Our five-hour discussion was predicated on a shared belief in Shopper’s pivotal place within the organization at a moment when so many brands have been reduced to commodity status in part because of their ubiquity at retail, both online and in stores. While sometimes dismissed as a grab-bag of discounts and homely, anti-brand promotional gambits, in fact Shopper is a complex business idea based on the alignment of brand and retail goals and objectives, and blending of consumer and shopper insights.

Much of the day’s give-and-take among the 11 participants centered on the indispensable part that Shopper plays within brand and retail organizations. This role largely is a function of Shopper’s unique insights into how consumers behave as shoppers, and why they make the brand decisions the do under a range of circumstances, both emotional and practical. Equally important is Shopper’s singular perspective on the retail environment, and why retailers do what they do.

These factors matter for one simple reason: we now live in an age where brand interactions and transactions are inextricably linked, thanks to that pocket-sized marvel formerly known as the cellphone. As one Confab member pointed out, it’s a period that pretty much began in 2008, with the introduction of the Apple iPhone. As it happens, most Shopper departments were established at around the same time. Almost a decade later, if the transition into this new age of commerce and commercial innovation is not yet complete, it is pretty darn close.

We are now all shoppers, all the time.

The innovation imperative. Shopper’s place in the digital world will depend on an ability innovate, and clearly we are in the very early stages of exploring that potential. Much as brand folks initially viewed digital as a cool new way to deliver advertising messages, some in Shopper at first saw it as a nifty coupon dispenser. Everyone now knows the potential is much larger, given how all things digital so completely permeate everyday life. Shopper's ability to engage and connect emotionally and to inspire is clear, though still underdeveloped.

A unique vantage point. Shopper also occupies a special place within the larger enterprise, which is both a strength and a weakness. Sometimes it is housed within the brand group, which oftentimes underestimates the challenges of connecting with shoppers at retail. Sometimes it resides within sales, which frequently focuses only on the value of short-term promotions. Sometimes it sits somewhere in between the two.

It’s time to re-align. Too often, Shopper is bounced back and forth between marketing and sales, like a ping-pong ball. Where it lands largely depends on the goals and objectives of the organization itself. That it so often finds itself in limbo suggests that the goals and objectives at some organizations are less than clear. As one Confab member put it: “Shopper has been this strange little land where it is whatever the hell you say it is.”

From metrics to sabermetrics. Yet Shopper's place in between silos, as not quite brand and not quite sales, gives it a valuable understanding and appreciation of both, and the potential to bridge the gap and mediate the perpetual struggle between the two. Shopper is the “moneyball” of the brand and retail experience; that is, an undervalued asset.

Finding common ground. This understanding of what separates Shopper from the rest of the brand and retail universe matters, but it pales in comparison to what it shares. The key to the future of Shopper, and the brand/retail concept in total, is not what makes it different. Nor is it about morphing marketing into sales or shopper into sales and marketing, or tearing down silos. It’s not about re-litigating the divisions of the past or competing in the present.

A culture of specialists. It's about each specialist understanding each other’s expertise, and how everyone works together toward the shared values of the organization in total. It's about a collaborative culture, not a competition. It’s how the success of each depends on the success of the other, and we are all part of the same business strategy.

That’s not just the future of Shopper; that’s the future, period.

A chorus for change. This may appear to be an outsized conclusion to draw based on a mere five hours of conversation on a rainy Tuesday in October -- and it is. As the fourth Confab on the Future of Shopper, it built upon three previous meetings. The 11 voices in the room both echoed and amplified those of dozens of others heard during similar discussions over the preceding 18 months, as well as previous interviews and other research conducted over the past three years.

Moving at the speed of shoppers. Specifically, the cumulative effect of our day at the Yale Club was further informed by two additional Confabs on the Brand Experience, during which about a dozen chief marketing officers from a diverse set of major brands pondered the future. Layered on top of this are two research studies, one on Shopper and the other on brand, that provided additional intelligence as well as a framework in which to consider and begin to map out what it will take to get from here to there -- not consumer or shopper, not marketing or sales -- but to a “new age of commercial innovation” predicated upon the brand and retail experience as a single idea, moving at the speed of shoppers.

The four dimensions of the brand & retail experience

While much murkiness remains, order is discernible within the chaos by breaking down the challenge into four overlapping areas, or dimensions: organization; innovation; implementation; and measurement. It is all too easy to chase after any one subset of these four dimensions -- especially the bright, shiny objects of digital and big data. Some discipline is best brought to bear on the process, and establishing a framework is helpful:

Organization: What must be done from an organizational, structural, or operational standpoint to make the brand/retail experience an integral part of the company culture?

Innovation: How must a brand or retailer anticipate, embrace and design a culture of innovation to optimize the brand/retail experience?

Implementation: What are the most effective ways to bring a brand/retail strategy to life across the many consumer and shopper interactions that define the brand/retail journey?

Measurement: How to determine that the brand/retail experience is producing sales, profits, health and growth?

Excellence in, and symbiosis between, all four dimensions — organization, innovation, implementation and measurement — is critical to harmonizing the brand and retail experience. Each dimension is embedded within and dependent upon the other. They must be viewed holistically, in osmosis. In future updates, we will examine and explore each of these four areas in detail.

Up Next:

Part Two: Culture: Ground Control to Major Tom
Part Three: Innovation: Butch Cassidy & The Brand Experience
Part Four: Execution: Real-time Retail & Stranger Things
Part Five: Measurement: The Experience is the Metric
Part Six: Conclusion: Ask Not What Your Shopper Can Do For You

The cultural evolution of silos. Gillian Tett, author of The Silo Effect (Simon & Schuster, 2015), argues that the issue of corporate silos is cultural, not organizational. Tett is a cultural anthropologist who spent time living with and studying villagers in Tajikistan, in Central Asia, and applies what she learned to "tribes" in corporate settings.

Her main point is that people naturally define their roles by classifying and differentiating themselves socially. This does not necessarily happen with any hostile intent, but becomes entrenched over time and helps explain the failure to understand and communicate with those outside one's group — be it marketing, sales, technology, human resources, finance, and so forth.

In other words, it may not be necessary to change the organizational structure at all. The answer may be more cultural in nature, and the imperative to find ways to enable better communication and understanding between those in the silos, and not necessarily tear down the silos themselves.

The single-word solution. Dwayne Chambers, a former chief marketing officer of Krispy Kreme (now CMO of PF Chang's), says that the doughnut retailer addressed this problem, in part, by distilling its brand's essence into a single word: Joy.

"We have a lot of different people whom we have to serve in 24 countries. We have a lot of languages, a lot of cultures, and a lot of things to consider. It is just so interesting how this concept of ‘joy’ cuts through all of that. There are cultures that don’t smile. There are cultures where laughing means you’re nervous. They still have joy; they just express it a different way."

Having both a purpose & a promise. Scott Moffitt, chief marketing officer of Keurig, frames cultural consistency by establishing both a purpose and a promise. The purpose is what the brand promises to do; the promise is how it does it. Drawing on his tenure as CMO at Nintendo, Moffitt says the purpose at the games-maker is simply “to put smiles on faces” while its promise is “fun.”

The power of shared values. Leontyne Green-Sykes of IKEA emphasizes the central role of the organization's culture as the driver of a consistent brand experience on a global basis:

"The culture is an outcome of the values we have at IKEA, and the passion that we have for creating a better everyday life for people. We take those values into our recruitment process, and the way we work with our agency partners. It is the foundation for how we behave and respond across the board. As a result, we don’t worry about compromising our culture, particularly as we expand into different states and countries."

Aligning objectives on “purpose.” The issue of silos may also be less pronounced in organizations with a strong sense of purpose, or mission, such as Seventh Generation, which is devoted to environmentally friendly household products. CEO Joey Bergstein says silos are less of an issue because the "organization is so aligned around who we are and what we're about that there's a consistency that goes through the company and the singularity of our mission. What you don't see is a lot of dueling priorities."

Silos can be a good thing. Within Seventh Generation’s apparently "horizontal" culture, individuals maintain their specialties. "Everybody's got their areas of expertise but people are working together … There is a real shared understanding of the mission and how we go about making that effective for us," says Bergstein. So, it's not that silos do not exist; it's rather that they don't get in the way of a holistic brand/retail experience. At Seventh Generation, the brand experience is "managed in parts, separately," but Joey doesn't see a conflict in that:

"My general belief is that people have different experiences with the brand and each one of those experiences needs to be thought about individually and managed for what it is. We need to think holistically and make sure that it all hangs together as a whole. But the truth is that every consumer has a different entry point into the brand and each one of those experiences has to be coordinated for consistency, but individually managed by the people responsible for those entry points."

Everyone owns the experience. At Arby's, where Rob Lynch is President, the experience knows no boundaries. "Organizations that allow every function to weigh in and be a part of the brand experience are going to outperform those that don't," says Lynch. "Everyone should feel like they own the brand experience."

Meanwhile, from a purely retail perspective, Paul Latham of Costco comments:

“We don't believe that the leadership responsibility lies even predominantly within the marketing group. We believe that the brand experience has to be embedded in the culture. It has to be lived, believed and exercised every day. Managers must have the autonomy to make decisions that they feel are in the best interests of our members. Although there are company protocols to guide them, they must have the freedom to do what they believe is right, driven by their own moral and ethical compasses."

Ground control to Major Tom. While silos may serve a useful purpose, communication between them is critical. This is challenging for any number of reasons, but is certainly compounded in the digital world and the scourge of endless emails. Some companies are dispensing with outdated technologies like email and using something like an internal social network to improve communications between all members of the organization. Eduardo Conrado, the chief strategy and innovation officer of Motorola Solutions, comments:

"The greatest untapped value of social networks is people. As you communicate with your customers externally, as well as with your own people internally, it allows them to express their feelings, sentiments or even ideas back to you."

Re-casting internal communications as a social network promises substantial improvements in all dimensions of the brand/retail experience, potentially enabling once-silod operatives to converse and better understand one another in real time.

Up Next:

Part Three: Innovation: Butch Cassidy & The Brand Experience
Part Four: Execution: Real-time Retail & Stranger Things
Part Five: Measurement: The Experience is the Metric
Part Six: Conclusion: Ask Not What Your Shopper Can Do For You

Past Episodes:

Part One: Shopper's Brand New Bag

Innovation is a way of life. The linkage between innovation and the company culture is made clear by Steve Battista, a longtime brand chief at Under Armour: "Innovation is not a department; it’s a way of life. It’s not just about the next product that we commercialize; it’s about everything from how we run our cafeteria to how we tell our story."

From this perspective, innovation is the brand/retail experience itself. It is an idea that solves a problem, and makes people's lives better on a sustained, everyday basis. Its connection to profits is direct. Sometimes such changes are incremental; for example, a cap that's easier to open or a jar that's easier to pour. Other times they are transformative, as in the wave of emerging "sharing" services, like Uber and Airbnb, or electric cars, like Tesla.

Tesla vs. the dealership industrial complex. Tesla is a particularly instructive example because not only is the product itself innovative, but so is the way it is sold. It is a classic example of the convergence of brand and retail in this new era of commerce. Tesla is not only disrupting the internal combustion engine, it is also blowing up the dealership industrial complex that has long had a lock on the way vehicles are bought and sold. Yet Tesla didn't invent the electric car, and its retail model is largely lifted from Apple's.

In fact, Tesla's original retail strategist, George Blankenship, previously served in a similar role at Apple. He explains: "When I started at Apple in 2000, most people knew one thing about Apple computers: They didn't want one." Apple changed that, in no small part, by opening stores in busy places and seducing consumers with eye-popping products and a great retail experience. "Our mission," Blankenship says, "was really about getting in front of as many people as possible on a day-in, day-out basis and teaching them about Tesla."

Yet another lesson in retail innovation from Apple. This is exactly what Apple did so successfully. The store's primary purpose was not necessarily to sell anything right away, but rather to teach people about digital devices. The sales would come later — and they did — for both companies. That Tesla borrowed this idea from Apple doesn't make it any less innovative. Tesla took someone else's idea and applied it in a new way, making it its own.

Innovation cannot be divorced from the issue of organization. Can a silo'd organization, one whose denizens do not communicate, share, collaborate or understand one another, be innovative? It’s a rhetorical question. A dysfunctional, culturally misaligned organization is the opposite of innovative.

Flexing your empathy muscles. David Kelley, co-founder of design firm IDEO and the d.school for design thinking at Stanford University, believes that not only should everyone within the organization be involved in the innovation process, but also that everyone can be — and is — innovative. He told The New York Times that the idea is to build one's "empathy muscle." The goal, he said, is to create, tinker, and relentlessly test possible solutions … that people will actually use."

The gateway to breakthrough insights & innovation. With his brother Tom, David co-authored a book called Creative Confidence, in which they defined empathy as "the ability to see an experience through another person's eyes, to recognize why people do what they do." They wrote: "We've found that figuring out what other people actually need is what leads to the most significant innovations … empathy is a gateway to the better and sometimes surprising insights that can help distinguish your idea or approach." It would follow, then, that the gateway to empathy would open widest as retail and brand experiences in symbiosis.

How 'big data' can improve the customer journey. It is usually not long before any discussion of innovation arrives at the doorstep of big data, which stands ready to provide the requisite intelligence to find the gaps in the customer journey so they can be filled and the brand/retail experience improved. John L. Kennedy, a former IBM vice-president and currently the chief marketing officer of Conduent (a Xerox spin-off specializing in business process services), illuminates innovation as a data-driven concept at the nexus of brand and retail experiences:

“Marketers can build brand experiences that are that much more personal and don’t even feel like marketing, that feel a little bit more like a service. Marketing now is not so much in service of selling—which helps the marketer—but more in service of what the customer wants to do."

Cheesecake Factory & the big-data promise. The full expression of big data in a retail setting can manifest itself in many — and sometimes surprising — ways. Donald Evans, chief marketing officer of The Cheesecake Factory, explains how big data helps the restaurant chain keep its brand promise to its patrons:

"Everything at The Cheesecake Factory is made from scratch every day in each restaurant. We have more than 200 menu items that require thousands of ingredients at 180 restaurants. We can do this because of our inventory system and the way we manage data through operations.”

From Marketing to Real Life

The “lock” of innovation in the brand/retail experience is the connection between products, services and real life. This transcends not only marketing as we’ve known it (which is mainly about the communication of brand promises). It is about the delivery of those promises. It is about demonstrating relevance, in the moment -- not just in real time, but in a way that connects emotionally and makes the shopper’s day, if not life, a little bit better. It’s hard to imagine a forward-thinking CEO or CMO or brand manager who wouldn’t care deeply about achieving this.

The “key” to innovation in this realm is behavioral economics, which is the science of understanding why people make the decisions they do under a variety of circumstances. Behavioral economics stands in stark contrast to traditional economics, which assumes that people make decisions like economists -- that is, on a rational basis, by carefully calculating the cost vs. benefit of alternative choices and then selecting whatever is in their own best self-interest.

Decades of groundbreaking research led by economists Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky point in a very different direction. The evidence is that nearly all of our decisions are based on taking mental shortcuts, or heuristics, that make otherwise complex decisions seem simple. These shortcuts are not rooted in rational calculations (which are hard work) but rather emotional triggers (which come easily). It all happens so quickly that we humans don’t even realize how irrational our choices are.

Behavioral economics brings a much-needed dose of reality to understanding consumers as shoppers, and shoppers as people. Shopper -- as a business discipline -- does exactly the same thing, as it is attuned both to how people make decisions, and more important, why they make those decisions. Despite its reputation for appealing to rational calculation (i.e., price discounts), Shopper in fact is the business of understanding why people do what they do while they are shopping -- which today can happen anytime, anywhere, for any number of reasons. A brand cannot be built, sustained or grown without such understanding.

As Paul Newman once said: "You can get straight A's in marketing and still flunk ordinary life."

So, the first, and most important thing to understand about innovation in the brand/retail experience is that it is fundamentally about one thing: Real Life. In this respect it is unlike any other form of “marketing,” and in fact transcends marketing as we’ve known it to align with how people live their lives. It supports their wants and needs in real life, in each moment.

Up Next:

Part Four: Execution: Real-time Retail & Stranger Things
Part Five: Measurement: The Experience is the Metric
Part Six: Conclusion: Ask Not What Your Shopper Can Do For You

Past Episodes:

Part One: Shopper's Brand New Bag
Part Two: Culture: Ground Control to Major Tom

Digital media are inherently transactional. They are invariably about the exchange of something, be that entertainment, information, conversation, goods or services. In the early days of the web, many saw cyberspace as the second coming of television, and a new way to convey advertising. It can be that, for sure. But as we all now know, it is so much more than that. It is now so deeply and prominently embedded in our world, and daily lives.

As a run-up to our Confabs, we reached out by email to chief marketing officers and others responsible for the brand/retail experience in their organizations and asked: What are your top priorities relative to the brand/retail experience? We received 28 responses, representing a cross-section of categories including hospitality, retail, food service, packaged goods, automotive, technology, financial services, media, e-commerce, beverage alcohol, musical instruments, and apparel.

Give the people what they want, when they want it. The most frequent response involved some variation on the imperative to "give people what they want, when, where and how they want it." Several respondents expressed the concept as "real-time retail," delivered via a deft combination of digital and in-store experiences. Such alignment clearly is a prerequisite of every brand in today's "omnichannel" world.

A marketing chief at a major retailer expressed this as "leaning into the opportunities in the intersection of physical and digital retail." Another respondent, the CMO of a luxury brand, took the idea a step further, stating an objective to "bring our brand story to life in a relevant way across each touch point (from awareness building, to digital, to in-store, to after the sale)," adding: "The biggest priorities are to (completely!) “reinvent both digital and retail at the same time, and design them to be absolutely synergistic. When implemented, the customer will flow from digital to retail to digital in an absolutely seamless manner.”

Implementation is the "demogorgon" of the brand/retail experience. In a follow-up survey, with 72 CMOs and other brand and retail leaders across a wide spectrum of product and service categories, 34% said that "implementation" was the greatest threat to the brand and retail experience. Fifty-four percent said that "real-time-retail" was their greatest brand-experience hurdle.

Why is "real-time retail" so difficult to implement?

The packaged-goods conundrum. Douwe Bergsma, chief marketing officer of Georgia-Pacific, frames the challenge from a consumer packaged-goods perspective:

"First, we do not have seamless integration with the in-store environment. The digital experience is not in line with our packaging, or the look and feel of our products when you see them in the store. You could also have the most wonderful digital experience with the consumer and then get placed at the bottom shelf in the store where the consumer does not expect to find your brand."

Kawasaki & the voice of the brand at retail. Chris Brull, head of marketing for Kawasaki, says apps offer a solution at retail because his brands are sold through dealerships that also sell competitive products. What's more, because Kawasaki doesn't own its own stores, sales associates are challenged to know all of the many details of Kawasaki's line of motorcycles and other recreational vehicles. "When a customer walks into a store, the product has to speak to the customer," says Brull. The app provides the requisite "voice."

The point-of-purchase as point-of-pain. A silver-bullet solution for every type of brand is unrealistic, however, given the varied objectives of different product and service categories. In the retail apparel category, former Old Navy CMO Ivan Wicksteed cites a variety of issues, but anchors his focus in "the points-of-pain for the customer."

Going digital is not the point. In store, the customer challenges center on finding the right size or color, the discomfort of the changing-room experience, and perhaps most of all, the nuisance of check-out. "The experience is not about making it as digital as possible," Wicksteed says, while noting that digital can be applied to good effect when it comes to delivering the goods. "Not everyone wants to walk out of the store with the product," he says. "If I can get your purchase back to your hotel room faster than you can get back to your hotel room — which is possible today — then that becomes a compelling proposition."

The limited value of apps. On the other hand, Wicksteed sees limited value in apps, at least in the apparel category. "An app can help you find what you're looking for, or serve up specific offers. Price checking is another thing people do on their phones in-store. This makes less sense for Old Navy; you can't price-check our goods since we're the only retailer that sells what we sell."

Uberfication & the untapped potential of back-room technology. As Wicksteed sees it, the best use of digital in-store is "not the sexiest technology" but rather the "back-room technology that tells us where all the physical inventory is, down to an individual product level at any point … If you add that together with the Uber-fication of the world, it means that you're radically transforming your ability to get goods to people either from a distribution center to a store, or from one store to another store or from a store to a customer."

Fender & the local dimension of real-time retail. Richard McDonald, EVP of Fender Musical Instruments, looks at the relationship between online and in-store operations through a somewhat different lens, but one that is no less focused on "real-time retail":

"What's interesting about the digital age is that even if you purchased an instrument online you still engage at a local level. That's why local stores and partnerships are so important to us. Once you get the guitar, you might need someone to help you learn how to play it. You might need repairs. You might want to meet other guitar players. You're going to want to interact and have your interests fueled. That's the purpose of these local-market retailers. They are a very, very important part of the overall ecosystem."

Hointer: a blinding flash of the future. Real-time retail is being brought to futuristic fruition by Nadia Shouraboura, a former head of fulfillment for Amazon and now founder of Hointer, which The Wall Street Journal called "a shop that possibly represents the most radical synthesis of offline and online retail yet."

At Hointer, shoppers encounter no sales people, just rows of designer jeans, suspended from the ceiling by wires, each tagged with a QR code. Shoppers scan codes of the jeans they like, select the size, and the Hointer app keeps track. Each pair is summarily delivered via a chute to a dressing room. If the jeans aren't right, shoppers can toss them down another chute, and the pair vanishes from their list.

To buy chosen pairs, shoppers use a touch-screen terminal where they tap a button corresponding to their dressing room and swipe a credit card. On a second trip, with credit card on file, shoppers can skip checkout altogether. At first blush, Hointer sounds like a really cool app, but in fact the real story is what's going on in the back room.

The rise of the microwarehouse. The technology required to deliver those jeans in about a half a minute is all about logistics and distribution. Shouraboura’s innovation is a "microwarehouse" that networks individual stores into a distribution hub and makes the dream of same-day delivery a reality. In other words, the future of the shopping experience is decentralized and agile distribution. Shouraboura is now applying this concept in grocery.

Up Next:

Part Five: Measurement: The Experience is the Metric
Part Six: Conclusion: Ask Not What Your Shopper Can Do For You

Past Episodes:

Part One: Shopper's Brand New Bag
Part Two: Culture: Ground Control to Major Tom
Part Three: Innovation: Butch Cassidy & The Brand Experience

The “how” and “what” of measurement. No shortage exists with respect to means of measurement. The issue is not as much how to measure but determining what to measure. The question inevitably reverts back to the lack of alignment of goals and objectives across the organization. What Sales, Marketing and Shopper might consider a good result can -- and apparently usually is -- viewed quite differently.

Quantifying each and every interaction. These discrepancies must somehow be reconciled into a holistic view of success that accounts for the brand/retail experience in total. It’s not enough just to capture media impressions or document sales lifts. The challenge is to somehow quantify how each and every interaction either contributes to or subtracts from the brand/retail experience. Measurement must factor in the three other dimensions of the overall enterprise: organization, innovation and implementation.

Organization: a shared interest in emotional engagement. The imperative is to acknowledge weakness and double down on the strengths of both Marketing and Shopper. Let’s admit it: too little of Marketing is relevant to people when they are deciding what to buy, and too much of Shopper corrodes brand image and identity. Marketing’s strength is its ability to communicate messages and raise awareness; Shopper’s strength is its ability to convert all of that great brand work into cold, hard cash.
 
Marketing and shopper share a very important common goal: to engage and inspire the customer on an emotional level, but in different ways. With Marketing, it’s aligning with how consumers think about the brand; with Shopper it’s aligning with how consumers behave when they’re deciding which brands to buy. Both are equally invested in achieving the emotional engagement that is essential to brand health and growth. They simply do so in different ways, at different moments along the customer journey. Every moment matters.
 
Innovation: the convergence of products and services. In marketing, innovation is traditionally thought of in terms of products but the context in which those products are experienced is equally important. As Tesla, Apple and others have demonstrated, products and services (i.e., brands and retail) are now one.

Over the long-term, it’s important to keep in mind at least one thing Marketing and Shopper share: An interest in helping people become better versions of themselves. Michael Schrage details this concept in his book, Who Do You Want Your Customers To Become?

Schrage’s theory is that it’s no longer sufficient simply to fulfill or satisfy a customer’s expectations, or even exceed them in the usual sense. Truly forward-thinking enterprises are leading their customers, and teaching them how to expand their personal potential. Examples include not only the usual suspects like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, but also IKEA, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft, Khan Academy and, yes, McDonalds.

It’s little remembered now, but the idea of ordering food at a window and consuming it in your car represented a radical departure in consumer behavior in 1955. McDonald’s taught its customers a new way to eat, designed for the age of the automobile.

Implementation: making moments that matter. Our research has shown that chief marketing officers believe they have no shortage of great ideas; it’s making the ideas work, at each and every interaction along the customer journey, that’s the challenge. As noted above, the brand/retail experience is tantamount to the customer’s journey and every opportunity to engage and build or erode the bonds of loyalty.

Acknowledging that Marketing and Shopper are fellow travelers along the same customer journey would be a sensible place to start. Agreement that each complements the other along that journey really shouldn’t be a matter of contention. Both have roles to play with respect to touch-points both digital and analog, but again, in different ways.

Recognizing each other’s respective talents is certainly a key imperative. That Marketing does a great job of building brand image and identity is beyond question. That Shopper knows how to translate those equities in the noisy, chaotic and crowded retail environment should be equally respected. Granted, the creative expression of that expertise could be improved in many cases, but perhaps that’s a fresh opportunity for Brand and Shopper to collaborate, combining the former’s aesthetic sensibilities with the latter’s insight into why shoppers behave the way they do.

Storytelling is perhaps the most fundamental tie that binds the brand/retail experience, and Marketing with Shopper. The journey is a story that can and should be told differently, depending on who, what, when, where -- and especially the why -- of the stop along the way.

A new template for measuring health & growth

How to quantify the moments that matter? What are the implications of all of the above on the issue of measurement? It appears that measurement should be looked at differently, not only as the quantification of media impressions or sales lifts, but also in terms of engagement, both internally and externally.

Quantifying the conversation. Perhaps the most significant data point is a measure of how well people within each organizational silo are communicating with and understanding those in the other silos. At the very least, this could be a leading indicator of the organization’ health, and therefore its growth.

Mapping out measurement. Might the customer journey map itself provide a template upon which to track health and growth? Some quantification of the “moments that matter” along the way could be the most holistic, and therefore accurate, gauge of success.

The tipping point between heart & wallet. Success is often a function of the extent to which the customer is engaged, inspired or otherwise motivated on an emotional level along the journey. The balance between heart and wallet can be treacherous, however. The limitations of available metrics are telegraphed by Jeff Charney, chief marketing officer of Progressive Insurance, who succinctly observes: "Technologies cannot quantify feelings.”

Arby’s: We have the metrics! Arby's president, Rob Lynch, aspires to rise to this challenge. "We need to explicitly show how we connect our insights to our sales and profits, or some other performance result," he says. "When we invest in driving an intangible like 'friendliness,' we need to know that an uptick in that metric is the equivalent of a sales increase. Building that linkage is a big opportunity across the industry." He adds: "It's one thing to have the measurements. It's another to believe in them, trust them and then make investments based on them."

Up Next:

Part Six: Conclusion: Ask Not What Your Shopper Can Do For You

Past Episodes:

Part One: Shopper's Brand New Bag
Part Two: Culture: Ground Control to Major Tom
Part Three: Innovation: Butch Cassidy & The Brand Experience
Part Four: Execution: Real-time Retail & Stranger Things