Not Better Marketing Insights, better shopper marketing insights

Shopper Marketing Insights are essential to understand and prioritize opportunities with shoppers.

But, what is a shopper insight?

A shopper insight isn’t that different than other insights. Except it looks at the brand or business from a shopper’s perspective. Understanding what shoppers do – and, more importantly, why shoppers do what they do – is key to creating better shopper marketing.

It’s important to get underneath shopper behavior to understand why shoppers make decisions. 

This is key to better understand how to influence decisions.

Getting to Better Marketing Insights

There are a few key questions to help define opportunities with shoppers:

Are they buying the category?

What and how much do they buy? How often?

How price elastic are they?

How loyal are they to a channel, retailer or brand?

Are you capturing your fair share of their category needs?

Who are they buying for?

How do they evaluate their purchases?

These questions help brands understand what’s happening in the market. Through a combination of purchase level data and multiple research methods all these answers can be found.

This serves up the data – or the “What”.

DATA RICH, INSIGHT POOR

Many organizations have lots of data to understand their business performance. But most don’t pay enought attention into ‘why’. Better marketing insights are needed. Missing the ‘why’ leads to wrong business decisions.

Take these two examples for a snack brand with declining sales over the past two quarters:

  • Scenario 1: The brand finds shoppers at two key West Coast retailers have exited the franchise. Based on this initial analysis, budget is directed to the two retailers for incremental activation. More budget is spent on over-the-top media to shore up the West Coast business.
  • Scenario 2: The brand finds shoppers at two key West Coast retailers have exited the franchise. The brand manager was inquisitive and dug deeper to find out ‘why’. In California there was a social media campaign to boycott one of the key retailers for the brand which has caused shoppers ages 20-30 to leave the franchise. In the Pacific Northeast, a new local snack brand has been selling well despite the fact they are sold exclusively off displays versus the snack shelf.

It’s an overly simplified example for sure. It does illustrate that what might at first seem like a good decision may not hold up after a little more digging. A more targeted approach, and less expensive one, is often required.

Why, Why, Why

Better marketing insights require deeper analysis.

To get to a valuable insight, marketers need to ask “why” – and keep asking – until there’s a deeper answer. For shoppers, this gets underneath demographics, purchase data, and other foundational data to create better marketing insights.

Insights that are created and deliver the Shopper Perspective.

These insights must be actionable versus a simple statement of facts. Better marketing insights should address the motivation, behavior or usage occasions. Better yet, they should address all of the above in a way that gets to a deeper understanding.

We suggest asking “Why” at least 5-7 times.

Why? Because your brand – and shoppers – demand it!