Channels have been on my mind this week. Not just because I was in Jakarta running a workshop with a client on Channel Strategy : but because every news story I read seemed to be about channel fragmentation and proliferation: small store formats from big box retailers;online retailers such as Amazon opening up bricks and mortar stores, or vice versa; and even from a more fishy angle, seafood in vending machines as seen in Spain recently (see links below). 
Channels matter, because it is channels that shoppers choose first. The first shopping decision, as I’ve discussed many times here before, is where to shop. Fragmentation and proliferation of channel choice is putting power into the hands of shoppers, and manufacturers have an opportunity to use that.
Proliferation of channels, be it online, bricks, smaller stores or whatever, means that the mix of shoppers in each channel is likely to be less homogeneous. In the days when shoppers had little choice, everyone had to shop in the same grocery store. Now with choice, comes decision, and that means different groups of individuals (segments) will make different decisions, and that means they can be targeted more effectively.
With higher levels of shopper insight and data than ever before, it is becoming easier to understand the differences between the people who shop in each channel. As an example, according to last week’s Marketing Daily article, there is a high density of older people shopping on the internet, and also a high number of them are bargain hunters. Unfortunately (which I wish this article had mentioned) the two are not exactly the same – there are a high number of “boomers” who are not bargain hunters. But the opportunities to target shoppers by channel are high (if you wanted to target boomers, OR bargain hunters, for example).
Once a brand understands which shoppers they are targeting, there is an opportunity to map those target shoppers onto channels, so as to identify the environments where there is the richest mix of the brands’ target shoppers.
