Multi-channel shopper marketing

A couple of months ago I write a post about how I saw the discipline of shopper marketing (SM) evolve into digital shopper marketing (DSM) and then into Multi-Channel Shopper Marketing (MCSM).

Now I've had a little while to think about this some more and work with clients on this, I thought I would share some more of my thoughts and observations.

1. Shoppers are now multi-channel
It is not simply the case that online marketing influences online purchases and traditional marketing influences in-store transactions. Online and offline are now just different channels, each potentially contributing to the acquisition and retention of the customer over a range of time.

2. Influence has a huge part to play
The path to purchase starts with initial awareness and continues up to the point that the shopper reaches for the product. In between these two events, there is a wealth of channels, touch-points and devices that the shopper uses to make their purchasing choices. Google calls this the Zero Moment Of Truth (or ZMOT for short) and has produced a number of studies to show just how many information sources a modern multi-channel shopper uses before they commit to a sale.

3. The shopper is getting more savvy
We now live in an age of austerity for most people, where nearly everyone is watching what they spend (in a way, this is the way it always should have been). This translates to a change in shopper behaviour, where they now search around for the best price of brands / commodity products and a lot more now look out for discount codes and promotions. This has a clear effect on eCommerce sites, where a lot more visitors now jump out of the transaction funnel just before they compete the payment process...to look at voucher sites and to hunt down any relevant offers.

In the future I hope to dig into the ways that brands and  retailers can utilise this behaviour and get the maximum benefit from the new ways that multi-channel shoppers act.

The digital path to purchase

The path to purchase is dead, long live the path to purchase.

Today's shoppers now have a number of tools at their fingertips to help them chose which products to buy and consumer technology has been the facilitator of this.

Research from Google Analytics has found that over a two-day period customers now interact with a brand 4.3 times before making a purchase. Furthermore the average U.S. shopper now interfaces with a total of 10.4 traditional and online media sources prior to purchasing. That's a lot of browsing before buying (or looking before booking, if you're in an industry such as online travel).
Furthermore, according to further research by Google, online customers are now making the majority of their purchasing decision before engaging with a sales representative,

There's no doubt that the traditional way that shoppers purchase has now evolved and the marketing to these people has changed with it. However a lot of the ideas that the more technology-savvy shopper marketing agency might suggest to a client (e.g. QR codes and online store check-ins via FourSquare or Facebook Places) just don't make the impact required... and therefore turn out to be expensive experiments.

My view is that optimising shopper engagement across the path to purchase needs an integrated approach, one that pulls together: marketing, useful functionality, content and online retailing... then measured and learned from. Without this, brands and their agencies will continue to just experiment.

Digital Shopper Marketing - the new influence

The world of retail is now multi-channel and customers now shop across a number of different devices, at times of day to suit them and in different ways to how they used to (convenience vs. cost, etc.).

 

The area of Shopper Marketing, which originally looked mainly at things such as the in-store path to purchase has now started to merge with the eCommerce / multi-channel retail and even online marketing. This has formed the relatively new discipline of Digital Shopper Marketing.

Here's my take on this:

1. Brands, by placing themselves between the channels of influence and the point of retail (e.g. the store), can affect the buying decisions of the customer
2. A lot of customers now use the Internet to inform their buying decisions (e.g.recommendation and comparison sites, social media, brand micro-sites, etc.)
3. The digital influence doesn't just happen at home and in-front of a static PC these days. Users search sites at work, they have laptops when on the move, they use tablets in bed and over half of the UK population now has a smartphone.

So how can brands disrupt a consumer and get the maximum affect? Well this depends a lot on what consumers you are targetting, their shopping preferences and the mix of marketing that is required.
For example, a particular segment (let's call them "shopper savvy mums") are more interested in ways to:

• Saving: Using vouchers to make the family budget stretch that little bit further
• Sharing: Commenting and gaining opion via Social Media
• Sampling: Trying new or improved products to optimise spend and overall family well-being

The secret for digital shopper marketing suppliers is to find out what works for their client's target audience. And I''ll leave you to find out how to do this for yoursleves.

Multi-channel retail meets Shopper Marketing

For many of us who come from the digital world, the mere existence of a whole area of retail analysis called Shopper Marketing is a bit a surprise.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopper_marketing

And even those like me who are aware... but talk, write or generally think about multi-channel retailing, tend to focus on digital first and in-store second.

But if the statistic in that above Wikipedia article that '70% of brand selections are still made in stores' is to be believed... then online needs to get realistic about the influence it really has at the point of sale. Now I've no actual evidence to contradict this figure, but it does feel a rather high percentage... given that a lot of people will already have made their choice up about the brands they want before they get to the point of purchase.

Over the last few months I've built up my understanding of Shopper Marketing, having worked alongside an agency that specifically does that sort of thing. I actually have to admit I am actually quite impressed with some of the outputs of their work; producing empirical results from their in-store analysis which puts a lot of website testing to shame. For example, heat maps are carried out on different product aisles in various stores from a selection of viewer angles.

In short, digital user experience practitioners could learn a lot from the effort that goes into store planning (where to put products and how customers get to them).

So it does raise the important issue of how these two disciplines come together to:

• Understand the roles that in-store and online now have
• Map the Paths to Purchase (both Digital to Store and Store to Digital)
• Grow customer loyalty and retain existing customers

In short, multi-channel retail / eCommerce and shopper marketing now need to merge into a single area of specialisation... Multi-channel shopper marketing.