I’ve just created a new twitter account for all those little instances of “new thinking” or “dead thinking” that pop up between bleats on my blog.
Follow me @the_orangesheep, and when you see your own instances of dead thinking (or new thinking!) remember to tag me or use #dead-thinking so the whole flock can follow.
happy tweeting bleating
the orange sheep
I am on the record as being a huge advocate for ‘new thinking’ in shopper marketing (and, in fact, in any field).
But in reaffirming that point of view, I want to emphasize the second word in that phrase: thinking. There’s a big difference between ‘new thinking’ and ‘doing what’s new’: just following every fad or idea hawked by the latest VC-rich wunderkind.
Thinking should be, by definition, a critical & selective process. Yet too often today we see marketers following the ‘flavor of the month’ without knowing why. Or worse, without any objective for doing so. How many people have sat in a meeting in the past 5 years where someone proclaimed, “I feel like we should be doing something with the Facebook”? (Or ‘the Twitter’, or ‘this near field communications stuff’, or…).
I call this particular disease the ‘solution-looking-for-a-problem’.
This little sheep offers up two reasons this paradox plagues business thinking right now:
1) ‘solutions’ are currency in today’s corporate world: When ‘solutions’ are the way to the top, people start ‘imagining’ problems to address with whatever ‘solution’ they have found. (Hell, I’ve done it myself!! Why let a great idea go to waste just because it’s not solving a problem (or tapping an opportunity) that’s meaningful to your business?)
2) decision-makers are not educated or familiar enough to be effective filters: with a lot of digital or truly innovative ‘solutions’, managers are often entirely unfamiliar with the technology or environment they’re looking at, because the speed of change is so rampant. When the content is foreign, it’s difficult to be a critical thinker, impossible to make an informed choice and easier to follow the lead of a (any!) person you believe understands things.. which is often the person pitching the idea in the first place.
Given these two issues, we end up pursuing a lot of “ideas in solutions’ clothing” and, sadly, end up missing opportunities to solve real problems.
A classic case for me in Shopper Marketing are QR codes. Everyone thinks they’re ‘kinda neat’. Everyone wants to be on the bandwagon (lest someone crucify them in 2 years because they ‘didn’t see that trend coming’). When you look around though, who is really applying them in a way that meaningfully addresses a shopper need?
QR codes as artwork? It's no less useful than some other applications out there.
“Snap the code to view our website” is widely used and hardly helpful. I probably have no interest in your website, and if I did, guessing your URL is hardly rocket science. As a shopper, I want you to help me meaningfully. Solve a real problem or challenge I have while shopping.
Imagine instead that you gave me an app to snap the QR codes on your products when I am at home and close to running out, which auto-add a reminder to my calendar for my commute home (or text my better half to pick it up later?). You just saved me getting home and seeing the empty pack again.
Not everyone is QR-clueless though: SCJohnson used a QR code in a helpful way, to explain their new Drano product which includes both a tool & gel. A new concept that could be difficult to comprehend, and hard to convey through packaging alone, so they included a QR code on the shelf display to show shoppers the product in action via a web video on their smartphone. Bravo Drano!
Your turn… What’s the best thinking you’ve seen (or would you apply) to turn QR codes into a true solution to a real problem?
the orange sheep
This week we lost an amazing innovative thinker, whose company showed us how dramatically retail experience could be changed. Steve Jobs, all I can say is thank you for decades of progressive thinking. I will miss your inspiration.
I have frequently wondered what Steve Jobs would have done in CPG retail if he had sold apples instead of Apples? The Cupertino company’s retail approach really epitomises the type of revolution – not evolution – that grocery retailing needs if it is going to survive as a profitable industry for all players.
Apple (whether Jobs was directly involved or not) broke the mould in technology retailing when it created the Apple retail experience. They didn’t just make a sexier looking store – as Jobs himself once opined: design is not just about the veneer. Apple changed the way you browse, the way you buy, the way you experience an Apple product at the retail store. They ditched the rows of dormant laptops with stock photo screen savers and added open, active, internet-connected models that you could play with for 3 hours (if that’s what it took for you to get to know Mac). Apple asked, hey, why do you need to go line up to check-out? Couldn’t we check you out anywhere in the store with a mobile device? And what if instead of a handful of unknowledgeable staff that have too much to do, we provide enthusiastic Apple ‘geniuses’ floating around with plenty of time to chat with you about your uncertainty about switching from a PC, or helping you with editing tips for your iMovie project?
Apple re-engineered the retail experience to make it fit the way that shoppers wanted to shop – even if shoppers could not articulate it exactly that way.
Buying an iPod or a MacBook at Apple – or just browsing there – became an experience that made PC buying at your average electronics store seem like a life sentence in Siberia. So what would Apple do with the desolate and uninspiring canvas that is the American grocery store?
We could speculate on Jobs’ specific ideas, but probably fall embarrassingly short of where he might have taken us. Instead, I’ll turn to Jobs’ own words to issue a challenge to CPG innovators to change the way we think:
“Innovation comes from people meeting up in the hallways or calling each other at 10:30 at night with a new idea, or because they realized something that shoots holes in how we’ve been thinking about a problem.”
How often do we look to “shoot holes” in the current experience of grocery retail? Big ideas in grocery retail are few and far between… lately we just seem to try to augment the current (broken?) experience with ‘innovative’ trimmings. Jobs once told a programmer, “You’ve baked a really lovely cake, but then you’ve used dog shit for frosting”… in grocery retail, I wonder if we’re trying to frost a stale cake to start with?
So here’s the challenge: SHOOT A HOLE! What is the glaring short-fall you see in grocery retail today? Post your thoughts below.
If you read any of the industry rags this past week, you no doubt read about Sainsbury’s in-market test of a shopping cart with an integrated iPad dock. Heck, this story is so “nouveau-geek-sexy” it even made the mainstream media (like the LA Times for example).
The big question is whether this is a true “sticky” idea* or another flash-in-the-pan fad… and for me that means asking a key question about the concept’s origin:
“Is this idea grounded in a key shopper need – something shoppers will see as a ‘positive interruption’ to their usual shopping experience?” If the answer is yes, then I’d bet on success.
Otherwise, this is probably another idea led simply by the availability of the technology: what I like to call a “solution looking for a problem”… and in that case, destined for the annals of retail failures (‘retailures’ perhaps?).
Too often, ‘innovation’ in the shopping experience is driven by the inventors of the technology, fixturing or packaging ideas saying “hey, look what we can make!”. To be fair (whether by luck or good management?!) those solutions sometimes hit the mark and solve a shopper issue. Experience tells me though that often the ‘creators’ behind those ideas have no more idea why that idea worked than they know why the 19 ideas before it didn’t.
So what of this ‘iTrolley’ idea at Sainsbury’s? The orange sheep expects that this idea’s success may be measured differently at the end of the day, depending on who you ask. I am not sure the positive outcomes are the ones that Sainsbury’s or their tech partner, SkyGo, might be shooting for. The UK retailer has teamed up with the online news and sport media purveyor to place the docks on trolleys – presumably so that shoppers can access SkyGo while they pick up their chips and stir-in curry mix. Could be a stretch.
However, if I know shoppers in the UK, something tells me that Sainsbury’s might find a silver lining – this idea probably hits a few shopper chords and might fulfill a few needs. I predict that we’ll see shoppers using it to enable handsfree use of their iPad as a shopping list tool, or to zap an email to the kids to ask them if they need anything while I’m in-store. And in fact, if Sainsbury’s (or another retailer) tie up the hardware with a shopping list app – and perhaps with RFID technology to help find items on a list in the store – we really might be getting to something that makes a difference to shoppers.
So innovation or gimmick: if Sainsbury puts it to work for shoppers needs – and not just those of SkyGo – I think this one might stick.
the orange sheep
*If you haven’t yet read the Heath brothers’ book “Made to Stick”, go to their site now and buy it.
One of the most frequent questions at the start of every shopper insights or shopper marketing discussion, forum or team is undoubtedly “how do you define shopper vs consumer?”. The answers are diverse and the discussions always interesting – but one piece of dead thinking that seems to keep bubbling up really bothers this orange sheep.
I could go into detail on the problem, but one well-seasoned CPG marketeer summed it up for me perfectly when we discussed this question recently: “some people seem to talk about shoppers and consumers as two different species – aren’t they all just the same people in the end?” Bingo! I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Organizationally, so many CPGs have split brand marketing (and consumer insights) from trade marketing (and shopper insights), so this perspective is perhaps just a ‘symptom of the system’. But excuses aside, it’s time to get over this exaggerated delineation and consider a new paradigm in which we recognize the shopper and consumer as elements of the same people.
And this is where some new thinking for shopper marketeers might just draw on some ancient (but very ‘alive’) thinking that Plato first shared more than 2300 years before the first supermarket opened.
In his “Allegory of the Chariot”, Plato described the human soul as a charioteer that is pulled by two horses: one representing the rational positive and moral impulses of human nature, and the other representing the soul’s irrational passions and desires. The charioteer’s challenge is to steer the chariot forward as the two horses often wish to take different paths. In Plato’s words, “the driving is necessarily difficult and troublesome”.
the orange sheep started to think about this allegory in the context of shopper and consumer – certainly not because one is rational and the other irrational, but isn’t this similar to the challenging decisions that people make every day as they balance their “consumer needs” and “shopper needs”. Just go with me for a second on this.
If we define shopper and consumer as two different sets of needs that the “modern charioteer” must steer along the path to purchase, is the role not similar… and similarly challenging?
I like to define the two “horses” by the base needs that our inner shopper and consumer respectively represent:
Plato's chariot evolves into the modern shopping cart
Consider how this “Desire//Acquire” paradigm changes the way we might think about all the different aspects of shopper understanding: take missions for example. A simple shopping mission (perhaps the simplest and most common) for milk or bread. Our inner consumer might desire a fresh brioche from that quaint little bakery in the next suburb with the best bread in the city. Our inner shopper though, wants to acquire it quickly in a place close to the route home from work, and where she can be in and out in a couple minutes so she sees her family sooner tonight. Oh and she is short on cash and that bakery won’t take plastic.
So as charioteer, a person makes some decisions on how to find a path to purchase that both horses can agree to run …and ends up with a simpler italian loaf from the corner store (hey, it’s better than the nearly-expired WonderBread from the gas station!).
This ‘respectful borrowing’ of Plato’s chariot can re-define so many other things in our conversation of shopper marketing as well: including how we think about shopper marketing and consumer marketing as disciplines and teams within our organizations… which I’ll pick up in a future post.
the orange sheep
Data powerhouse IRI published a report this week that got a lot of press and while there was plenty of useful data in IRI’s offering, this little sheep was baffled that the one ‘hook’ that seemed to get re-printed, re-tweeted and discussed on the the various shopper marketing threads across ‘the interwebs’ was that “despite increasing fuel costs”, people are still visiting 5 different stores every week to get their households needs.
The fact that this idea took hold, just highlights again some fundamental pieces of ‘dead thinking’ that I think are holding back shopper marketing success:
I discussed the second point in a recent post, as one of the three biggest ‘thinking impediments’ holding shopper marketers back, so let’s focus on the first point for today.
Full disclosure: I am a bit of a “mission understanding evangelist”, and have spent thousands of hours working with CPG companies to understand shopper missions both qualitatively and quantitatively in recent years. In that time, every discussion on missions has had to start with a major investment in alignment on what the different parties mean when they say “mission”.
Frequently, the word “mission” and the word “trip” are used interchangeably – and often you can throw the word “basket” in with them to further confuse things. Whilstever we use these three words as synonyms, we will never get beyond a superficial understanding of missions… and will keep being surprised by insights like those delivered in IRI’s article.
As I see it, a “shopping trip” is exactly what it implies: a physical journey to one or more places to shop. A “shopper mission” on the other hand, is driven – just as a secret agent’s mission or a soldier’s mission is – by a specific objective(s) that define the choices the shopper makes along their trip. A shopper’s “mission” will be something like “get the items I need for a successful family dinner” or “find a remedy for my son’s cough”: not “drive to Kroger” or “stop in at Walgreens”.
A “basket” is just the “collection of solutions” to fulfill a mission, and while those solutions are sometimes enough to infer what might have driven the shopper’s mission, it’s just as easy to misinterpret a mission if you rely on this data set alone. Unfortunately, we have gallons of data available to describe “baskets”, and to describe “trips” (consumer panel data, frequent shopper data) but so little that gives an insight into “missions” (shopper needs, objectives & motivations). So historically, our industry has settled too often on using “baskets & trips” to talk about “missions”, and swept aside the critical difference between the two.
Which brings me back to the story that sparked so much attention this week. If we really understood shoppers’ motivations, rather than trying to infer them (I am tempted to add “poorly”), we might see that there is not really anything too surprising about shoppers behaving this way… regardless of today’s gas prices.
Those 5 weekly visits to different stores might very well be motivated by different missions, with different contexts, which makes it entirely sensible and logical that the shopper is fulfilling them at different places at different times. Who says gas prices are part of their motivation at all?
In fact, there’s plenty of ways shoppers might just be saving gas money by shopping across more stores as well: for example, by taking advantage of the chance to grab a few items at the drugstore they walk past at lunchtime, then getting some items the next day from the dollar store next to the little league field while they are right there for their kid’s game. Two extra stores shopped, no extra gas money. And that doesn’t even start to touch on the giant suburban mega malls, where I could actually leave my car parked in one place and stop at a supermarket, pet supercenter, baby store, supermarket and Target without using a single extra drop of gas.
So let’s not leap to conclusions about how “surprising” or “illogical” shoppers’ behavior is, based solely on data about their number of trips, or basket composition.
The marketers that invest in truly understanding shopper missions – and, inherently, the motivations that define them – will be the winners moving forward.
the orange sheep
When Tesco announced their plans for a Fresh’n'Easy loyalty card last week, I was pleased to read their promise that the program would be ‘like no other’ that we’ve seen in the US. Because the last thing we need is more card member schemes that neither drive loyalty, nor offer the shopper real rewards.
Some retail marketers might take offense at those two assertions, but over recent years, both shopper conversations and published data points have told the orange sheep that something isn’t quite right in loyalty-card-land. And I think the reason why is obvious: because retailers are getting what they need from their programs, and haven’t really noticed that shoppers are giving a collective yawn.
Retailers the world over have been following the lead of Tesco (and their card program partner, dunnhumby) in turning their cardmember programs into the ultimate database of shopper buying behavior for tailoring their marketing programs, store design and category management, with great effect. So it’s great for retailers, but what about the shoppers these programs are supposed to reward?
Nielsen has published figures that show that loyalty cards are not a major driver of retailer equity (aka loyalty) – especially in the US – and it’s little wonder. If you take a look at the key-chain of the average American shopper, she’s got more bar-coded little tags hanging off there than she has keys.
Talking to shoppers over the years, I’ve heard two things over and over about rewards programs:
After a decade working with major CPGs and retailers in the pursuit of truly “shopper-centric” marketing strategies, this orange sheep has honed in on a few ‘classic’ pieces of “dead thinking” that have slowed down a client’s progress, time and time again.
Here I’ll share the top three pieces of “common (non)sense” that I think we need to overcome as an industry, and open the floor to you all to add to the list.
#1: “The P.A.L.M. Problem”
No, this is not to do with ‘trees’, ‘springs’ or reading your future from the lines on your hands. PALM in this sense stands for “People Are Like Me” – the all-too-common (and slightly narcissistic) view of far too many marketers that they know shopping, because they shop and they’ve been in plenty of stores themselves.
Especially when talking about shopper missions and trip types, I am too often greeted by a shocked look on the faces of people I consider to be very intelligent marketeers. I distinctly remember the reaction from one very smart and successful marketer at a major CPG company when we introduced the idea of the shopper that made 3-4 quick trips per week and rarely did a major stock-up: “Why would anyone in their right mind shop like that?” she said. It was so different to her own way of shopping, and what just seems ‘rational’ (i.e. to stock up once a week, save time and money).
Well, folks, it’s time to get over this one. Shopper needs and motivations are as varied as favorite colors: yours are highly unlikely to be the same as mine, nor the next guy in line. If you don’t believe me, just go stand in a supermarket, a convenience store or a corner store and watch shoppers for ten minutes. I guarantee you won’t see a line of lemmings all acting the same… and perhaps NONE that shop the same way as you. Indeed, you probably won’t even see two that behave the same.
Many companies are investing in ethnography and shop-alongs for specific shopper research projects. The most successful have started making it standard practice to send senior executives and decision-makers on these exercises, to open their eyes to the ‘other world out there’. More should follow their lead.
#2: The Myth of “Shoppus Rationalus”
Once we get over the idea that all shoppers think and act like us, we need to get marketers off the crack that shoppers behave rationally. This would be ever-so-convenient for us as marketers, but ‘the rational shopper’ is as much a myth as bigfoot, el chupacabra or mermaids. In fact, if you gave me $10,000 to bet on one of them being real, I’d go with mermaids being real before the rational shopper.
Plenty of great shopper researchers before me (Sorensen, Scammel-Katz,Lindstrom, Underhill et al) have all highlighted the role of emotion in shopping, yet still many of the strategies and tactics of shopper marketers reflect that hard-to-let-go belief that rationality always triumphs in the end. This myth is the downfall of so many great ideas, as it leads us to put aside meaningful insights simply because they can’t be defended logically, or, rationalized. (As an aside on rational thinking, if you’re in any marketing field, and have not read Dan Ariely’s “Predicatably Irrational”, go to his blog and buy it now.)
Last year, the orange sheep read an article by pricing research agency, Vocatus, that challenged the concept of the ‘homo oeconomicus’ (the person that always chooses the purchase that makes the best economic sense). To this little sheep, that article was a breath of fresh air in the field of pricing – and more people in the field of shopper marketing need to embrace the idea of shoppers making emotional decisions that defy logic. Perhaps then we can start imagining a new world of retailing – one that makes sense, precisely because it makes no sense.
#3: “The String-Pulling Delusion”
This one might hit a little too close to home for some marketers, because it sucks the air out of that powerful feeling that our own marketing strategies are our companies’ greatest assets. Indeed, when I’ve discussed this one in industry forums in the past, it gets the prickliest response, and nobody feels that they are guilty of committing this particular crime against good thinking. But it’s prevalent in every marketing organization I have ever worked with, and not showing any signs of going way.
It’s the mental illusion that the majority of what shoppers do in stores is a direct response to some piece of stimulus that marketers have provided: the delusion that shoppers are marionettes and we’re pulling the strings.
If you don’t believe this one, just look at the ‘causal factors’ that are utilized in the sales models and marketing mix models of so many manufacturers and retailers: how many of them are ‘marketing levers’ and how many are related to shoppers’ lives and the context of their trip? Whoever stops to consider that more people bought Red Bull in their store this week because exams are coming up and they’re all pulling all-nighters… no, it must be because you took 10 cents off per can.
In this last piece of nonsense, we see bright and clear that shoppers are not at the center of shopper marketing strategies, and we’re not even close to putting the shopper first. Instead, we’re still putting marketing strategies at the center of the universe, and at best just paying a little more attention to shoppers as the target of our own particular brand of wizardry.
That type of thinking will get us nowhere.
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There’s more than three, but these are some classics (which I think in ‘Pareto’ terms account for the ‘big head’) to get the ball rolling. The sheep is interested in your thoughts and whether you’ve seen these problems too. And even moreso, in how you’ve overcome them.
Agree or disagree… let the discussion begin.
the orange sheep
