Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of time talking to marketing teams about how they can use shopper insight. On a number of occasions, I’ve been asked “doesn’t that mean that we’ll have to do loads of shopper research?” The answer to this question lies in the “shopper fitness” of the company. Some companies are like professional athletes when it comes to shopper insight – they have heaps of well-structured data which is used create clear strategies and plans and they work on it daily to hone their skills. Others don’t. We all know that to perform build muscle, you need spend a lot of time in the gym. The same is true with developing shopper marketing muscle – you have to work with and develop broad data sets to become really effective. [Read more…]
How Shoppers, Shopping Behaviors And Retailers Have Changed
When Mike Anthony and I started writing “The Shopper Marketing Revolution” in 2009, the world was a very different place. In our book we set out to define a new marketing model for the consumer goods industry. In 2009 we felt the need for this change had become extreme. We saw that most companies with whom we worked with were applying a classical approach to marketing their brands. This traditional model seeks to create massive awareness through traditional media and to convert this awareness into sales through extensive retail distribution. By the end of 2009, this model was under extreme stress as media had become ‘hyper-fragmented’ and retailing had become dominated by a small number of global players. [Read more…]
The Future Of Shopping (Part 2)
In my last post, I discussed some recent retail casualties and covered just some of the reasons WHY shopping has to change in the future if retailers of tomorrow are to survive. Today, I’m looking into WHAT I believe that we will see this happening in 2013 and the years to come
If the future of shopping is more online, more globalized and more fun what are the implications for retailers and brands? [Read more…]
The Future Of Shopping (Part 1)
This week one of my favorite retailers died. I used to love HMV! When I worked of Piccadilly Circus I spent many happy lunch hours checking out movies and music. But that was in in 1997 and the way we shop has moved on. Today my kids and I browse movies and TV shows on Netflix and Singapore’s pay-per-view Mio TV system, we sample tracks on YouTube and download what we like from iTunes. [Read more…]
2012 – The end of retail as we know it?
So if you are reading this, the world hasn’t yet come to an end. The end of the Mayan calendar hasn’t yet heralded Armageddon and yet another doomsday prophecy has hopefully been put to rest.
Since the world has not come to an end, I’ve been thinking about other prophecies that have been made in 2012. One such prophecy is that offline retail is dying. I most recently heard this from Piers Fawkes during the “2013 Trends Predictions via @PSFK” Hangout when he was heard to say “The big story is that retail is dead” [Read more…]