Shopper Marketing: Profiting from the Place Where Suppliers, Brand Manufacturers, and Retailers Connect

Drive Profits by Influencing Shoppers When It Matters Most: While They’re Deciding What, When, and Where to Buy

Shopper marketing offers you a powerful new framework for marketing to consumers as they morph into shoppers and move toward a final  purchase decision. Using it, you can gain a deeper understanding of shoppers and leverage that understanding to connect brands, retailers, agencies, suppliers, and shoppers for mutual benefit.

Now, three pioneering shopper marketing innovators bring together state-of-the-art insights for succeeding with this strategy throughout your  organization and with all your partners. Their significant experience in  industries ranging from CPG to technology lies behind the shopper  marketing principles, objectives, and processes they describe. You’ll learn how to adapt shopper marketing for your environment, overcome obstacles, and create renewed value along the entire path to purchase. The authors conclude by identifying new shopper marketing opportunities online and in internationalized environments.

Shopper marketing is not easy. But, as many of the world’s most successful companies have discovered, it is the best route to deeper shopper  loyalty, sustained differentiation, and higher profits.

6 core objectives

1. Make it easy for shoppers to find and buy your brands

2. Extend your brand equity along the entire path to purchase

3. Differentiate both your brands and retailers

4. Activate purchase at POS by delighting, engaging, and motivating shoppers beyond expectations

5. Align with the opportunities, strategies and protocols of each channel, format, and retailer

6. Provide mutually balanced benefits over time to retailer, brand, and shopper

One 4-step process

1. Identify opportunities: Situation  assessment, right targets, right insights

2. Plan: Right strategies, right initiatives, right customer plan

3. Execute: Collaboration, agency empowerment, reporting, supply chain/operational execution

4. Measure-Learn-Change: Internal, external, continuous improvement

The shopper marketing methodology is a powerful, complete approach for satisfying target consumer demand at the point of maximum influence, and thereby driving consumers to purchase. It gives companies a far deeper understanding how consumers behave as shoppers, and leverages this intelligence across the entire supply chain to benefit all stakeholders: companies, brands, consumers, retailers, and shoppers.

Shopper marketing requires supply chain partners to smoothly integrate complex sets of marketing and sales tools, in order to engage shoppers, build brand equity, and persuade shoppers when they move into "shopping mode." Internally, it also demands deeper coordination of R and D, marketing innovation, operations, logistics, and distribution. It isn’t easy, but it offers remarkable, proven results that are virtually unachievable any other way.

In Shopper Marketing , three of the field’s pioneering innovators and consultants bring together state-of-the-art insights, strategic approaches, and supply chain execution methods for successfully employing shopper marketing initiatives throughout your organization.

Dan Flint, Chris Hoyt and Nancy Swift clearly explain what shopper marketing is, and why it is critical for marketers to master. They review each of its six objectives and eight foundational principles, demonstrating how to adapt and apply it in your environment, overcome obstacles, and systematically create value along your entire "path to purchase." Drawing on their unsurpassed consulting experience, they also assess emerging trends and their implications, helping you deepen customer loyalty, extend competitive advantage, and improve profitability for years to come.

Daniel Flint, PhD, is the Regal Entertainment Group Professor of Business and Director/Founder of the Shopper Marketing Forum in The Department of Marketing and Supply Chain Management, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a graduate from the US Naval Academy, has a sales engineering background, and a PhD in marketing and logistics from the University of Tennessee. He has worked with many firms in the consumer goods, aerospace, industrial, and third-party logistics industries on branding, shopper marketing, marketing strategy, account management, and innovation. He works internationally often and remains active in both marketing and supply chain management associations. His research focuses on helping businesses develop a proactive customer orientation; understand what customers, consumers, and shoppers value; improve their marketing strategies; and develop more productive business-tobusiness connections. Dan has published in top-tier journals such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Business Logistics, and the International Journal of Physical Distribution and Logistics Management. Dan currently is focused on shopper marketing, spending a great deal of time with leading CPG, agency, broker, and retailing firms.

Founder of Hoyt & Company and a CPG marketing and sales consultant for more than 35 years, Chris Hoyt has developed an industrywide reputation for his real-world, factfilled, challenging, and entertaining point of view. Because Chris actually “walked the walk” in senior management positions with P&G and Clairol prior to becoming a consultant, he knows the difference between theory and practice and invariably leaves his readers significantly better equipped to deal with the realities of the current marketplace. Details at www.hoytnet.com

Nancy Swift is vice president and co-founder of Hoyt & Company. Her extensive experience in advising consumer goods brand leaders on their sales, marketing, and trade challenges created a natural pathway for Nancy’s move into shopper marketing. Her background in consumer understanding, research, and data analysis proves key to synthesizing the interrelationships of brand, retailer, and shopper essential to best practice shopper marketing. Prior to founding Hoyt & Company, Nancy was the first female Managing Director of Consulting at Ryan Partnership and a research specialist at Glendinning Associates.

Introduction What Is This Book All About?     xvii

Chapter 1 Shopper Marketing Overview     1

Chapter 2 Who Is the Shopper Anyway?     19

Chapter 3 How Retailers Work     45

Chapter 4 How Consumer Goods Manufacturers Work     67

Chapter 5 Opportunity Identification     91

Chapter 6 Strategic Planning     119

Chapter 7 Execution     147

Chapter 8 Measurement     167

Part II The Scholar’s View     175

Chapter 9 What Do Academics Actually Do and How Do They Think?     177

Chapter 10 Exemplars of Shopper Marketing Relevant Academic Research     207

Chapter 11 Connecting Supply Chain Management to Shopper Marketing     237

Chapter 12 Conclusion     245