Shopper insights evolve from research and provide a basis to identify opportunities and corresponding strategies. They are the links between your understanding of your consumers as shoppers and the reasons they shop at the stores they do.
Insights result from making connections between socioeconomic trends, purchase barriers, how well your brands are performing at a given retailer and that retailer’s objectives, priorities, equities, platforms and protocols.
Deselection barriers cause a shopper to overlook or reject your brand based on the briefest glance at the category. Problems include poor visibility, low brand awareness, poor location, perceived irrelevance and lack of interest.
Selection barriers cause shoppers to reject your brand after a close look and comparison to competing choices. Problems include unconvincing claim, poor perceived value, choice confusion and poor differentiation.
A variety of research methods, both inductive and deductive, can be used. These include in-depth interviews, ethnography/observation, and shop-alongs. Technologies enable eye-tracking, to see where shoppers focus attention. Video tracking can capture how shoppers navigate the store and what they do. Other technologies can track how the brain responds to visual stimuli in the retail environment.
Data mining is often used to analyze transaction and loyalty-card data. Behavioral economics takes an experimental approach to determine how shoppers respond to different messages or offers.
Deductive methods are used to test hypotheses and theories. These include surveys that get at shopper attitudes, experiments that are designed to provide a precise answers to a specific questions, and mathematical modeling that can help determine pricing strategy for example, or calculate the return on investment on Shopper initiatives.
With a half dozen or so insights in hand, the next step is to translate — and rank order — insights into specific initiatives that work within the protocols and capabilities of each retailer.