Viewing the shopper as a person is crucial for brands that are looking to grow their portfolio of brands, increase sales within a category, or improve their performance at specific retailers. By understanding the shopper’s needs, preferences, and behaviors, brands can tailor their marketing and product development efforts to better meet those needs. This can lead to increased customer loyalty and repeat purchases, which are key drivers of brand growth and sales.
There’s been a seismic shift in terms of how people shop. Disruption has happened to brands on so many levels and from so many directions – creating a very different and continually changing shopper landscape. While the obvious macro shift has been more online shopping, the reality is that many micro influences have greatly affected how people approach shopping. Shopping today is a much less linear experience. For brand and category managers, those in charge of revenue and shopper marketing, this means we need a new lens through which to look at shoppers.
Providing shopper insights today starts with a deeper understanding of the motivations and behaviors of different shopper groups in order to drive meaningful activation of insights for a specific product, a whole category, or even to move a brand forward. Brands look to shopper insights experts to understand how the customer journey has changed and continues to change. They want to know how their particular brands are categorized in the mind of the consumer, how people are shopping their products differently and what is fueling the change in perception and action.
At Explorer Research, we’ve done a lot of customer journey work over the years. Our work has helped many brands identify and sometimes even anticipate changes. But for brands who need to look beyond the segmentation and motivation of past buyers and move into a fresh understanding of current buyers, a larger framework can provide a window of understanding into potential opportunities for growth. The Shopper Activation Framework was born from this desire to provide accurate market information and real business intelligence.
The Shopper Activation Framework goes beyond any single customer segmentation study. It goes deeper than any look at shoppers through a behavioral science lens. It brings macro data in combination with smaller and more pointed studies for a new way of seeing key customer motivations at a category level, on a specific trip, or in relation to shopping mindsets. With this approach, we deliver a more holistic view of the modern shopper that moves brands forward in these three ways:
We look beyond simple trip segmentation.
By quantifying and analyzing years of shopper data, we layer in current shopper insights to unlock the secrets of their customers’ shopping journeys. This comprehensive understanding of both emotional and rational drivers gives brands the power to target and capitalize on shopper and trip opportunities like never before. We analyze how these different drivers and behaviors work together, across categories and channels, giving teams ideas on how to optimize different segments of the experience to activate desired behaviors.
We see a broader perspective.
We looked at over 30,000 shopper trips with us consumers to understand how people buy, and we saw distinct groups of shoppers in terms of their motivation to buy. With that same data, we saw those motivations break down differently over different categories (beauty, home health, food, electronics, etc.) Pulling back out to see the data differently, we also analyzed it from an actual trip standpoint, and again, we can see this data cut by different factors that motivate the actual trip.
We bring the granularity of understanding the category motivations while shopping along with understanding the values, drivers, and motivations of that shopper on a personal level. By layering micro data with macro data across the full US retail landscape, we can see the forest when others can only see trees. Our years of collecting comprehensive data help us identify opportunities missed with a narrow view of the shopping landscape. Our data provides comparative insights across categories, channels, retailers, and brands.
We find the right connections.
Linking behaviors with motivations means that shoppers are no longer seen as non-dimensional entities. The truth is that they interact with your category or product differently when they are in different mindstates and motivated by a different set of influences. Many stimuli can be added and subtracted from the marketing messages, product presentation, and more to create new opportunities with the same buyer or win more often with a new prospect. New connections of the data give brands not only a more holistic view of the consumer but new ideas for both strategic and tactical efforts.
Stripping back one-dimensional pre-conceived ideas of what, how, and why consumers shop and buy is the beginning of a more holistic view of the shopper as a person. This is a critical process for brands that want to grow their portfolio of brands, increase sales within a category, or improve their performance at specific retailers. By understanding the behavioral drivers alongside individual shopping trip drivers, brands can create targeted marketing campaigns and product development strategies that resonate with their customers, leading to increased customer loyalty and sales.
Contact us today to find out more about the Shopper Activation Framework and how it can grow your brands.
