Consumer, Shopper, Retail Expert
Consumer, Shopper, Retail Expert
I love marketing with a passion, and always have. I’m utterly convinced of the importance of marketing in driving massive value for businesses, so when I see headlines which comment on the lack of marketers on Executive Boards at most of the largest companies in the world, it does make me wonder why. Why do …
Survey after survey suggests that shopper marketing is becoming a bigger priority for organizations, with more focus and more spend. Yet many of these companies ask shopper marketers to work with a blindfold on, not investing sufficiently in shopper research to build a really clear understanding of the target shopper, how they behave and how …
Brand loyalty. It’s a phrase that is bounced around meeting rooms and brand plan presentations every day. We get our data analysts to measure it. Or rather we measure share of throat and we call it loyalty. But are we kidding ourselves? As marketers too often we convince ourselves that our brands are more important …
A perennial topic with clients is the ability (or lack of it) of their teams to create ground-breaking insights. Consumer and shopper insight teams are producing lots of understanding, lots of analysis, but sometimes they struggle to find those breakthrough insights that will truly transform the business. Some of this criticism is possibly unfair, and …
Many of the marketing and sales executives I meet have big problems with trade investment. Typically trade investment is large, increasing (often faster than sales) and most acknowledge that the returns from it are dubious. Over the years the money spent on trade investment by many consumer goods companies has ballooned, putting enormous pressure on …
I posted recently about the apparent indifference of consumers and shoppers to many brands: a post that created a large number of responses. And perhaps not surprisingly, either. The idea that consumer and shoppers suggest that they would be quite happy without the vast majority of brands should strike a chill into the hearts of …
“We want to be Category Captains!” was the specific objective of a certain senior sales manager I coached recently. And he is not alone. Despite cases of disappointment far-outnumbering the success stories, the goal of ‘strategic alliance’ between retailer and brand seems to be ever-pervasive. The benefits of collaboration between brand and retailer are well …
There is an apparent conundrum in the world of consumer goods marketing. If consumers and shoppers are so enamored, so ‘in love’, with our brands, then why are they prepared to shop at discounters such as Aldi where many of these brands are not even available? Why, if we marketers are building ever closer, ever …
In the last six months of so there has been much commentary about Tesco’s difficulties, including a number of posts by me. One of the questions I have been asked many times since is “Why didn’t ClubCard (Tesco’s loyalty card scheme) data warn them? Why didn’t big data help? Surely a retailer as sophisticated as …
In the past few months I’ve written a number of posts criticizing some of the largest retailers in the world for being slow to adapt to changing shopping habits. Shoppers are definitely changing, shopping trips are fragmenting, yet too many stores I visit look pretty much the same as they did ten years ago (perhaps …