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The New Path to Purchase:  An Escalation of Channel & Consumption Migration

The New Path to Purchase: An Escalation of Channel & Consumption Migration

In August's report, SymphonyIRI's Times & Trends provides insights into recession-driven changes in consumer shopping patterns across departments, categories and consumer segments, and serves as a foundation for competitive and distribution strategy development as well as a baseline for ongoing tracking efforts

August 2010
Executive Overview

SymphonyIRI's Times & Trends highlights new developments and critical events across all major CPG categories and channels, providing powerful benchmarking data to help guide your strategic decisions. This report provides insights into recession-driven changes in consumer shopping patterns across departments, categories and consumer segments, and serves as a foundation for competitive and distribution strategy development as well as a baseline for ongoing tracking efforts.

Introduction

Though the U.S. economy has shown some positive movement, many consumers remain entrenched in a daily struggle to make ends meet. The silver lining in this economic cloud is the outstanding resilience demonstrated by the American people.

Resilience can be seen across a wide range of daily rituals, from eating and health care, to home care and pet care. At the heart of these rituals is the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry. Throughout the economic downturn, consumers have relied on packaged goods companies to help them meet their daily needs on extremely tight budgets.

To stretch their CPG dollars further in a difficult economy, consumers have adopted extremely conservative shopping behaviors, resulting in a resurgence of channel switching behavior.

In a transforming economy such as the one this country faces today, the study of consumer shopping behaviors is fascinating. The battle for share of spending is nothing short of intense.

Select Findings

Three-quarters of consumers shop across five or more retail channels. While this is consistent with historical trends, the tides began to shift in recent months. A small handful of CPG shoppers, about 3%, shop across ten or more retail channels to fulfill their CPG needs. In contrast, the number of consumers shopping less than five retail channels fluctuated considerably throughout 2009, and then escalated rather sharply since the beginning of 2010.

Consumers Shopping Multiple Channels

Select chart to enlarge.

Cross channel shopping trends vary across CPG departments. The supercenter channel saw flat-to-negative share trends in the past year across five of the six CPG departments. This shift is indicative of the extent to which competing channels have upped the ante on their marketing game.

Dollar Share Point Change by Department

Select chart to enlarge.

See the complete report in the "The New Path to Purchase: An Escalation of Channel & Consumption Migration" pdf.