In their recent, excellent (as always) summary of the state of shopper marketing in the USA for The Hub, Chris Hoyt and Nancy Swift identified three key issues which were preventing shopper marketing from flying to the heights it should. The first was the adoption of digital – which struck me as a really interesting point. Report after report suggest that more and more shopper utilize digital environment which shopping. All of the research we see recognize that shopper marketing without digital shopper marketing is really missing the point. So it made me wonder what was the reason why so much shopper marketing (in the US at least) apparently hasn’t yet taken digital to the full, and whether a focus on retail collaboration is part of this.
It appears that shopper marketing is evolving along a slightly different path in the US than in other parts of the world. In the US, there is a very strong link, coming from heritage, which make shopper marketing very much focused on working with a specific retailer. Whilst this link exists elsewhere in the world, it doesn’t appear to always be so strong: perhaps (particularly in parts of Asia) because of the lack of a tradition of extensive retail collaboration. Whenever I post that perhaps a ‘retail first’ approach may not be the optimal way of thinking about shoppers from a brand point of view, they are often very well read, largely because it is such a contentious point.
But is retail collaboration strangling digital shopper marketing?
Before I go much further it is probably worth saying, up front, that of course I believe that retail collaboration is critical to effective shopper marketing. Retailers own the real estate, and some of the most useful and plentiful data on shopping behavior. There are also many benefits from driving shopper marketing from a retail collaboration start point. I am not for one minute advocating an approach which snubs retail collaboration: merely that an approach which begins with retail collaboration may have a number of downsides: including a lack of digital focus.
The limits of a retail-led approach to shopper marketing
First and foremost, the approach begins by limiting the audience to those shoppers who shop in the stores of that particular retailer. Further, it limits the thinking to focusing on shoppers who can be influenced in the channels that retailer operates. Unfortunately (to coin a lovely phrase from my buddy Toby Desforges) – shopper marketing is channel agnostic, because shoppers are too. Shoppers don’t live in “Target World” anymore – so any shopper campaign or strategy which starts with “Collaborate with Target” is going to miss a big part of the shoppers’ story.
This of course was always the case: a shopper’s relationship with a brand was rarely limited to the real estate of one retailer. Digital has just blown this model to pieces.
If the epicenter of shopper marketing thinking is the relationship between a brand and a retailer, then any relationship (or potential relationship) between a brand and a shopper which does not involve the retailer is likely to be demoted to peripheral at best. What goes on outside Target is just not on the minds of a shopper team thinking ‘Target’. And digital channels (except Target’s own), and their messy, retail brand agnostic ways, are ‘outside of that world’.
For shopper marketing to really embrace digital it needs to be shopper-centric, not retail centric. It needs to recognize that shopping takes place across many channels, and it needs to begin with a desire to understand and influence shoppers (the target shoppers) wherever they are, rather than to start with the playing field, and then decide the game.
In our book, “The Shopper Marketing Revolution” Toby and I outline a shopper-centric approach to shopper marketing: one that believes and endorses retail collaboration, but one that recognizes that it isn’t the starting point of shopper marketing. You can pick up the book at Amazon, or if you’d like a sample chapter, please feel free to contact me and I’ll happily share.
Image: Flickr
