You know that feeling when someone makes quite a flippant remark that suddenly makes you realize that they have missed something truly fundamental? It happened to me this week, and I just felt I had to share. Someone said to me that shopper marketing was about satisfying shopper needs – about making it easy for the shopper to find what they want. Now on the surface that feels pretty sensible doesn’t it? Certainly not satisfying shoppers would be a pretty bad situation, making it really hard to shop is a frustration that I know too many of us have felt. Yet – is satisfying shoppers (or any customers for that matter) enough?
If the shopper leaves the store satisfied, is that sufficient to meet your objectives? I would argue no. I would argue that going to your boss having missed your sales target, but having ‘satisfied shoppers’ is a fast track to job hunting. So if shopper marketing is more than merely satisfying shoppers, then what else is it? And how do we balance the idea of not disappointing shoppers, with perhaps achieving more than merely satisfying them?
Before I started writing this I did some research, to see who else was working on satisfying shoppers. Nielsen on their website suggests that shopper marketing is “…satisfying shopper needs for convenience, choice and value for money.” So the person I was conversing with this week is not alone in thinking this. And I’m not necessarily suggesting that Nielsen is misleading anyone here at all – just that it appears that the apparently simple statement could be misleading.
Satisfying Shoppers is the minimum shopper marketing must deliver
Before I go any further, of course shopper marketing must at least satisfy shoppers – but it needs to do much more than that. Given that many shoppers shop habitually, satisfying shoppers would lead to many shoppers buying what they normally buy. In this way an objective of satisfying shoppers rapidly becomes an objective of making it easy for the shopper to buy what they want to buy. And therein lies my problem. Business growth will come from encouraging shoppers to do something different, and that means that we need to not only make it easy for them to buy what they want to buy, but to make it even easier for them to buy what we want them to buy. If, as Nielsen argues above, this is about meeting their need for convenience, then what I am suggesting is going against that. If a shopper wants, let’s say, to buy Pepsi and I want them to buy Coke, my job as a shopper marketer is to make life just a little bit harder for the shopper: to make it harder to buy Pepsi. Not so hard that they leave the store, but harder than it is to buy Coke. The shopper is not necessarily any more satisfied, but the company has achieved its goals.
Shopper marketing is about changing what people want, too
The key difference here lies in the semantics, but they are important. If a shopper walks into a store wanting a basic pizza, but we convince them during the shopping process that they really want a premium pizza, then of course we are satisfying them. We all understand that, intellectually, but when junior marketers translate ‘satisfying shoppers’ into ‘making it easy for shoppers to buy what they want to buy’ then shopper marketing is missing something, and the message isn’t clear. Shopper marketing must therefore be about persuading shoppers that what they need is your brand, and then getting them to buy it.
Different shoppers require different approaches
At the heart of this lies the fact that there are two different types of shoppers in every category. Those whom we are happy to carry on doing what they do currently, and the ones who we want to behave differently. Shoppers who already buy loads of our brand regularly may fall into the first group: those that buy a competitor’s, or don’t buy the category at all, the latter. So shopper marketing needs to work hard to make it easy for some shoppers to do what they normally do, whilst at the same time encouraging others to behave differently. And that may mean NOT giving them what they want, or rather, making what they think they want just a little harder to achieve.
It’s a balancing act of course. Make it too hard for the shopper to do what they want to do and they will be unhappy, and that may spell disaster. But make it too easy and they’ll not change their behavior, and growth targets simply won’t be realized. If shoppers are happy doing what they usually do, and we aren’t able to encourage them to change, then there is a risk that shoppers stay happy, but we miss our sales targets.
Senior managers, agencies, please help. Help make it clear by insisting that all shopper activity briefs or objectives clearly state who the target shopper is, and what it is we want them to do (differently) to what they normally do. By insisting on this clarity we can ensure that there is no confusion about what “satisfying shoppers” really means. If you have any examples of really good, (or really bad) shopper activities or tactics designed to influence shopper behavior, please share your stories in the Comment section below!
