Study Finds Men Shop Grocery Stores As Often As Women

Contrary to common perceptions, women now account for just 51 percent of grocery store shoppers, narrowing the gender gap in this key CPG channel. However, women still buy more items and spend more—on average $2.73 per shopping trip more than men—according to the latest VideoMining Grocery Shopper Impact (GSI) MegaStudy.

Since 2011, VideoMining has been providing CPG retailers and manufacturers key insights on shoppers using real-world behavioral data from millions of grocery shoppers. The latest release of its GSI MegaStudy introduces VideoMining’s new Decision Analytics capability, which sheds light on where shoppers are making buying decisions and how the decision process differs across brands, categories and shopper segments.

“With Decision Analytics, we now have the ability to determine whether a decision is made pre-shelf or at-shelf,” says Richard Hirata, senior vice president of shopper science for VideoMining. “This has huge implications for how marketing dollars are allocated. For example, if category decisions are primarily made pre-shelf, you wouldn’t want to dump all of your budget into at-shelf initiatives.”

Among the most compelling findings from the latest MegaStudy is the trend in grocery shoppers who shop only in the perimeter of the store. While data from 2012 showed that 12 percent of shoppers limited themselves to the perimeter, the number has grown to 20 percent today—meaning one in five shoppers do not shop center store at all.

The MegaStudy also revealed that 68 percent of grocery visits are relatively small trips—10 items or fewer—meaning that manufacturers have a limited opportunity to make it into the basket during the majority of shopping trips. Between small trips, perimeter-only shoppers and changing shopper demographics, brands must now be increasingly precise in targeting marketing messages and merchandising solutions to reach and convert these harder-to-reach shoppers.

In addition to new analytics capabilities, the most recent GSI MegaStudy introduces new tools that provide clients with flexibility to analyze and explore data. VideoMining’s Insights Builder is a cloud-based suite of dashboards and modules that enable user-friendly access to the Big Data generated from the MegaStudy. These capabilities extend and complement over 200 rich traditional reports that are still available as part of GSI insights packages.

“Our new Insights Builder represents a big step toward what we call ‘guided analytics’ with an easy-to-use interface that enables users to delve into the underlying data and evolve their own learnings.” says Jeff Hershey, executive vice president of strategy and development. “With unprecedented access to big data on real shoppers in real stores, category managers, shopper marketers and the brands now have access to previously unmeasured insights to fine tune their strategies and execute better initiatives in-store.”

The GSI MegaStudy is powered by VideoMining’s Shopper Impact Platform, which incorporates its proprietary OmniSensR IoT sensing devices with patented AI and machine learning technologies to anonymously track detailed in-store behavior and apply prescriptive analytics for a variety of applications. Using a nationwide panel of representative stores across multiple retailers, the MegaStudy provides a channel-wide perspective benchmarking across geographic and demographic clusters.