You may be familiar with the old anecdote: a message saying that the General "flies back to the front" is received as "the General's flies are back to front."
Pause for a brief thought on how this can occur in retail marketing. Hopefully, everyone understands that it is the shopper who dictates what sells. P&G recognises this. Sunny Delight, while an ambient product when launched, was sold in vast quantities in the chiller aisle. This is a message that has been very slow to get through to companies selling UHT milk.
Shoppers have a set of expectations when they go into a store and walk past products. Success comes either from meeting those expectations or from successfully challenging them. Success does not lie in ignoring them.
Talk to sales directors and buyers, however, and they will talk about retailer initiatives and BOGOFs. The shopper per se rarely features. Up until now, the message transmitted to shoppers has not always been seen as terribly important - they are just consumption units as opposed to actual people.
Continuing with this assumption would be perilous. The margin between success and failure is now vanishingly tiny, and when retailers catch cold, their suppliers are the first casualties. Store groups have lined up to ask for contributions to funds to cover everything from availability guarantees to advertising initiatives. All suppliers are familiar with the regular call for cash from buyers in support of retailer objectives. All buyers are familiar with the message coming down the line.
But on top of this, the percentage of companies' marketing budget devoted to retailer support continues to climb. And companies queue up to tell you that offers destroy brand equity, they don't build it.
At the moment, buyers know that, if they cut the price and pile it high, they will sell more. Many retailers know no other way of communicating.
So the message that originates from head office talking about building brand equity, a future for the workers and the community, ends up looking entirely different when viewed by the shopper.
But there is another way of making that very same money work a great deal smarter. That is, for all parties to recognise why shoppers don't buy normal product, at normal prices, and secondly, to change the way that they manage their investment to make it easier for shoppers to buy.
One point worth mentioning is how few shoppers per store, on average, keep the average brand going. Even huge brands such as Cadbury might achieve only an average of £40 per sku in a store per week. Perhaps 20 shoppers a week.
So selling just a few more per store, per week, can have a big impact on sales. A basket full of added-value products is worth a great deal more to the store than one with the own-brand value product, as well as to the supplier.
So how does investment at the facing improve the image of the brand, and sales at the same time? It still comes down to basic statistics about the percentage of store traffic that visits the aisle, as well as stopping and buying. Increase any one of these, and you increase the quantity sold.
Statistics vary between product and are greatly affected by store layout. Research commissioned by The Grocer shows that the best categories attract 80% of passing shoppers, and convert up to 95% of them to a sale. The worst can attract fewer than 10%, and convert fewer than 50% to buy.
This is similar to normal direct marketing - you need to move people up the chain to making a decision, and if the layout of the fixture doesn't persuade them to stop, you have immediately failed.
All of us are shoppers and we all know the frustrations. Understanding and fixing the issues needs both retailers and manufacturers to agree that getting feedback from the front line has a value, so that they will at least trial the findings.
In the light of this, MB&R is pursuing further study into shopper behaviour, under the banner of the MB&R "Stopping Power" category review.
The result will be a general category attractiveness measure, covering a few different sample results across stores (to avoid any one store's layout skewing the data). The research, from store visits undertaken by Storecheck Marketing, will be published on MB&R's soon to be launched website. Retailers interested in being included should contact the editor of MB&R James Parker on james.parker@william-reed.co.uk n
what makes A shopper stop and look?
The best-performing categories convert over 80% of lookers to buyers or at least considerers (those who pick up and look). These categories include biscuits and breakfast products. We found the worst performers were categories such as salad dressings, where only 30% of shoppers stopped, and then only 13% of them bought.
The matrix below illustrates the main drivers for a purchase. Do they stop, and moreover, choose to buy? This can be improved by making a category stand out more, or by making it easier to buy when they do stop.
These benchmark figures can be seriously impacted by the way a category is laid out. One example Storecheck Marketing undertook, in one of the largest of the supermarket groups, was adult soft drinks. Only 30% stopped. However, 75% of those that stopped bought. Key to the change made was moving the brand leaders to eye-level, and marking out the premium from the value products with visuals/pictures. Using brands as the key marker for a shelf arrests the eye. Better to do this than to expect an own brand to do the same.
After making changes, sales rose by 30%. Conversion to sale was the same, but nearly 50% of the shoppers chose to stop. Lastly, 50% of the additional sales came after POP had been placed on the relaid category.
In a survey (POPAI 2006), buyers said their main focus was to attract people to the fixture. Buyers, however, did not generally believe that shopper research had a value.
Has the number of customer complaints about the price of goods increased recently?
