Today's Wall Street Journal tells us that Target "... is tired of being used." In an article discussing a concept called "showrooming," where shoppers come into a store to see a product in person only to buy it from an online rival - typically at a lower price, Target is asking its vendor partners to create special products for the banner that shield it from price comparisons.
Online sites like Amazon.com pose a significant risk to retailers like Best Buy to Barnes & Noble. The article reports that this years holiday season saw an average 4.1% jump for brick and mortar stores while on line sales jumped 15%. Target's sales were particularly disappointing in electronics, books and movies – all categories that have made a significant shift to online sales.
It appears that Target's vendors may have little choice but to play along because of the second largest discount chain's clout. For a shopper marketing agency like birdsong gregory, this just highlights more opportunities to mine the path to purchase for consumer insights that may benefit our online and B&M clients.
We are officially in the middle of shopping season. Terms like Black Friday and Cyber Monday are not only part of our vocabulary, but are increasingly how we search for deals. According to a recent MediaPost article, the search term "Cyber Monday" led all google.com search terms, jumping 120% from last year. "Black Friday" rose 60%.
While it is not news that consumers shop more and spend more during this time of the year than any other, what is news is how we are shopping. This year, more than any other in history, consumers shopped differently. Consider these statistics from this week:
PayPal saw a 511% increase in mobile payment volume on Cyber Monday vs. last year.
17% used a mobile device to visit a retailer's site.
10% used a mobile device to make a purchase.
5% of mobile traffic came from the iPad.
Year to date, online retail purchases are up 16%. All of this points to a healthy start to the holiday buying season and more, illuminates the continued adoption of mobile as a critical shopping tool.
Shoppers are multi-channel creatures of purchase and smart phones are their multi-functional swiss army tool of choice. Shopper behavior has forced retailers to stretch their offerings across channels in order to enhance shopper engagement. Retailers have started to focus on creating a seamless and similar shopping experience regardless of which channel shoppers are engaged.
What does all this mean?
Shopper technology, that is, technology that enhances the shopping experience, has to be a focus for marketers.
Digital Shopper Marketing strategies and insights are increasingly critical for retailers and manufacturers.
Organizational silos that separate online and in-store need to be unified under a renewed focus on shopper experience.
Mobile executions need to consider context. Reapplying traditional or web programs is cutting your effectiveness short.
The brave new world of the integrated, informed consumers is here. How have you adjusted your engagement with them?
If you've never heard of Martin Lindstrom, then you probably don't work in shopper marketing (like the folks here at birdsong gregory). He's the author of six highly insightful and well written books about consumer behavior and retail branding, including one of my personal favorites, Buyology - Truth and Lies About What We Buy. He also recently made Time Magazine's "100 Most Influential People" list.
He wrote a great shopper marketing article recently for Time based on one of his invaluable blog posts. The big premise?
The next time you go grocery shopping, take a look at the signs, the type of flooring, and even the carts. Everything has been designed with an eye towards getting you to grab those three cans of something that was not on your list.
Martin spent some time at a huge "shopper research" facility outside of Chicago (run by a big consumer goods company), where test shoppers spend hours pushing carts through what, to the untrained eye, looks just like a real grocery store. Of course, to the shopper marketers, consumer anthropologists, and other pointy headed brand geeks back in the control room hovering over a bank of glowing video monitors, every detail is carefully analyzed and tweaked. From the type of flooring (people move more slowly over parquet than linoleum) to how special deals are formulated on in-store price signs (using an actual dollar sign decreases the probability of purchase), it's a fascinating look at what goes on behind the shelf.
This is a quick peek inside the refreshed Bloom Grocery store. This showcases just a part of the work that earned shopper marketing agency birdsong gregory a Gold Prize for excellence in the retail environment from Hub Magazine.We introduced new graphics and merchandising efforts in key departments to amplify the new product offering and improve the shopping experience. See more of this work at www.birdsonggregory.com
Retail associate are a personification of your brand. They are front line brand builders or brand breakers. They have a direct impact on your store's shopping experience.
This is a reality that spans retail channels - how associates choose to interact with your customers will form an impression of your brand. Whether shoppers are looking for a product recommendation, need help navigating the store or seeking information, when your associate doesn't take the time or have the answer, you are missing a critical shopper engagement opportunity.
Sadly, we all have examples of bad retail associate experiences. It is an unfortunate retail reality these days. But think about your recent positive associate interactions. What was common about these experiences? I would argue good retail associates are like bartenders. A good bartender engages you and seeks to understand what you want. They are ready to make a product recommendation if you aren't sure what you are having - based on understanding inventory and market trends. They know their tip is directly related to the level of service they provide and as such, they put service before product. They have the background knowledge to make what you need and the empowerment to deviate from a specific menu item to make you happy. There is follow up to make sure you have what you need.
For all the focus put on marketing, don't forget the most important contact point you have with your shoppers. How are you empowering them to build your brand with customers? Maybe it is time to start viewing your associates more like bartenders.
Think the shopper behavior of finding ways to save money is going away anytime soon? Not according to a recent Mintel report.
Shoppers continue to look for discounts. While this is not a total surprise based on the sluggish economy, what is surprising is how this behavior has seemingly shifted away from doing this out of need and into doing this out of enjoyment. According to the report, 64% of US Moms say they are spending more of their time looking for details, sales, etc.
In other words, they are spending more of their personal, pre-purchase and pre-store time seeking these deals. This is no longer just about saving money, but about finding enjoyment in the “hunt” for these deals. It is about the process as well as the outcome.
With the boom of shopper technologies, the challege for marketers is not creating and helping shoppers find deals. Instead, the important consideration is how we are shifting shopper engagement strategies to talk to customers pre-store and at the point of sale to effectively drive brand preference.
There is no doubt that this focus on price and finding deals presents significant shopper marketing challenges. However, given this reality, how you adjust and directly impact your shopper's choice to put your brand in their cart? Perhaps birdsong gregory can help?
After reading a recent article in The Times about Google Goggles, I was struck by how rapidly the world of digital shopper marketing is evolving. Google Goggles is a mobile app that uses image-recognition software to decipher landmarks, text, book and DVD covers, artwork, logos, bar codes, wine labels. etc.
Comparison shopping has never been easier, now that you can snap a quick pic of a book’s cover while in store and almost instantly check the price and reviews on Amazon, but the mind races to fathom all the opportunities a good image recognition app could offer a retailer or consumer brand. Here are a couple:
• Massively successful European billboard advertiser JCDecaux is launching an image recognition iPhone app called U snap. Users can take pictures of JCDecaux posters and billboards – which the app will recognize, and provide access to extra content. Several major brands including Orange and Lancome have already signed on, and the app is planned for Android and Windows launches as well.
• Amazon Mobile includes the “Amazon Remembers” feature, which allows you to take a picture of any product, and (using the Mechanical Turk service identify the product and put it in your wish list. This isn’t real-time yet, but several product categories (movies and books) are already automated.
• Layar is one of many popular augmented-reality apps on the AppStore which allow you to see the iPhone’s camera output in real-time, with supplemental data overlaid on it. For example, take a picture of street you’re walking down to see what stores lie ahead.
Our shopper marketing agency has devoted countless hours over the past year strategizing, formulating and finally launching a new brand position for our grocery store client, Bloom (see the case study to learn more). Knowing there was a lot at stake, we commissioned a research study to gauge shopper sentiments about the store experience before we relaunched the brand. Now that the relaunch is complete, and shoppers have had a few months to soak in the new surroundings, we went back and completed a second wave of research to see what they think. The results are very promising. We saw a 7% lift in the likelihood of shoppers to recommend Bloom to their friends, a 15% increase in likeability for key departments in the store, and 15% improvement in store navigation. Those stats along with a double-digit increase in overall same store sales, how's that for ROI?
Diet Coke first hit store shelves in 1982 and has been a top seller ever since. But even legendary icons can use a bit of updating. AdWeek asks industry experts to chime in on the new packaging design. Click here for the whole story and to learn more about birdsong gregory's philosophy on design, shopper marketing and the state of advertising read our Manifesto featured on our new web site.
1. Visibility Contrast is key, which is why a strong logo and lots of white space work (think Special K) – especially when shelves are filled with a visual cacophony of slogans, logos, and CTAs.
2. Shopability Consumers can easily be overwhelmed by the breadth of a category, so making your product easy to find and, most importantly, easy to understand, is critical. If you have different products for different applications, the layout should be consistent and facilitate comparison. For example, colored caps on similar colored bottles can bring branding and product differentiation into harmony.
3. Differentiation Since purchase decisions are often intuitive and emotional, packaging needs to embody or represent key aspects of your brand. If you're selling health food, your packaging needs to look healthier than the competition. If you're selling high end auto care products, you should make the rest of the shelf look downright proletarian.
4. Simplicity Consumers don’t spend a lot of time studying the items they throw into their shopping cart, and accordingly, the package needs to convey a clear message. Adding more claims, for example, won’t increase the time the shopper spends reading the package and can even dilute the message.
5. Consumability Smart packaging design can increase sales and help anchor your shopper marketing strategy when it makes a product easier to store (think fridge packs) or to readily consume (think "on-the-go” packaging).
6. Sustainability We are all increasingly concerned about the environment, and packaging design needs to address our collective need for greater sustainability. Fortunately, it’s increasingly easy to align a product’s marketing needs with those of the world around us. For example, eliminating secondary cardboard packaging can make a product more visible (and more unique).
I don’t buy 10 cartons of Yoplait because I can’t (won’t) eat 10 cartons of yogurt before they go bad. I’m lucky if I can eat my way to the bottom of one carton. So when my local Food Lion has a great deal on yogurt, I tend to pass. From a shopper marketing perspective however, such outlier behavior is generally atypical of how middle America reacts to a ten for $10.
The Times had a good article about multiples this morning, and here’s a quick birdsong gregory exegesis.
Using buying patterns detected from loyalty cards, receipts, and other research, grocery chains are searching for the multiples sweet spot. For example, Kroger currently has lemonade, socks and Kroger gummi bears candy on sale at 10 for $10. And, to the chagrin of right-brained finger counters everywhere, the old gimmick — buy one, get one free — has been expanded to include some pricing equations based on complex NASA-inpsired algorithms – or at least it appears so to my mathematical challenged mind.
Most grocery shoppers make a list before going to the store, according to two recent studies, In one, Acosta Sales and Marketing, which advises clients like Nestlé on pricing, found that 84 percent of shoppers make a list, 23 percent make fewer grocery trips than a year ago, and that, over all, shoppers are spending less per trip than a year ago.
Then, throw unemployment, rising gas prices and more expensive food into an already meager stew, and you get consumers who have become extremely value driven, budget minded, list minded, less impulsive, and very deal oriented. So in order to get someone to buy something that wasn’t on their list (or more of what was), grocers like our client Bloom need incentives to nudge shoppers outside their typical behavior. And it’s working.
Well advertised, relevant multiples push customers a little higher than their typical purchase rate. People tend to buy the amount, or buy in increments, that are advertised – ten boxes of tortellini for $10, for example. According to John T. Gourville, professor of marketing at Harvard Business School who studies pricing strategies, even though shoppers usually do not have to buy the suggested amount to get the discount, they do anyway. “It is all about the power of suggestion,” he said.
As reported recently in The Wall Street Journal, the once staid barcode is suddenly getting a bit of flair. It seems that granola, juice and olives packaging are sporting barcodes that integrate famous buildings, blades of wheat and bubbles into the ubiquitous black and white rectangle of lines and numbers. This evolution of package design to include the barcode is a way for consumer-goods companies to better connect with customers. And while the the trend is popular with smaller companies, even one of the world's largest food companies, Nestle SA, is trying out vanity barcodes on its smaller brands.
The Journal reports, "Barcodes are what allow retailers to track products through their stores and change pricing without needing to retag every item. Every retail barcode number in the U.S. and 107 other countries is assigned by GS1, a nonprofit standards organization created in the early 1970s when barcode technology entered the retail landscape. A company applies to GS1 for a barcode number specific to that company. It then creates (or hires a firm to create) the barcode to match that number."
Do you have a novel vision for your next barcode? Contact Shopper Marketing agency birdsong gregory and let's chat.
Are retail employees supposed to sell products or help shoppers?
A retailer's lifeblood is sales and therefore every retail employee needs to sell products. Your retail marketing should be oriented to sell-through. But there is a difference in the answer to this question that results in a short term (sales) or long term (service) focus.
Apple's retail stores are as oriented towards service as they are sales. In fact, a quote from their training manual reinforces this: "Your job is to understand all of your customer's needs - some of which they may not even realize they have."
Said another way, your job is to help shoppers. And through that help, based on having relevant products, the solution could be a sale. But the employee's focus is not a sale, and as a result, Apple's stores provide a richer shopping experience.
The world of commerce has exploded, expanding from the traditional store to include e-commerce (internet), s-commerce (social) and m-commerce (mobile). Pour on the fuel of personal payment options (Paypal, Google, Facebook, Square, clearXchange, etc) and you have a multi-dimensional retail marketing revolution that is no longer bound to place or time. What an awesome time to be a growing shopper marketing agency!
The above info graphic from Microsoft's Tag does a great job of bringing to life the adoption of m-commerce.
Google recently launched its mobile-payment platform Wallet with hopes of persuading consumers to trade in their credit cards and instead pay for purchases by smart phone. Google has partnered with MasterCard and Citi in its Wallet application, which is designed to be a combination credit card, rewards program and coupon case when customers tap their smart phones at the register.
What has gone somewhat unnoticed in the reporting of this new platform is the potential this app has to connect the dots along the path to purchase. Osama Bedier, Google's VP-payments, demonstrated how buying a pair of shorts at American Eagle would work with Wallet. Through Google search, he found a coupon on-line for 20% off anything at AE and saved the offer to his Wallet app. (The Offers ad product will be out in wide release when Wallet launches this summer.) Then, at the store, he tapped his smart phone on the MasterCard PayPass terminal and the transaction, minus the discount plus AE rewards points, processed together.
Learn more about birdsong gregory and our shopper marketing services at www.birdsonggregory.com
Because we're social animals. That's why. And no matter how fast a network we have at home. Or however many QVC channels. Or how convenient it is to order a kayak while wearing pajamas, just because it's increasingly easy to shop online, doesn't mean we'll stop going to the mall.
Indeed, for most retail sectors, a physical store can serve a fundamentally different function, giving consumers the ability to see, taste and touch the products in a way that is impossible online. Think of prime retail spaces like an Apple Store. Or Nike Town. Or the Disney Store.
The shopper marketing challenge for retailers in the future will be to figure out a way to play up the strengths of a bricks-and-mortar store while incorporating new technology and consumer trends into the experience. From interactive video screens to a smaller, carefully cultivated selection, here's an interesting article from The Streetabout ways that retailers can remain relevent as online commerce continues to grow.
It can be a difficult task to break a shopper's loyalty to a particular retailer – especially a grocery store. So when our client Bloom launched its brand refresh in the Norfolk and DC markets, our strategy was to lure as many folks back into Bloom with compelling offers, based on shopper insights, and also bring a taste of the new Bloom into the community. In addition to a direct mail campaign with coupon offers, billboards, radio and agressive digital and print advertising, the mobile unit pictured above will show up at local events in the market (with the giant shopping cart in tow) and sample an array of the new products found in Bloom. We'll also be distributing coupons that direct people back to the store for free products. Check out more of the work we deliver around Shopper Marketing at www.birdsonggregory.com
As another sign that retailers are looking for ways to adapt and adopt new technologies, Express has announced they will make their whole clothing catalog available on Facebook. As Jim Wright, SPV of CRM and e-commerce at Express explains, “If you look at what's happening today, top-down marketing and driving people to places to transact has changed. We need to be where customers are having their experiences and sharing information. We need to take down the barriers preventing a shopping experience.”
Did you catch that important shift? Retailers can no longer afford to wait for shoppers to come to them - they have to be where their shoppers are. Technology, in this instance Facebook, has brought about the means for retail marketing to evolve beyond the traditional four walls of the store. The result is a whole new world of retail.
The article goes on to quote Patti Freeman Evans, VP and research director at Forrester Research as saying experimenting with social commerce is valuable for retailers even if it doesn't drive direct sales. Why? Because retailers “get insight into customers that are much more intimate. Retailers can pull those insights and turn them into analytics and use those analytics on their website to make recommendations to customers based on friends' purchases.”
The implications are far reaching. You have to be where your shoppers are to get the shopper insights you need to stay relevant. Even if that means being willing to experiment with new ways of being where your shoppers are.
Retail Marketing continues to evolve. Retailers have become manufacturers, creating brands and products to sell in their stores. Manufactures as retailers, looking to create more direct interactions with shoppers. Based on this, here are two interesting examples of manufacturers blurring the lines beyond their traditional roles.
Pepsi's Social Vending Machine: This new execution from Pepsi mixes the lines of retailing, manufacturing and social media. As the video shows, you can purchase or gift a drink as well as explore ways to get involved with their Refresh project. Will it result in more sales? Increased brand engagement? Stronger brand preference? Maybe, but more importantly, the ability for shoppers to interact with products and as a result, for Pepsi to gain shopper insights from those interactions can be priceless.
P&G's Art of Shaving Store: While not a new execution, I had my first visit recently and came away impressed. From the merchandising to the store employee training, it is obvious P&G has invested a lot into making this store work. And while it may or may not be successful, the learnings, interactions and sampling the Art of Shaving provides could be a differentiating factor as P&G looks to evolve the men's grooming business.
There are many examples I could pull from, as evolving roles continues to be a trend changing marketing. While the implications are many, the central focus for retailers and manufactures is the same - relevance. In today's shifting landscape, having an opportunity to engage consumers and gain shopper insights is critical to keeping your store and brand relevant.
Most shoppers look for the iconic cigar chomping Vlasic stork in the pickle aisle, but lately, thanks to a new instore ad campaign for one of America's most popular pickle brand, you can find the stoutly billed Groucho Marx-imitating bird in other parts of the your supermarket. Like next to ground beef in the butchers case. After all, what goes better with a hamburger than a nice crisp dill pickle? Research shows that a majority of burgers are served with pickles, and as grilling season gets underway the timing is good.
Along with shelves and grocery carts, vinyl ads also will appear on supermarket floors, while displays near the pickles themselves will dispense coupons and recipes. Along with this in-store advertising, which will run through September, the new Vlasic campaign includes recent ads in print magazines like People and Dash and on websites including FoodNetwork.com.
Vlasic, a brand of the Pinnacle Foods Group, spent $7.9 million on advertising in 2009 and $8.4 million in 2010, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. Eric Hintz, vice president for marketing at Pinnacle, declined to reveal the exact cost of the new campaign, but said marketing expenditures in 2011 would increase by double digits over last year.
As a Charlotte based shopper marketing agency, birdsong gregory is experiencing this trend firsthand and is excited about how retailers and product brands increasingly understand the importance of being relevant at the shelf.
According to a recent survey by the GMA and Booz, 55 percent of brands plan to increase spending on shopper marketing by more then 5 percent annually over the next three years, which is more than those intending to increase spending on social media (52 percent), Internet advertising (41 percent), print media (14 percent) or television (7 percent).
Some other examples of fun instore marketing juxtapositions:
To promote its soy and teriyaki sauces, Kikkoman dispenses recipes for marinades and coupons from a shelf display in the meat section during grilling season and places turkey brining recipes in the poultry section before Thanksgiving.
In an instore Valentine’s Day promotion to encourage using M&M’s in recipes, the Mars brand recently placed displays in the bakery aisle at supermarkets with cupcake recipes featuring the candies.
Think the shopper behavior of finding ways to save money is going away anytime soon? Not according to a 
As another sign that retailers are looking for ways to adapt and adopt new technologies, 
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