The tough question in Shopper Marketing?
As brand manufacturer people many of us have years of experience in working out how to inspire consumers to buy our brands. It’s not a massive leap onward to work out how this translates through the path to purchase (it’s a leap, but hopefully not a chasm!)
Where sometimes things are a lot less clear is in understanding what the Retailer needs and hence what our customer will endorse and back. Relatively few supplier side people have “walked the walk” in retailers, and few companies have much data about their wider customers’ business.
What do retailers seek from shopper marketing? Well, the first answer, of course, is more supplier dollars in their stores. Emphasis: their stores. Ideally, more dollars in their business than their competitors. That’s pretty obvious. Second is more subtle, they want supplier shopper marketing in tune with their own shopper marketing strategy. Can be a challenge because this may not be something they share with you, or even can particularly articulate (at a category level). Third (and this is the low hanging fruit) they want ideas that drive genuinely incremental growth in a way they can win resources for.
Let’s focus on the last one. Firstly, incremental growth. That’s growth that drives new occasions/users and/or profit in existing occasions/users (via higher margin lines in most cases); second the idea of “winning” resources. What does that mean?
Its about matching up the shopper marketing idea with the unique position of the category in the store so that someone high up in the retailer says “that makes sense”. For example, promoting Soup as a “standby” low cost meal idea in mid winter in a low demographic retailer where they need to increase basket weight. Or linking ice cream to kids parties at the end of term for a family oriented retailer that wants to become first choice for mums.
In our company we provide data to put numbers to these kinds of scenarios, enabling you to see how your brand and category “fit” into the wider store picture and what makes each retailer “tick”. That way you can put together compelling arguments that will win you the opportunity. For more information please drop me a line.
Roger Jackson
+44 7763 074929
roger.jackson@shopperintelligence.com
