shopper needs

All posts tagged shopper needs

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

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

Innovation or gimmick: is Sainsbury’s off their trolley?

Posted by theorangesheep on September 5, 2011
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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.

“Mission” failure… to understand

Posted by theorangesheep on August 13, 2011
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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:

  • a lack of focus on understanding the role of shopper missions and how they are triggered; and
  • marketers tendency to over-state expectations of shoppers to make strictly rational, economically logical decisions.

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

Who gets the ‘rewards’ from shopper loyalty cards?

Posted by theorangesheep on July 24, 2011
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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:

  • “the card member deals are okay, but they’re hardly ever for things that I want”; and
  • “whichever place I go, I know I will save about the same”.
This speaks to two major ‘misses’ for me: the twin opportunities to “tailor” and “differentiate”.  There’s a huge opportunity to use the knowledge about individual shoppers to better target offers and programs to that individual (take a leaf out of Amazon’s book!) and an even bigger opportunity to offer some different perks and rewards that make your own program a little different to the one across the street.
On the latter, there is so much low hanging fruit, that it wouldn’t even require too much creativity to take a step in the right direction.  Just take a look outside the world of supermarkets, and compare to other loyalty rewards programs, like those of the airlines and hotels.  Where are the ‘perks’ for the gold and platinum members, beyond a few ‘dollar off deals’?  How about ditching one of those ’10 items or less’ lanes – which actually reward people for buying less in your store! – and replacing it with an ‘elite member’ red-carpet line?  Or sending your ‘Gold’ members a window sticker entitling them to those super close car spaces up front near the door?  Now they’re going to think twice about where they make that extra trip – no-one wants to lose their cushy parking space privileges next year!
To be fair, not everyone is missing the opportunity to deliver rewards that really tap into shoppers’ needs along the shopping journey.  Online retailer FreshDirect has already set the pace with its ‘Chef’s Table’ program which rewards the most frequent and loyal shoppers with guaranteed next day delivery, and access to delivery slots not available to ‘regular’ members.  And of course, they offer them the special deals you would expect as well.
That kind of thinking – delivering ‘rewards’ that actually matter to shoppers, and show a bit more creativity than the ubiquitous ‘dollar off’ – is exactly what I hope Tesco had in mind when they promised us something new.
Bring on the real rewards!
the orange sheep