the latter