Consumer, Shopper, Retail Expert
Consumer, Shopper, Retail Expert
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 …
“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 …
Many companies spend small fortunes on market research every year, and while much of this research is valuable, and helps many smart marketers achieve amazing things for their companies, a lot of it is wasted. ‘We didn’t learn anything new’; ‘there was nothing actionable’; ‘the agency didn’t really do their job’; are all quotes I’ve …
I was inspired to write this by a recent quote from Stan Sthanunathan, senior VP-consumer and market insights at Unilever. Inside the article there was a lot of solid, sensible stuff. It was especially great to hear that Unilever is not resting on its laurels when it comes to finding new ways to create better …
“The great thing about big data is that it helps us answer so many questions about our consumers and shoppers”. I heard this line (almost word for word) twice in the last two weeks, and it struck me as an interesting theme that at once helps describe what is right, and so wrong, with the …
A little while ago I wrote a post on the pros and cons of investing in secondary locations and how organizations might optimize this sort of activities. Making the secondary location placement relevant to the shopper in the context of shopping the destination category is key. So how well do brands and retailers do in …
I stumbled across this interesting (and thought provoking) piece over the weekend. It argues that because things change rapidly, business planning is a waste of time, and is arguably dangerous. Having worked at many brand plans, customer plans, channel plans and business plans myself, the idea that the laborious and often painful task could be …
They are being heralded as ‘the next big thing’. The technology allows shoppers to be tracked as they shop and for messages and offers to be sent to them, and is being tested extensively by major retailers and manufacturers alike. In-store beacons are touted as a way to massively enhance the shopping experience in bricks …
Again and again we poll clients (and agencies) and again and again we come up with the same answers. Despite the apparent increase in the availability of data, too often the effectiveness of shopper marketing activities is simply not measured, or not effectively measured. Despite most shopper marketers having more data available to them than ever before, too many activities …