Shopper Marketing

Mark my words, retailers who don't figure out smart, helpful, shopper-centric ways to harness the growing penetration of smart phones are going to evoke an old general store's big brass mechanical cash register: quaint, obsolete, and a reminder of how people used to shop in the past.

Meijer, a 194 store regional hypermarket chain based in Grand Rapids, Michigan has launched a trial system in four of their flagship stores that let users locate more than 100,000 items in store along with facilities like bathrooms and customer service. 

Indoor positioning systems have long been a holy grail for malls and big-box retailers – where labyrinthine aisles and massive floorplans often leave customers lost and irritated. The obstacles to deploying such a system are many: you've got to create detailed maps for every facility where you want it to work, and you need some sort of system for locating users with a reasonable level of precision since GPS is out of the picture. 

Conveniently, these stores have some 26 WiFi nodes deployed, which helps triangulate users down to a reasonable level of precision – though it's probably not going to be able to tell if you're standing in front of Heinz Ketchup or Hunt's.

But who cares. It's a fun, exciting, novel, useful shopper marketing tool, and, best of all, a free download for iPhone and Android users.

Kraft Foods' Triscuit crackers brand is partnering with nonprofit Urban Farming to create 50 community-based home farms during 2010, and the brand's new home farming initiatives also include offering free basil and dill herb seed cards on four million boxes of its original and reduced-fat varieties, and a website featuring tips on starting home gardens or volunteering at a local Urban Farming garden.

The Web site includes a tool that advises consumers which vegetables and herbs are best to plant (and planting dates) based on their regions/ZIP codes and the amount of sunny space available (ranging from a single pot on a balcony to two 4-foot by 8-foot gardens). Another tool enables users to find nearby community farms, and add their own home farms to a map. Forums and sharing tools are prominently displayed.

The site also features step-by-step advice for creating and maintaining a home garden from HGTV "Gardening by the Yard" host Paul James, who will make appearances at the openings of the sponsored community gardens.

The home farming theme meshes with Triscuit's "Weave Some Wonder" marketing campaign, which launched last year and marked the brand's return to TV advertising after five years. The broadcast component of this campaign emphasizes the crackers' "simple, authentic goodness" and quality ingredients, such as the "soft white winter wheat" from North American farms that gives the product its crunch and "22 grams of delicious whole grain goodness per serving."

What else? The home farming initiatives are being supported by PR, print ads, banner ads on gardening, women's general interest and other sites; messaging on the product boxes (which also drives consumers to the microsite), some outreach to blogs and tweeting through the Kraft Foods Twitter presence; and the community forums and sharing tools on the microsite. Rather than focus on promotion via Triscuit's Facebook page, the brand decided to make it easy for users to share the home farming movement site's existence and usefulness through their own social media pages or channels. Now that's tasty!

When you think of food and Southern California, what comes to mind? Beside the iconic In-N-Out Burger?

Increasingly, the region's true culinary claim to fame is LA's thriving street eats scene. Thanks to a growing selection of gourmet-on-the-go, mobile take-out joints that have at least 4 wheels (and an army of loyal Twitter followers), the LA street food scene is more dynamic, affordable, and delicious than ever before.

It even has its own festival, which happened a couple of weeks ago. Held in the Rose Bowl, 50+ L.A. food truck and ice cream vendors (set up in booths), bars, tequila and mezcal tastings and a marketplace of general goods and crafts provided enough culinary and visual stimuli to keep festival-goers happy (and possibly drunk). General admission tickets quickly sold out, and all the SoCal food truck favorites like The Grilled Cheese Truck, Don Chow Tacos, Kogi BBQ and Flying Pig Truck were there.

All words pointing to the same thing – I am passionate about shoppers. I love the discipline it takes to find the issue or barrier keeping shoppers from purchasing a product. I love the vision it takes to find shopper insights and then bring it to life in a relevant way. I love the curiosity it takes to stay on top of the technology and trends that are changing how shoppers approach retail environments, whether brick or click (traditional stores or online).

10 years of shopper marketing experience has brought along some awesome opportunities. I have worked on some of the largest retailer and manufacture brands around, from Walmart to USPS, Walgreens to P&G and have lived in some great cities along the way, from Fayetteville, AR to Cincinnati, OH to Chicago, IL. And this experience has led me here, to birdsong gregory in Charlotte, NC. Why? The answer is based on how I view the future.

I believe the best way to predict the future is to create it. And I believe the role of future creators will belong to smart, strategic, neutral and nimble companies, those who choose to approach problems as conversations. A conversation requires approaching challenges engaged in actively listening, watching and focusing on what factors are influencing the situation before responding. birdsong gregory has taken a purposefully conversational approach to their 10 years of growth, building their business on the idea that facilitating a conversation requires low overhead and high access. The fact that Charlotte ranks 8^th in the US for Fortune 500 companies has provided a perfect regional and national proving ground for this philosophy.

Have a passion for shoppers? Have a shopper challenge you need help solving? Let’s start the conversation.

And now Bloom, one of our retail grocery clients, is making a bet that broadcast ads delivered between the aisles will be an effective way to reach the kind of purchase-focused, motivated audience in a way that top-of-the-funnel living room broadcasts cannot. 

Automated Media Services plans to test its system, 3GTV, this summer in Maryland and Virginia at nine Bloom stores. Known as A.M.S., the company has been working for years on a system that would deliver television in retail environments; and one that would enable ad agencies to plan and buy commercial time in stores just as they do on the networks, channels and stations shoppers watch at home. 

We'll keep you posted on what Bloom's shoppers think

There are as many shopper classification tools as there are shopper marketing agencies. The original VALS spectrum still brings a lot of clarity the "plan and brand" process, and most of the proprietary segmentation models agencies try and sell their clients are still heavily derivative of the original Values, Attitudes, and Lifestyles psychograpics developed in the 1970's by Author Mitchell.

The folks at Henkel Consumer Goods recently annouced the results of a study that examined three years of data from multiple retail channels, covering 300 food and non-food categories commonly carried in supermarkets. This data was collected from the Information Resources, Inc. Consumer Network Panel and other sources

Their findings? Shoppers can be divided into three general categories: Shoptimzers, Mainstreeters, and Carefrees.

Shoptimizers are most likely to be influenced in their choices by pre-shopping stimuli such as circulars and coupons. They also are most likely among the three groups to regard a clear everyday low price (EDLP) strategy as an assurance of value. Once inside an EDLP shopping environment, Shoptimizers may be likely to respond to in-store cues.

Mainstreeters do far less pre-planning and rarely save coupons, so their channel choices are more likely to be influenced by location, convenience and price reputation. Once inside the store, however, this group is most likely to be sensitive to in-store promotions and offers.

Carefrees avoid EDLP channels and bypass most pre-planning and in-store promotions. Interestingly, they totally trust club stores to deliver value appropriate to their consumption patterns. Once inside a store, they tend to ignore prices and buy what they like.

Some other interesting tidbits:

• Coupon Use is almost entirely confined to Shoptimizers, who make up about 25 percent of households and 30 percent of household spending. Coupons are seldom used by Mainstreeters and virtually never by Carefrees.

• Private Label products are purchased more frequently (higher dollar-sales index) by Shoptimizers and less frequently (lower dollar-sales index) by Carefrees. Mainstreeters purchase store brands at about average levels.

• Trip Frequency varies significantly among the behavioral groups, with Shoptimizers visiting stores about four times per week, compared with two-and-a-half times per week for Mainstreeters and twice a week for Carefrees.

• Shopping Basket Size also varies among the behavioral groups, with Shoptimizers spending the smallest dollar amount on each occasion and Carefrees spending the most. Shoptimizers, however, due to their trip frequency spend the most per year, +16 percent versus Mainstream, and +32 percent versus Carefree.

• In-Store Promotions are primarily effective at influencing Mainstreeters, who make up 44 percent of households and dollar sales. In-store promotions have relatively little influence on the purchase decisions of Carefrees.

Imagine you're on your way to the store to shop for dinner. Your stomach is growling, and as you round the curve you see a larger than life, mouthwatering piece of perfectly cooked steak. Then, as you get closer, you realize you can smell the scent of grilled beef. It's not your imagination - we actually installed the nation's first scented billboard with a high-capacity emitter hidden at the base of the billboard.

Bloom, the upmarket grocery store banner of the Delhaize Group, asked us to help them develop a private label brand of beef and drive sales with a multifaceted shopper marketing campaign. The result: Sheffield & Sons USDA Choice Angus beef. 
 
Hungry yet? With Bloom's beef sales trending higher since we launched this campaign, it would appear so.