Shopper Marketing is a discipline designed to drive growth by improving the shopping experience for the shopper.
The authors of The Shopper Marketing Revolution book (1) define the case for shopping marketing as:
The systematic creation and application of elements of the marketing mix to affect positive change in shopper behavior in order to drive consumption of a brand.
Four criteria for great shopper marketing:
The author of the blog What Is Great Shopper Marketing? (2) provides a perfect example of great shopping marketing: the Old Spice “I’m on a horse commercial”.
This is a perfect example that meets all four criteria for great shopping marketing:
- Great shopper marketing is insight led:Clearly the team behind the Old Spice ad had two killer insights which drove the campaign:
- Women buy shower gel for their male partners, and;
- Males in a relationship with females will often wash with whatever is in the shower, even if they end up smelling like a girl!
- Great shopper marketing encourages a change in purchase behavior:This campaign, and the many that followed, encourages the girl to buy something specifically for her guy. This increases her portfolio as a shopper, driving new sales.
- Great shopper marketing encourages new consumption:Whether guys saw the ad or not, and indeed, whether they liked Old Spice or not, with a ‘male’ product in the shower, they are likely to use this instead of the ‘female’ one. This drives new consumers to the brand, a sure-fire way to boost consumption.
- Great shopper marketing delivers superior returns on investment: The Old Spice team choose to use prime-time TV and viral videos as the lead element of their marketing mix, which indicates heavy investment. But think about what this investment delivers: literally hundreds of thousands of incremental purchases of shower gel. These new sales, and the profits they create massively increase the probability of real ROI.
What’s great about this case is that it shows that getting shopper marketing right is not rocket science; it’s simply about knowing what consumption you want to create, how shopper behavior needs to change and then defining what activities will make that happen.
References
- The Shopper Marketing Revolution: Consumer – Shopper – Retailer: How Marketing Must Reinvent Itself in the Age of the Shopper, by Toby Desforges (Author), Mike Anthony (Author),
- What Is Great Shopper Marketing?, http://www.tobydesforges.com/shopper-marketing-2/what-is-great-shopper-marketing/#.VgTDL8tVhBc
