Identifying your shoppers is a matter of finding the overlap between your brand’s highest-potential consumers and the retailer’s most loyal — and profitable — shoppers. It requires an understanding of the difference between a consumer and shopper, as well as why those individuals buy your brands, or not.
The difference between a consumer and shopperis a simple matter of mindset. The shopper is your consumer when s/he is deciding whether to buy your brand or a competitor’s. How your consumer thinks and feels about your brand often takes a back seat when s/he is in the store, making choices. If you do not understand how your consumer behaves while shopping, you do not understand your consumer.
All the hard work building your brand’s image and cultivating your consumer’s attitudes can evaporate in an instant in a noisy and cluttered retail environment if you don’t understand and address their needs when they are shopping. While your consumer and shopper may be precisely the same person, what s/he thinks versus what s/he does can be two completely different things.
The difference between consumers and shoppers goes to the very heart of Shopper. While it does not change what your brand stands for or how it is perceived, it translates the brand’s equities into “shopping mode.” In so doing, Shopper extends your brand’s equities, aligns them with the retailer’s goals, and positions your brand for success at the moment shoppers are picking and choosing between your brand and a competitor’s.
Understanding how your consumers behave as shoppers is not optional. It is the linchpin between your marketing investments and a return (at the cash register) on those investments.
This has implications not only for how your brand is presented in the store, but also at every touchpoint along the shopper’s journey, before and after a transaction. It not only affects how your brand is priced, packaged, displayed and promoted but also how its virtues are communicated through social and all other media outside the store. It is all connected. Everything matters and must work together.
The key to understanding your consumer as a shopper is understanding why they do or do not buy your brands. Adding a sense of discovery, surprise, delight is a big part of Shopper. It is about creating a better shopping — and brand — experience that is based on how consumers live their lives, or would like to.
It means immersing yourself in the shopper’s life and seeing the world as s/he does so you can figure out what s/he wants and why, and what s/he expects from the shopping experience. Such understanding transcends traditional consumer-focused considerations such as demographics and psychographics to include aspects of behavioral economics and other sciences that get at why people do what they do.
To begin with, it is critical to understand the shopper needs that are best served by your brands, and which retailers they tend to shop to fulfill those needs.
However, perhaps the central tenet of Shopper is to make it easier for shoppers to find and buy your brands. If the shopper can’t find your brand in the store, or remind shoppers how it solves a problem or makes their lives better, even the most creatively brilliant brand strategy will unravel and collapse. In part, this is a matter of effective messaging. It is also about navigation.