There has been lots of handwringing around the consumer goods world. It has got harder to engage with shoppers as Covid has hit! Some shoppers are eschewing stores and heading online. Those that go to stores are loitering less, unsurprisingly less keen to linger in a store that they now see as a health risk. And retailers have reduced activity. Floor displays are fewer. In-store sales promoters are often banned as shoppers aren’t keen on too much human contact, and we don’t want to risk employees unnecessarily. And as for sampling? Forget it! No Shopper Activation! But we still have a job to do. We still need to engage with shoppers and influence their shopping behavior. The task remains the same, but the toolkit isn’t fit for purpose! How do we influence shoppers with our hands tied behind our backs? Fret not! There is a shopper marketing toolkit which is completely fit for purpose in 2020.
Having to change your shopper marketing toolkit is a good thing!
First, the good news. Shoppers are still going to stores. Actually, many stores are doing extremely well in terms of foot traffic. Secondly, you can still engage shoppers online too – though of course that also requires a different shopper marketing toolkit! But the really good news is that you can’t do what you used to do!
Why is that good news, I hear you ask? Because, unless you are a shopper marketing hero, not everything you used to do was perfect. In fact, our analysis suggests that up to seventy percent of in-store activity loses money! Much of our activity just loaded up loyal shoppers and didn’t move our brand consumption forward, didn’t drive anything beyond short term volume. Perhaps pressing pause on our old Shopper Marketing Toolkit and stopping some of that isn’t such a bad thing!
And I’m not blaming you. We’ve all been there. I’ve been there. We’re under pressure to hit our numbers, retailers are demanding this that and the other, and we are really busy. So we repeat activities that we did last year. We don’t evaluate as effectively as we should. What we do isn’t necessarily bad, but it isn’t optimized either.
Disruption forces us to change how we influence shopper behavior
Then Covid comes along. Business gets disrupted. Out usual Shopper Activation plans get canned. We can’t do all of the activities we used to. Believe me, this is an opportunity! Its challenging, but if we can reinvent the way we think about shoppers, and how we influence them, then we can step ahead of the competition. But what should we do? We need a new shopper marketing toolkit.
Take a step back to take a step forward – the most powerful tool in the Shopper Marketing Toolkit
In a recent post I shared a simple technique for rethinking our in-store marketing. It works for online and offline shopping, and is a powerful tool for re-inventing our marketing mix and improving it. But it doesn’t really answer the question: how do I influence shoppers when they aren’t stopping, and my usual tools of signs, displays and shopper activation aren’t available to me? At engage, we advocate utilizing a broad shopper marketing mix that has three elements: Availability (the choice of which products, pack formats we put in a store, and where we put them in the store); Communication (the message, media and media-placement we use); and Offer (the blend of price and promotion we use. But much of this is not an option at the moment.
A new Shopper Marketing Toolkit for influencing shopper behavior (OK – its not so new!)
What can we do when we can’t do our usual Shopper Activation? We focus on the tools that are always there! We can still change the range – the product and pack format we put in a store. We can change the placement too. Big floor displays might be harder, but there are still gondola ends. And we can remerchandise the home shelf. Communication is trickier – but without in-store associates and signs, we need to rely on the one piece of media that is always there – packaging! And while our promotion toolkit is narrower than before – we still have price – and that is massively influential, as we all know.
This Shopper Marketing Toolkit influences shoppers every day – not just for a few weeks
All of these things can have a huge influence on shopping behavior. We’ve worked on projects where remerchandising the home shelf in a supermarket (and nothing else) has driven category sales by over fifteen percent! Likewise, getting the right pack and price strategy by channel has helped our clients grow sales and profitability by twenty percent or more! And remember that changes to range, home shelf merchandising, or packaging: they are there for the shopper to see every day for months or years – offering the potential for far more impact than a two week campaign.
Taking an old toolkit and making it fit for purpose
So am I saying that what we need to do is return to that old-fashioned category management toolkit? Yes and no! The tools of category management have always been useful. At engage, we’ve always included them in our Shopper Marketing Toolkit because, simply put, they are tools that can influence shopper’s behavior. But they need to be used in a more focused way. Remember that process I mentioned before? We need those targeted Shopper Behavioral Objectives to guide us. With a clear focus on the target shopper, and powerful Shopper Behavioral Objectives, we can tune our range, merchandising, packaging and pricing strategies to influence shopping behavior anywhere. Whatever the circumstances.
With this Shopper Marketing Toolkit we don’t need displays, booths, promoters and samples. We can influence shopping behavior just by tuning what happens on the shelf.
This Shopper Marketing Toolkit influences shoppers that don’t want to engage
And it works even if a shopper is in a hurry. Arguably, it will work even better! Shoppers don’t need to consciously stop and think to behave differently. There is plenty of evidence that shows that shoppers are making subconscious decisions throughout their purchase journey. This makes sense. There is so much noise and complexity in a supermarket – there is no way that a shopper can process it all consciously. No. Shoppers are processing subconsciously. And that means we can nudge them in the right direction with some smart merchandising, clever pack and price combinations, or a packaging design that has exactly the right cues for the target shopper.
And of course, once we have our full arsenal of shopper marketing weaponry available again, we can use all of this, in complimentary fashion, to create a really powerful shopper marketing mix. That’s what we’ve been doing with our clients for the last fifteen years!
Turn these challenging times into an opportunity with a new Shopper Marketing Toolkit
This is a challenging time for the consumer goods industry. It is especially tough for those of us who are tasked with engaging with shoppers in-store. But the challenge is also an opportunity. An opportunity to create powerful shopper marketing approaches and stop relying on the formulaic approaches we’ve used in the past.
If you’d like help in guiding your team to win with shoppers in the store, no matter which store, no matter what the current conditions are, please get in touch now. If you’d like to know more about how shoppers make decisions, let me know. If you just want to learn more, just drop me a line. I’m always happy to connect. I’m sure we can help!
