A shopper marketing cheat sheet

I find it interesting the article is funny how the consumer been changing as technology evolves. The messages are being obsolete traditional and immune to new consumers. Communication trends must change, offering experiences and tell stories, clearly addressed to pose clear objectives established under strategic planning. http://bit.ly/Ov9w87 http://bit.ly/Pth3bW

Hi Jim

I'm assuming that your statistics and insights are for American consumers. How do you think they would differ in Canada? What similarities and dissimilarities can you envision?

Hey Jim - nice piece.

Having grown up in shopper marketing (well...it used to be called point of purchase advertising or below the line advertising), I like this article a ton.

A few thoughts:

The Shopper Marketing budgets (or where they are commonly drawn from on the MDF/trade/in-store front) are calculated as almost twice as large as the measured media budgets...something like 150 Billion / v. 260 Billion. Makes for an attractive bucket. As media/creative/content budgets have been stretched, fragmented or shrunk and more attention put on in-store (e.g. Jim Stengel started pushing this for P&G a decade ago and Tripodi at Coke started hard after this in 2007) many agencies started creating new divisions to follow the money, creating a new category of company (or at least one that got renamed).

You're dead on WRT the silos...one of Shopper Marketing's biggest failings in scope (IMO) though is it isn't just about what activity IN the store happens...it's the insights from influences right around the store or right before they arrived as well. It doesn't benefit a retailer to simply amplify "switch" sales via in-store shopper marketing (one brand wins over another)...it has to contribute to "plus sales" to float all boats) and get new consumers to the store. There's an awful division and turf battles between "media" and "shopper marketing" that need to disappear to help drive retailer/brand needs at the trade area marketing level but managed from corporate. In many circumstances the understanding of an in-store expert simply doesn't translate into how someone got to the store in the first place....and same goes for many media folks who couldn't name what aisle and shelf their client's product is actually in in Krogers or why it's important.

My fascination is right in line with yours...technology, including mobile, is going to inherently disrupt these silos (media/merchandising v. in-store/around the store) and force an integration between CRM, media, merchandising, sales, content and consumers/shoppers. Right now retailers are a little baffled by all of the opportunities/technologies out there (your usual Shopper Marketing guy is not a socially active, mobile using ex-developer who used to work at Razorfish.) and hence slow to change (or do anything)....but they may have to pull "command and control" of local media buys AND all in-store digital communications/media back into their own walls with their own expertise to get control of it and make the silos play nice together before outsourcing it again...Macy's does some of this already quite well...

Lastly, scale of a lot of these technologies/companies simply isn't there yet (20 million users isn't scale to most retailers whose customer base may account for 150 million shoppers monthly, which exacerbates the problem of adoption.

Should be a fascinating area to watch over the next 10 years!

Cheers. Hope to see you when I'm next in San Fran!

Rob