Booz and Co. have recently published their latest report on shopper marketing which focuses on the opportunities that omni-channel marketing brings. The report makes for interesting reading, although their conclusions and solutions are, one has to say, a little lackluster. I’ll park for a moment my dismay that one of the so-called ‘leading’ papers on shopper marketing leads its executive summary by talking about consumers rather than shoppers – and focus on the content. There is unfortunately little new in the report, but their arguments are coherent. But a lack of news isn’t really the problem. The issue lies with the fact that the solutions proposed by Booz are nothing new, and therefore suggest that they are missing something – that perhaps without some more fundamental shift in consumer goods marketing, little good is going to come from the omnichannel marketing opportunity.
Shopper and Consumer Marketing work better when integrated
Finally Booz get on the right track with what is important about shopper marketing. After their last report suggested that the future of shopper marketing was little more than link-promotions and bundles, finally they seem to have got to the heart of an important marketing challenge: that of the omnichannel environment. Despite the fact that they present a fictitious case of what must be the most extreme case of omnichannel shopping behavior I can think of, they do have a point: Booz quite rightly points out that the path to purchase is not linear; that the domains of the consumer and the shopper are complex and varied, and that this requires a shift in the way that brands are marketed.
Where Booz, finally, hit the nail on the head, is on their point of integration. Regardless of the category, regardless of the complexity of the path to purchase: regardless of the massive increase in the number of potential marketing channels available: massive brand success relies on effective integration. This isn’t a shopper marketing thing, nor a digital thing: this is marketing: Total Marketing. Brands, regardless of the sophistication of their marketplace and their categories, will thrive only when they can truly integrate their activities across the consumer/shopper/retail spectrum: creating brand plans which truly motivate consumers to use them: shoppers to buy them, and retailers to support them.
So far so good: but how new is this?
The omnichannel world merely throws this need into a sharper light: I would argue that it has been there for some time. I’m not sure there was ever a time when it was totally possible to delineate between a ‘shopper space’ and a ‘consumer space’. The world of digital has merely opened some people’s eyes to the reality that this behavior exists. Indeed, the Booz report refers in its first example to buying a kitchen. The need for consumer and shopper marketing to be integrated in this category preceded the social media revolution by some years. Eight years ago we studied this category and many others and found a highly complex, dare I say “omnichannel” path: web forums, multiple store visits to multiple chains, websites, online reviews, and word of mouth were all present. Web forums have been around for close to twenty years, and worth of mouth ever since there were words or mouths…
So if the situation isn’t new, is rather an amplification of an existing scenario, what do consumer goods practitioners need to do differently? Well, according to Booz, nothing much.
According to Booz, we need insights, we need to do content marketing (though what they actually talk about here appears to be more about a coordinated approach across platforms, rather than content per se), testing measuring and learning, and cooperation…
Well – there is nothing new there.
Despite this apparent new world, the required solution is largely the same as the required solution for marketing excellence, arguably for decades. But few have risen to this challenge yet, therefore that suggests that there are other, more fundamental barriers that must be addressed.
Marketing needs a radical overhaul
What is required is a fundamental rewiring of marketing, and its relationship to sales and retail. This will require changes to organizational structure, changes to KPIs, changes to roles and responsibilities. Without more radical shifts in the way that sales and marketing teams operate, this means nothing: it’s another fad. It is for this reason that the book I have just penned with Toby Desforges is sub-titled “Consumer – Shopper- Retailer – How marketing must reinvent itself in the age of the shopper”. Until these more fundamental shifts take place in the consumer goods ecosystem, then integration (and with it really effective marketing) will be a pipedream, and omnichannel will be consigned to the dumpster where buzzwords go to die.
Let’s make sure that doesn’t happen: let’s find a way to use this as an opportunity to challenge the marketing status quo and to create a new, Total Marketing approach, which is accessible to all, not just the mega budget mega teams that manage the biggest brands and the biggest accounts.
