shopper marketing

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UNdead thinking: Walgreens closes the app gap!

Posted by theorangesheep on April 1, 2012
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I am sure they did not have time to pull it together just because of my last post about poor apps in grocery retailing, but in a serendipitous piece of timing, Walgreens launched a great answer to that blog this past week with a truly helpful app.

Built on top of the usual retail app ‘standards’ (mobile coupons and digital circular) are some TRULY helpful features for shoppers, including some really useful features for managing prescriptions – like the scan & refill feature – plus a pill reminder, to make sure you remember to take those pills long after you leave the store. As a shopper marketer, I think this is a great step forward… but more importantly, as a shopper I see this really making a difference in my preference for where to fill prescriptions.

The pill reminder is a great example of adding a feature that is helpful to the shopper, even if the benefit to Walgreens is at best indirect (ie. if I remember to take them, perhaps I will refill more often).  Adding this feature says “we really do care that you feel better”, not just “we really do care that you buy your pills at Walgreens”.

Even better, Walgreens took a big step that few others have done: putting high-production-quality TV time behind ads for the app, letting shoppers know what it can do for them.  And why not… when you have a great app, you want it on as many phones as possible.

So congrats, Walgreens, for setting a new bar… and overcoming the dead thinking in so many other retail apps.

— the orange sheep 

The ‘app gap’: dead thinking in branded apps

Posted by theorangesheep on March 18, 2012
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An interesting insight struck me when I was recently asked to comment on ‘the most useful apps for the connected shopper’: very few of the best shopping apps come from a grocery retailer or CPG manufacturer.

My list of great apps (that I use!) included Key Ring, Card Star, Fast Mall, Coupon Sherpa, Shopkick (etc…) with with nary a grocery retailer or CPG brand in sight.

To be fair to other retail channels, there’s quite a few useful apps in the general merch/ specialty retail space. But even on this list there’s a severe lack of grocery retailers (okay, Target made the list but their app isn’t really for grocery shopping).

There is NO shortage of retailer or CPG apps out there, and some are quite useful (like Meijer meal box, or Stella Artois’s bar guide) but the real ‘killer apps’ for grocery shopping tend to come from third party developers.  My best inference is that this phenomenon is another example of what I call a ’solution-looking-for-a-problem’.

Third party developers’ process probably starts with a comment like: “you know what would be helpful when I’m shopping? An app that <insert shopper need here>”. And then they apply their technology and design skills to building an app to meet that need.

However, I fear that too often the starting comment in grocery retailers or CPG companies is something more like: “We need an app! Everyone has one! We HAVE to have one, ASAP!”  We’ve all heard it said – or perhaps been the one that said it!   Then likely follows an inward-looking process focused on “what we want our app to do or say” and soon the inclusion of ‘brand building imagery’ and ‘on-brand messaging’ overtake the idea that this thing should do anything for shoppers.

I’d love to hear that I’m wrong, but that’s the distinct impression I’m left with after using many brand or retailer shopping apps.  They were made more for the aggrandizement of of the makers ego, than for the benefit of shoppers.

So, where Key Ring delivers against a valuable shopper need (two in fact!: gives me my all my loyalty barcodes on my phone plus aggregates all the coupons for those stores in real time) many grocery retailer apps still focus on minimally useful ‘benefits’ like telling me store locations and hours or directing me to their online stores. I have an app for that… my web browser.

The third party apps actually can be a useful flag for shopper need gaps to retail marketers, though – both for their own apps, and overall experience.  For example, there is a popular app now out to help New Yorkers calculate how much to add to their subway cards to make sure it rounds to a certain number of trips (without 35 cents left unspent) and shows them how to do that on the ticket machine.  For the subway authority , the fact that their passengers are using this app should flag a need for their buying experience (ticket machines) to be made easier in the first place (ie. offer cards by number of trips, instead of just by dollar value).

Thankfully for shoppers, where big business is falling short, independent appsters are filling the gap(p).

- the orange sheep

A Kansas girl’s dream & the perfect shopper team

Posted by theorangesheep on January 28, 2012
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Still one of the most common topics in shopper marketing forums and share groups remains: “what’s the right structure for shopper marketing in our organization?”

I don’t claim to have the perfect answer, but it occurred to me recently that the first step may require you (unfortunately!) to drop a house on a witch. Let me explain further.

While most of the discussion seems to focus on “should this role live in Sales? or Marketing?” I think the first thing to focus on is having the right ingredients in your team.  Because if the ingredients are wrong, it doesn’t matter where you put them.  I am not talking about scouring CVs for some magic formula of X years of retail-side experience plus some insights background with dunnhumby data, and a sprinkle of leadership training. Those things are important, but I see three more important ingredients in the successful shopper marketing teams that I have worked with.

That’s where the Yellow Brick Road comes in. Just like Dorothy’s traveling companions, as I see it, what every shopper team is really in need of is brains, heart and nerve.

Let’s start with brains, which is really (apologies in advance for this pun) a no-brainer.  Smarts are essential, of course, and most shopper marketing teams are blessed with an abundance of this ingredient.  There are PLENTY of smart folks in our field – and we have more data, spreadsheets and powerpoint decks than our brains know what to do with. However, brains left to themselves can turn from a blessing to a curse.  Brains without heart lead to strategic mis-steps that look good on balance sheet projections but don’t play out well in real life (see this post for example).

Like the tin woodsman, what I see more often missing in shopper marketing teams is the “heart”.  Now shopper marketers are not heartless, by any means, but sometimes shopper marketing teams let the brains (and their data!) take charge and don’t have the shopper close to their heart.  The best organizations are deeply and intimately connected to shoppers needs, often by a shopper insights group, shopper ‘advocate’ or vocal field teams that ensure the shopper perspective is an integral part of team decisions.  A heart without brains can also lead things the wrong way, though – the trick is having both in balance.

Even with heart and brain working together, a shopper marketing organization can still get stuck in the mud and senior management might start to question ROI. (Sound familiar?)  That’s where the third ingredient kicks in… who provides “the nerve” – the courage to make bold decisions, propose revolutionary new ways to connect with shoppers and push big initiatives through with management?  Obviously, the leader of the team needs to have this quality in spades.  As a relatively new part of most organizations, though I see this as a bit of a weak spot, too – shopper marketers can be a bit shy of being too bold or pushing their agenda to hard as the new kid on the block.

So, if you are still struggling with structuring your shopper marketing organization (or hiring to add to it), or just evaluating your own perfromance, take one moment to put aside the usual evaluation criteria and imagine instead: how well balanced are you on “brains, heart and nerve”?  You might find a quick trip to see the wizard is just what you need.

the orange sheep

Dead Thinking: every important SKU sells like hotcakes

Posted by theorangesheep on January 14, 2012
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‘SKU Rationalization’ is fine – if it is truly a process of ‘rationalization’.

Despite a career spent using all forms of traditional research, I maintain that the best way to learn about shoppers is to get into an old-fashioned conversation with one.  Let me share a story a shopper told me this past week which will illustrate how revealing one conversation can be.

For the sake of anonymity, let’s call the shopper “Eva”. Eva is a new mother and her baby daughter has just started eating solid food. Eva’s done her homework and wanted to feed her little one Earth’s Best, a popular organic brand that was well rated by other mothers online (there’s the ZMOT at work!).  So she went shopping…

In her close & convenient Walgreens, Eva found the brand… but only the “2nd foods” varieties (for babies 6+ months). Eva needed “1st foods” for her 4-month-old, who is just starting on solids.  So off to the small-chain local supermarket.

No baby food at all. Or at least Eva couldn’t find it, if it is there. (That store just reinforced her perception that they are unreliable and disorganized!)

Long-story-short: Even after traipsing to CVS and TWO local ‘organic’ stores, the same problem: everyone had Earth’s Best ’2nd’ and ’3rd foods’… but no ’1st foods.  So five stores missed a sale that day, or from the manufacturer perspective, Earth’s Organics struck out five times and lost an ‘intending trialist’.

Eva’s question to me was: “Why would ALL these stores start at Stage 2?” They didn’t even have a space on shelf for Stage 1, so it wasn’t just out of stock. It made no sense to her. And with good reason!

I told her that, although I am not working with these stores, I can make a reasonable guess as to the culprit: something category managers call ‘SKU Rationalization’ (or ‘SKU Rat’ for short). Then I explained why I think SKU Rat might be the cause of Eva’s plight.

You see “1st foods” are made for 4- to 6-month old babies, aka ‘supported sitters’. However, some babies might not start on them until 5 months, or even later. So, they are in the average baby’s repertoire for 1, maybe 2, months at most.  By comparison, ”2nd & 3rd foods” each have a full 3-month window to sell to moms, and babies at those ages tend to eat a bigger quantity, so the jars are bigger and cost a little more.

So, when most retailers start ‘rationalizing SKUs’ in baby food, they focus on sales (and, in connection, profit) at a SKU level and ‘rationalize’ (read ‘eliminate’) the bottom of the list.  One can assume that “1st foods”  - with their smaller sales window, and lower value – vanishes first (perhaps only after some awful flavor option that NOBODY wants!!).

The flawed logic here is that Stage 1 represents a critical category entry point for a shopper like Eva. If you don’t carry Stage 1, you force every ‘Eva’ – and their substantial future spending on their babies! – to look elsewhere. Or worse! In Eva’s case, she went home and ordered a steamer and hand blender online – abandoning Earth’s Best and the baby food category altogether! (Score one more to Amazon!)

Walmart famously had to reintroduce 8,500 ‘previously-rationalized’ SKUs in 2011, after recognizing they may have made some ‘irrational’ choices that alienated shoppers like Eva.  Cases like this can be easily avoided, if retailers start putting a little of the ‘rational’ back in ‘rationalization’.  That means considering criteria other than unit or dollar sales for a particular SKU before saying “off with it’s head”.

Imagine instead starting with a mindset of “why should we keep this SKU?” rather than “why should we kill it?”, just to start. I mean really considering all the ‘rationales’ for keeping a SKU. Like the roles it plays in establishing variety; locking in a unique group of shoppers; providing a value- or time-based entry point to the category… and countless more.

Maybe then shoppers like Eva will see your decisions as a little more ‘rational’.

the orange sheep

2012: the Year of ‘And’

Posted by theorangesheep on January 2, 2012
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Happy New Year! May it be a New Year full of New Thinking!

Here in the greener pasture, we’re calling 2012 the ‘Year of AND’: forecasting that the big trends in shopper marketing will be defined by ‘additive thinking’ – doing away with some of the divisive definitions of the past.

Here’s the top 3 reasons we’re going to hear the word AND a lot in 2012.

#1: ‘Online AND offline’ rather than ‘online OR offline’

Multi-channel retailing was a high-trending buzz topic of late 2011, and will surely keep gaining momentum.  This little sheep is looking forward though, to a more pronounced shift in the discussion from “online versus offline” to a paradigm in which we see more retailers adopting an “online AND offline” (‘clicks & mortar’) approach to satisfying shoppers.  

Bricks & mortar retailers have started to take online more seriously, and with Amazon running holiday circulars and eBay opening high-street shopfronts, the new world seems to be upon us.  The message should be clear: if you’re a retailer betting on a wholly online OR wholly offline strategy, I don’t expect to see you amongst the big movers & shakers in 2012.

#2: Value AND Quality AND Convenience, OH MY!

With the mass-customization and shopper-to-shopper sharing enabled by online retailing and social networking, and an economy (at least in the developed world) putting new pressure on shoppers in 2011, more and more have realized that with a little more homework, they don’t need to make trade-offs between value, convenience, quality and shopping experience any longer.

Retail banners like Trader Joe’s are delivering quality, perceived value AND a fun shopping experience and growing rapidly.  Morrison’s in the UK has promised that their new small-format convenience fascia will NOT charge a premium over their supermarket prices: they want to deliver convenience AND value.  And retailers everywhere are diversifying to offer hyper AND super AND smaller formats to satisfy different shopper missions.

In 2012, shoppers will have their cake AND eat it too!

#3: More FMCG’s to treat Shopper as ‘Sales AND Marketing’ 

So many shopper marketing fora still discuss the question of “should shopper marketing/insights live in Sales OR Marketing?”.  I’ve simply started answering this question with “No”.  It should most definitely be alive and well in both parts of your company, and it should be driving both sales AND brand health.

Sure, it’s messier organizationally, and means some people might initially get pushed from pillar to post, but if more FMCG / CPG companies can get beyond the internal tugs-of-war and get some cross-disciplinary teams working on shopper marketing initiatives, I believe we can see some really fantastic programs in our stores and online that benefit shoppers AND brands AND retailers.

And so, we commence “The Year of AND” – hopefully the year that Shopper Marketing hits its straps and proves it is no fad, and  makes the retail world a better place for all.

To my readers and twitter followers, I hope that 2012 is a great year for you all, full of happiness AND prosperity for you AND your families.

Happy New Year!
the orange sheep 

Make Love, not Warpspeed: solving the wrong problem?

Posted by theorangesheep on November 25, 2011
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A common thread in the online discussion that sparked my previous post was that (to varying levels, depending on the opiner) “all, most or some” shoppers just want to “get in and out” of their grocery, drug and convenience stores.

This insight is undoubtedly true, but the typical reaction of shopper marketers highlights another “common nonsense” we need to overcome: an innate ability to focus on a symptom rather than dig deeper to understand root cause.

Let’s take it as a given that time is a decreasing commodity these days, and that people really need to save a few minutes each day.  There’s a dozen activities they could shave that time from: they could save the four minutes (and more than a few bucks!) spent waiting for their “grande-three-pump-caramel-soy-latte-with-no-whip”; or could walk the four extra blocks to catch the express train and save fifteen. So, why are people so focused on the time “wasted” while in their grocery store?

It’s time to put aside the symptom (“takes too long”) and focus on the actual disease: why do people find time spent in grocery stores so irritating? Why do grocery stores suck so much that the two-minute wait in line is considered more painful than the seven- minute wait (out in the cold, mind you!) at their favorite lunchtime food truck?

Some stores seem to get it, and people seem to linger longer and complain less.  As one shopper shared with the world on shopping blog Beth’s Journey: “I could spend a couple of hours in a place like Whole Foods”.  On the other hand, ground-breaking location analytics start-up Locately wrote a great article about just how much people complain via social media while in Walmart – and tend to focus their tyrades on the long lines. Not so much the time that is, as the fact that Walmart is subjecting them to lining up.

In short: experience matters.

Kotler, Mehrabian and Russell started productive discussion in the ’70s showing the influence of the store atmosphere on shopper perceptions and, ultimately, behavior.

So, when the experience is poor, simply quickening a bad experience is not the way satisfy shoppers.  A swift hand might work for a doctor giving a child his shots, but it’s not the answer for retailers. (And heck, even the doctor gives out candy to finish the experience on a good note!)

In fact, this focus on shaving time off a bad experience is a veritable death spiral – the shopper will always still want you to shave more, and there’s only so quick you can make the whole experience. But worse, a lot of the ‘solutions’ for making things faster make the process even more abhorrent. (There’s a reason some chains are removing self checkout already!)

Imagine instead what we might do to make people love (instead of loathe) those 12 (or 17, or 36…) minutes in store.  Or just the 3 minutes in your own aisle, CPG category managers. Shoppers don’t have to jump for joy – just find the time ‘well-spent’.

Perhaps if we can focus on creating 12 enjoyable minutes – instead of cutting it down to 10-minutes that still suck – we’d be treating the root cause, not the symptom, and then will have a better platform to truly connect with shoppers.  Or else we can stick to rushing them out the door ever-and-ever quicker… with a sore arm and no candy.

the orange sheep

Too quick to dismiss: US shopper marketers missing great opportunities?

Posted by theorangesheep on November 11, 2011
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Sometimes I wonder whether shopper marketers in the US actually want to move forward.

Today, I spotted a RetailWire article that really captured my attention: about a Finnish retailer and university, partnering together to test the idea of a ‘slow lane’ at the checkout.  For me this was a “hallelujah!” moment – as you read the article, the team has identified that older customers and customers with disabilities often find the check-out to be a high-pressure, stressful end to what is otherwise a great experience in the store. So they flipped conventional thinking and saw an opportunity. Bravo!

But my bleat today is not to simply re-hash the RW article: rather to express disappointment on the comments that you will find below the article.  A majority of RW commenters have quickly dismissed that this idea could work in the USA.  Just like that- poof! – new thinking strangled by dead thinking!

Comments like “I could be wrong but the whole purpose of the checkout is to be the high pressure, high impulse area of the store. Yes, it’s a hurried experience because the customer wants to get out of there as soon as possible” just highlight the myopia that too many shopper marketers suffer, and the lack of insight into the varying needs of different shoppers, and different shopping missions.

The fact is that some (sure, many!) shoppers, on certain missions, want speed – but others want a more pleasurable experience, and still others just plain NEED more time.  This reality is hit home by one commenter (writing as a shopper & arthritis sufferer, not a shopper marketer!) who reinforces that a slow lane, which allows her to check-out at her pace, would be an idea she would not only reward with trips, but also would trumpet loudly in the social media.

Plus it is not just the elderly or disabled that I can imagine taking advantage – I would use the lane when I have my little lamb in the stroller. And how about the person with a bunch of coupons to use – or a question for the clerk – but is nervous of slowing down the next person and earning their wrath?

Imagine instead, couldn’t a slow lane actually help ‘speed up’ the ‘fast lane’ for the rush-rush-rush Americans described by so many commenters?  Wouldn’t it be beneficial to the ‘speed shoppers’ to have the ‘slow shoppers’ over in the metaphoric ‘right-hand lane’… out of their way? (Kudos to Bernice from RW for also pointing this out!)

So perhaps before we shoot down a new idea, we need to put aside our old assumptions, and re-imagine our view of the perfect shopping experience: we just might find a ‘crazy idea’ addresses a bunch of problems that our rational planning has never been able to solve.

the orange sheep

the sheep now bleats in tweets

Posted by theorangesheep on November 11, 2011
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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

Are QR codes a ‘solution looking for a problem’?

Posted by theorangesheep on November 6, 2011
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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

What might Steve Jobs have done in grocery retail?

Posted by theorangesheep on October 9, 2011
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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.