Conferences are packed with presenters carrying PowerPoint presentations ex­tolling the need to become more fo­cus­ed on the shopper. Consultants come armed with their eulogies for traditional marketing and look to replace it with electronic messaging, cell phone devices, Internet vehicles and other gadgetry. Market researchers seek to employ ever more complex assessments, segmentations and clustering approaches to target messages. And finally, senior executives stand stunned that they may have to justify the spending previously committed to category management that will not provide the expected results moving forward. Into this vortex of activity and confusion, step those that wish to place their wager on the importance of shopper marketing to deliver us all to the next wrung.

The initial stumbling block to be overcome is to develop a mutually agreed upon definition of shopper marketing. What exactly is it?  Is it developing a strong frequent shopper program that can then allow for behavioral targeting through coupon dispensing, or is it changing the assortment in the store?  Is it bringing classic media that was once broadcast on the networks into the stores and creating retailer specific television programming? The industry needs to settle on a definition and work from that starting point.

Once the definition has been determined, the work can begin. Printing new business cards and expecting yesterday’s category manager or even consumer analyst to suddenly be proficient in shopper marketing is unrealistic without providing the right infrastructure and foundation.

The consumer goods organization must be structured to support a shopper marketing focus. If it is placed within brand marketing, it will be subject to the paradigms and biases commonly found there. If it is positioned as part of sales, then it will be seen as a tactic to be employed and less strategic in nature. Putting it with market research will remove it from the ability to impact the business and cause it to become an academic or research driven initiative. Shopper marketing  must be treated as its own function that straddles sales and marketing.

The tasks of the job must be clearly outlined on the retailer’s side of the equation as well. As of now, the focus of the category manager is on cost containment issues (negotiate for lower costs, pricing considerations, driving margin, inventory control, etc.) and less so on the experience of the shopper. The industry tracks what was sold, where it was sold and when it sold. However, the why it sold is still unknown. Surely, the industry works to recognize what conditions were present when the sale happened and tries to recognize patterns that seem to correspond or correlate to sales, but the actual motivation, preferences and rationales for why the sale was made or not still elude the analysts. What is needed is a process, techniques and approach to uncover the underpinnings of the emotional reasons, motivations, decision-making criteria employed by the shopper to make the purchase.

The resources used to accomplish the job must reflect the new insights desired. No longer will simply looking at syndicated data and extrapolating causality be effective. For the industry to move forward, there needs to be an emphasis on new tools that measure and assess the shopper’s cognitive and emotional drivers, tools that can isolate external as well as internal influencers present at the time of the purchase occasion, etc.

Once the infrastructure is in place, the organization must also provide training in the new processes, skills and ways of performing the job. Whether looking at the retailer’s store operations and providing them with a gauge for assessing how well their store mirrors the shopper’s preferred shopping experience expectations (why can’t shopping for ice cream in the supermarket be as much fun as going to the locally owned ice cream store?), or looking at the manufacturers’ packaging and assisting with how well the products’ attributes align with the vision of a solution sought by the shopper to meet a need or “job” they need to complete.

The communication between headquarters and the stores must be vastly improved as well. All too often, the breakdown between agreement at the category manager’s desk and the execution at the store leaves much to be desired. Providing a common focus and aligning resources so that everyone within the chain of command understands the task and is focused on delivering the appropriate shopper marketing  experience or outcome is essential.

The final need is to determine how to best evaluate the efforts of shopper marketing. Is it to be judged on total sales increase or decrease alone? Is it to be measured by satisfaction measures with core or targeted shoppers? Just as the scorecard measures are an essential part of category management, so too must evaluation and criteria for measurement be a significantly important consideration in introducing shopper marketing  to the industry.
 
David Zahn, president of ZAHN Consulting, LLC, consults with retailers and manufacturers on performance-related issues. He can be reached at davidzahn@zahnconsulting.com.