Five things you need to know... Shopper marketing

1 Shopper marketing is really a measured communications plan 
A recent surge of agencies have stepped forward to offer retail marketing services, which correctly emphasise the importance of understanding shopper behaviour in store. But this also highlights a misconception that retail solutions should rely solely on opt-out insights gathered in store, rather than as part of a broader shopper marketing plan which analyses all communications and the part they play in decision-making. The trick is to know why to dial up in-store assets and when funds need to shift out-of-store to digital, events, sponsorship or ATL communications that create brand equity.  

2 The game is simple: make the shopping list
This is the most difficult part of any shopper engagement; making a consumer’s shortlist for purchase. In FMCG, 98 times out of 100 the item written on a shopping list will be a category, not a brand. For those lucky enough to be listed (Coca-Cola and Pepsi, that’s you), there’s a lesson for marketers to learn about winning the FMCG game with your audience before they enter the retail maze. For higher-value purchases such as consumer electronics, just making the shortlist is the goal. Here the path to purchase starts (and often ends) online with WOM evaluation, but the digital communications supporting this leg of the journey are often small tactical campaigns, with the majority of online spend managed as a media buy rather than as targeted communications. This leaves consumers largely in the hands of third-party review sites to formulate opinions.

3. Look at Japan, where daily fliers are losing ground to digital platforms 
Japanese retailers spend a large and important part of their marketing budgets producing and distributing promotional fliers to homes on a weekly/bimonthly/monthly basis. While paper fliers are not going to disappear anytime soon, tech-savvy retailers are starting to shift some of their budgets to mobile-based digital platforms that allow shoppers to customise the format, frequency and type of information/offers/coupons they’d like to receive. And thus make these consumers active participants in the first stop along their decision-making journey.

4. Hypermarkets in charge 
Generally speaking, hypermarkets have great control over the FMCG channel in Asia-Pacific, leveraging their volume discount capabilities to undercut competitors in highly urbanised markets. Less discussed is the public’s perception that they provide safe, quality goods in a region rife with knock-off or expired products. Recent studies of hypermarket supply chain management further illustrate how hypermarkets are best suited to provide quality-controlled products in an otherwise hit-and-miss food chain, suggesting further dominance and a growing role in food safety for the masses. And something they should be promoting on and offsite.

5. Regional enigmas 
Despite the above, there is also plenty of data to suggest that non-hypermarket formats will continue to remain volume-dominant in Asia for the foreseeable future. According to a recent PlanetRetail report, less than 10 per cent of grocery retailers in Asia and Oceania are hypermarket formats, and this share is predicted to stay relatively stable for the next five years. Add to this the geographic factors which make convenience shops the channel of choice in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, or the social traditions which make shopping for fresh food in a hypermarket rare outside tier-one metros, and a case can be made that national supermarket chains, convenience stores and 'mom and pop' shops should be more deeply engaged in regional promotions.