Improving Your Payback: Keys to Assuring that Shopper Insights are Used and Activated

Bruce Vierck, VP and Andy Cremer VP, Retail Planning and Design, RTC


Preconceived Ideas Limit Success

As shopper marketers, you get a lot of ideas and solutions thrust upon you from brands to retail but you get handcuffed to figure out what the real solution can be to success. Working with a beverage company, RTC started out at the water aisle, which needs sectioning to properly appeal to the shopper. Shoppers in the water aisle are very educated and savvy consumers, so research had to be done to figure out a solution that should work for the shopper, for the retailer and for the brand. RTC did a “quick and dirty” research of interviews, feedback, etc. RTC gave participants tasks like finding specific brands and then recorded what shoppers did was surprising. Participants sometimes did not notice signage pointing to a product and had difficultly finding their specific product among the bevy of brands.

RTC identified key principles:

Shoppers look for “red or blue” (Coca-Cola or Pepsi)

Shoppers filter and brand logos on signage

Shoppers have difficulty locating new products

Shoppers often look down, rarely do shoppers look up

So what RTC did was created a “color” coded aisle, making Coke framed and working to frame other big name beverages by color. It’s important that we start by framing the problem.

In the dairy aisle, it has not changed its overall organization in the past 50 years. What RTC wanted to get to was, “what is the path to purchase?” “What drives a purchase?”

They asked participants in the study of the dairy aisle to make a journal about their purchases of dairy products and RTC did “shop alongs” with participants to see how they make purchases and what is the most important to them and to their family. What occurred is a transformation of the dairy aisle to make sure that shoppers get information quickly and are able to make purchases based on what’s important to them as shoppers.

There is no bridge from knowledge to vision.

RTC did a study for a cell phone manufacturer within the Big-Box retailer space. Shoppers didn’t understand that they could walk out of the store with the phone after the purchase and shoppers were unclear on the process involved to purchase the cell phone. Because the Big-Box retailer had such low prices, many shoppers did not believe that the phone was “real” because the purchase was so low. It was an interesting learning experience for RTC. They were able to put out display cases for the products to show the shoppers that the items were real. Utilizing display cases, despite the price will instantly ensure a product’s credibility to the shopper.