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New Insights About Shopper Insights

If you’re in the food industry, you can’t avoid all the focus in recent years on shopper insights. It’s become a must-include topic at industry gatherings and company meetings.

But it’s moved beyond the proof-of-concept stage. At this point most industry participants are sold on the effectiveness of shopper insights. Now it’s time to increase the level of return.

And that takes new insights on how to accomplish this.

At a Wednesday session of Future Connect 2011, Trish Brynjolfsson, vice president, Brand and Industry Development, Catalina, provided some clues.

She said the key is to use insights to more effectively build volume and loyalty and encourage trial of new items, she added.

“Leveraging shopper insights can achieve marketing objectives while improving efficiencies and return on investment,” she said.

Companies need to maximize the impact by using shopper insights to increase trips and build volume, she said. An effective approach is to build volume through encouraging “regimen compliance.”

“Use shopper data to target individuals in advance of their purchase cycles to collapse the time between their purchases,” she said. “These messages can provide discount coupons and remind people how to use the products. This can lead to additional trips and big results.”

Another approach is to help retain shoppers by rewarding loyalty that helps lift sales.

“Shoppers respond to long-term rewards for brands they purchase,” she said. “We can personalize the rewards thresholds based on shopper data to reward the incremental purchases rather than subsidize the existing behavior.”

Still another useful tool is to use data mining to help acquire new purchases through brand trial, she said. The example provided was a CPG brand company with multiple categories whose consumer base was sticking to single categories in the portfolio. There’s a big opportunity to encourage existing shoppers to try an item in a new category, she said.