MAY 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 issue of Times & Trends provides insights into the consumer mindset throughout each stage of the purchase cycle, from planning to purchase. Insights such as these provide a critical foundation for marketing strategies aimed at delivering the right products, to the right place, at the right price, at the right time, and creating a shopping experience that keeps the best shoppers coming back for more.
Introduction
Over the course of the recession, consumers have made significant changes to their daily rituals. Across a wide range of daily tasks, today’s consumers have become quite self-reliant. And they have turned to CPG marketers to help them get it done. From this perspective, it is a time of great opportunity for the packaged goods industry.
But the road to success is not easy. Today’s CPG environment is quite different from days gone by. Old marketing tricks, it seems, just don’t work anymore. It’s time for a new playbook.
In this new playbook, the shopper will play the lead role. Tomorrow’s most effective marketing programs will be based upon a 360 degree view of the shopper. And, that shopper perspective will be at the individual level, rather than aggregate level.
The good news is that the information necessary to write this playbook already exists. Now, the challenge is to harness that information, cultivate it into knowledge, and use that knowledge to develop and execute programs that drive not only purchase behavior, but also true shopper loyalty.
Select Findings
Today 55% of shoppers are shopping across ten or more retail outlets to maximize the return on their CPG investment. These trips are reflective of all trip missions, and multiple trip missions are represented across CPG channels today. While the grocery and supercenter channels continue to represent the lion’s share of pantry-stocking trips, shopping patterns within these channels have shifted over the past several years. Shifts such as these underscore the importance of founding all marketing strategies on truly holistic shopper segmentations.
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53% of consumers rate a “good loyalty/discount program” as an important feature in the store selection process. Reduced prices are a fairly widespread and expected feature of loyalty/discount cards. But, a range of convenience and value-oriented features provide opportunity for differentiation and, perhaps, a level of customization. The key to developing a successful loyalty program is understanding what it is that loyalty program members covet and what they buy, and they understanding how these needs and wants differ from non-members, if at all.
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