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.
In the four years it’s taken us to complete the book the entire landscape in which consumer brands operates has changed more dramatically than we expected. The global adoption of smartphones, the ubiquity of social media and the transformation in entertainment that services like youtube.com and youku.com has provoked has, in effect, democratized media with both positive and negative effect.
Whilst it’s now possible to finely target and focus messages on key consumers it has also become increasingly difficult to define, locate and communicate to the right people; many marketers continue to make the mistake of applying a mass media model to the digital world. As hundreds of companies clamor to reach similar market segments the cost of media overall is growing faster than ever. IBM suggests that media costs in the first decade of the century inflated at 5.5% per annum. PWC’s research indicates that in the first 5 years of this decade, cost inflation will grow at nearly 10% a year.
In 2009 the march of e-commerce had long since begun and purchasing airline tickets and hotel rooms online was common practice. In entertainment, Amazon and iTunes were already significant players but e-commerce was only just beginning to affect consumer brands. Looking back over the last four years it’s startling to reflect on what’s changed. The book-selling industry in developed economies has swung hugely online, as has the market for video and music. The list of businesses that have died in these markets includes household names like Woolworths, HMV, Tower Records, Virgin Megastores, Blockbuster Video and Borders.
In the last two years this increase in online purchase has begun to affect consumer electronics significantly. This is a global phenomenon. In China leading retailers Gome and Suning both limped through 2012 in the face of fierce competition from online and Media Markt this week announced its departure from China. This now has a significant impact of some of the largest consumer goods companies in the world (think Samsung; Panasonic, hp and Sony). It has also led to major restructuring of the trade in developed economies; the UK for example has seen the closures of Comet and Jessops in the last two months alone.
It’s clear now that the future of shopping is online, or at least a significant share of shopping will be. Whilst the impact on FMCG brands remains relatively small, shoppers all over the world are beginning to see the benefits of buying groceries online. It would be wrong, we think, to presume that what has already happened to retail in other categories could not happen in the FMCG business.
So as we look forward in 2013, when we will finally publish “The Shopper Marketing Revolution”, we see a very different world to that of 2009. The consumer goods industry is likely to go through tremendous structural upheaval in the coming years and the model we thought was important in 2009 has now become essential in 2013. In The Shopper Marketing Revolution, we introduce a five-step ‘Total Marketing’ approach which creates an integrated strategy for driving profitable growth. This approach helps marketers, sales professionals, advertising agencies and retailers to focus investment on the right consumers, shoppers and retail channels in these exciting and challenging times.
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