Shopper Marketing: Every Decision Begins and Ends With the Shopper

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 edition of Times & Trends explores the transformation necessary to build a shopper-centric business.

Introduction

The marketplace looks totally different from where the shopper is standing. Shoppers no longer act independently of each other.  Today’s shopper is more connected to other shoppers, as they have become attracted to third-party information providers and are increasingly acting on a wide variety of media, such as collaborative product reviews, rankings, ratings and price comparison services.

Manufacturers and retailers acknowledge that their shoppers are important.  Indeed, shoppers are a CPG business’ most valuable asset.  The business only survives when it has shoppers, and grows only when it can retain and develop them while simultaneously recruiting new ones. Therefore, the business must be focused and managed around the shopper.

A shopper-centric manufacturer or retailer business seeks to identify what creates value for each shopper and then to deliver that value to them. The foundation for growing a profitable business lies in establishing stronger relationships with individual shoppers. The challenge is to understand how to establish these critical relationships and optimize them for profits. This will provide the framework for understanding how to build the value of the shopper base. Increasing the value of the shopper base will benefit the business

To build strong and growing relationships at the individual shopper level, businesses must first transform—across all business units and at all levels—from the mass marketing, product siloed thinking of the Industrial Age to the shopper-based culture of the Information Age. 

Select Findings

• It is now the shopper that it is in control in the CPG marketplace.  She has taken control from the retailer and the manufacturers. To excel in this new CPG world, marketers must make the choice to organize, lead and manage the business from a foundation of their shoppers, giving the organization’s “shopper” assets equal billing to its “product” and “store” assets.  Only then will marketers be able to connect with those shoppers that make the highest percentage contribution to the business or product group, and activate these shoppers with highly personalized messages.

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• All shoppers are not created equal.  Some shoppers are worth more, and everyone learns about, prepares for, purchases and consumes CPG products differently. Classifying shoppers into segmentations based upon economic and digital influencers provides in-depth insights into consumer behaviors across all tracked categories and brands.

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**Download the entire report in a pdf here.**