Shopper Marketing

How to Increase Purchase Decisions at the Point of Sale

Markus Ståhlberg, Ville Maila

• Editorial: Kogan Page
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780749464721
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Negocios y empresa
• Categoría: Publicidad

Shopper Marketing details how marketers can influence the buying decision in-store. The 35 contributors from top companies around the world have packed the book with practical advice on shopper needs and trends, retail environments, effective packaging and much more to equip product and brand managers, packaging experts, merchandising specialists and more with the tools they need to be successful in this field of sales promotion.

The second edition of Shopper Marketing has been fully updated to include a new forward by marketing guru Philip Kotler and 12 new articles that reflect the current changes in the fast growing area, focusing specifically on the international scope, the online presence and the future of shopper marketing. New case studies from India, China, Brazil and Japan also add to the depth and breadth of the first edition.

PART ONE

Definition: what is shopper marketing?

01

Science of shopping

PACO UNDERHILL

Paco Underhill is founder, CEO and president of Envirosell. He has spent more than 25 years conducting research on the different aspects of shopping behaviour. Envirosell has established its reputation as an innovator in commercial research and as an advocate for consumer-friendly packaging and shopping environments.

I am a bald, nerdy, 54-year-old American research wonk. No one has ever thought of me as being fashionable. The woman I live with complains that my pants are routinely too short and my ties never match the suit I’m wearing – so banish me to Long Island! What I do know about is shops and shopping. My day job, which I’ve been doing for 23 years, is CEO of a testing agency for prototype stores. Envirosell, the company I founded and run, operates in 27 countries across the globe – in the past six months, my work has taken me from Dublin to Dubai.

If you’d asked me years ago whether I’d end up as a retail expert, I’d have asked you what insane asylum you’d escaped from. Then again, I’ve always been good at watching people. Growing up with a terrible stutter, I learned to look as a way of understanding social rules. I’ve turned a coping mechanism for a handicap into a profession (my mother just calls me an overpaid voyeur) for which I walk shops and malls across the world for a living. It is part Zen and part commerce.

As I stroll around, I look at store windows, since they are an essential part of the shopping experience. In his delightful book Made in America, Bill Bryson writes about the US national history of stores and shopping, describing the big picture windows that characterized turn-of-the-century retailing. When I look out of my office window in the Ladies’ Mile district of New York City, I see those same windows. They remain the same today as they were some 120 years ago, when cast-iron construction made the big window possible and reinvented the act of shopping.

A century ago, people took the time to stop and look into store windows. I imagine them strolling along, stopping at a tall window and peering through the glass, curious to view the latest fashions, just-arrived products or newest appliances. Today, the ambling window-shopping pedestrian may be an Edwardian concept. Most people look straight ahead and walk with a quick, determined gait. Everyone seems to be in a hurry. They walk a lot faster now than they did in the old days.

Throughout modern times, a number of factors have affected the average walking patterns of pedestrians in urban areas. One of the most significant of these is traffic signals. William H Whyte, the American author and urbanist, wrote at length about the platooning effect of pedestrian movement. He said that, with traffic lights set for the speed of cars, people pile up on street corners as they wait for the light to change. What often results from this pile-up is a pattern of light and dense patches of people moving down the sidewalks of urban shopping streets.

Now let’s consider how individuals behave as they move within these dense patches of shopping humanity. Have you ever noticed that, whether you are on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue or cruising your local mall, you and your fellow shoppers are able to move in incredibly dense clusters and not touch or bump into each other? Walking speeds, sidewalk density patterns, and the ways people behave when they walk in tight clusters have an important effect on the success of store windows, particularly in cities. Even if you did want to stop and look in a window, you would quickly be pushed past it, as you wouldn’t want to risk disturbing the cluster you are walking with. That’s why window displays need to instantly grab attention. But many don’t. Take the CVS and Rite Aid drugstores that blanket my neighbourhood. I wonder in which century the merchandise managers were born. The windows are so crowded with boxes of bleach and detergent, packages of razors and soap on sale, six-packs of soda, cosmetics, hair goo, and whatever else can be squeezed into the window space that it is impossible to focus on any single product or even see clearly what is really being promoted!

Maybe in 1928 it was important for a drugstore to advertise depth of selection or the range of products offered. Maybe then shoppers had the time and solitary moments of shopping to really take a look at a window and examine the display. Maybe then crowded windows made more sense. But, these days, merchandisers are lucky if pedestrians give their store windows a passing glance. Windows must be quick reads if you expect busy shoppers walking in dense clusters to see them. They must be both simple enough so that the products can be clearly identified and creative enough to catch the busy pedestrian’s eye. Savvy shoppers should be able to tell, just by briefly looking at a store window, who the core market of that store is, whether the store fits their personal style or not, and how long a typical trip inside the store will take. Especially as today’s retail market is so highly competitive, if done properly windows can function as an important brand-identity tool. A clever, catchy, clear window can be the result of the best and most effective marketing dollars you spend.

Unfortunately, many major store chains still have no idea what a good window means and how it can contribute to their store’s success. Instead, from New York City to the local strip mall, from drug market to mass market, from video rental to jewellery shop, the store window is fast becoming a lost art form and a neglected marketing tool. While fashion retailers pay more attention to windows than other industries, they, too, have their own failings. At many apparel chains, window designers create standard, monthly windows for all stores, regardless of the size or location of an individual store. Even when designers create fancy flagship stores that resemble retail palaces, they often completely ignore the state of their street frontage – by far the most highly visible part of the store.

What makes a good window isn’t getting easier to describe. But it does start with an understanding that, while the average overall vision of ‘first world’ citizens is deteriorating thanks to an ageing population, the general connection between our eyes and our brains is getting much more sophisticated. Thanks to television, film and computers, our ability to process images and icons is improving. We no longer read letter by letter but, rather, word clump by word clump. In the 1930s, French essayist André Bazin wrote about how cinematic language evolved so that movies successfully and believably told the stories of years – or even lifetimes – in the span of just a few hours. Today, MTV has pushed that evolution, taking visual poetry into a mainstream vocabulary that viewers truly understand. A billboard can tell a more sophisticated joke today than it could 20 years ago. A 15-second commercial can allude to an entire plotline. Likewise, when it comes to window displays, shoppers today can infer and understand more from less because they possess an enormous vocabulary of visual images. Yet the mainstream window-design profession still doesn’t get it.

As retailers, you must be tactical; you must know who your customer is, and you must create a window that he or she will understand. For instance, Kiehl’s, which sells all-natural bath and body products, uses its windows as a pulpit for highlighting social issues, a practice perfectly aligned with the priorities of its customers.

My favourite windows are in France. I know a man who runs his family’s boutique off the main square in Strasbourg. He takes enormous pleasure in his windows. They tell jokes. They have political messages. They relate history. The clothes are part of the plot. Sometimes his windows make me chuckle. His store always distinguishes itself among all of the shops on the crowded square because his windows always make an impression. As busy as I might be as I walk down the street, his windows make me stop in my tracks. Even more, they almost always tempt me to come inside the shop and take a good look around.

So to modern retailers I propose the following: let’s liberate our design teams. Let’s take our lessons from Absolut Vodka’s legendary advertisements, Calvin Klein’s dark, clever ads and Benetton’s stridently correct ones. Windows can be like literature. It’s OK if not everybody gets the story you’re telling. What is important is that the target customer gets it.

02

Point of view on shopper marketing

GORDON PINCOTT

Gordon Pincott is chairman of Global Solutions at Millward Brown. For over 25 years he has been actively involved in the strategic planning and research evaluation of brands and communications. Millward Brown is one of the world’s leading research companies, with offices in more than 50 countries, and expert in marketing research and brand consulting.

Introduction

Shopper marketing is becoming an increasing focus for many of the world’s major brands. Reaching people using traditional means has become more difficult. Media audiences have fragmented and people are increasingly annoyed by unsolicited advertising intrusions. But all consumers will eventually arrive at the point of purchase.

A 2007 study conducted by Deloitte in the United States suggests that the portion of marketing budgets devoted to point-of-purchase activity doubled from 3 per cent in 2004 to 6 per cent in 2007, and is expected to reach 8 per cent by 2010.

Defining shopper marketing

More often than not ‘shopper marketing’ is directed toward exactly the same person whom brands target outside of stores with TV and other forms of activity. But too often we observe a complete lack of integration between in-store and out-of-store activity. After all, when consumers enter a store as ‘shoppers’, they do not suddenly become blank slates. They arrive in a particular mood, having chosen this particular retail outlet to fulfil their particular mission. They arrive with opinions concerning quality and value. But, even more importantly, they arrive with well-developed preferences for brands, based on associations built up over time from advertising messages, word of mouth and personal experience. On average around two-thirds of people know what brand they want to buy before they go into the store. About three-quarters of these ‘intenders’ follow through on their plans. For shopper marketing to be effective, then, it needs to work with the predispositions people bring with them to the store. Two broad strategies that can be employed to effect this are identification and disruption.

Strategy one: identification

For brands that are the preferred choice of many consumers, the key point-of-purchase task is to make them as easy as possible for shoppers to find. In a bricks-and-mortar store, the location, scale and visibility of the fixture, as well as the location and prominence of the brand within the fixture, are essential factors.

In online retailing, the dynamics of identification are no different, but it is also critical to think about how the brand will be presented online. Will shoppers readily identify a brand from a tiny packshot, a logo or a description?

Regardless of whether shoppers are in-store or online, many factors could undermine the identification strategy, such as a change of product location or packaging. An increase in price will cause the shopper to hesitate and consider alternatives, and of course the ultimate sin is to be out of stock.

Strategy t...