As every researcher knows, shoppers can’t always articulate why and how they do what they do. It’s simply impossible for our subjects to “reverse engineer” their behavior, and if we were foolish enough to expect them to we’d end up with some pretty ridiculous solutions.

For consumer brands, distribution is king when it comes to growth. But if you’re a manufacturer with good distribution, how do you pave the way for continued success, especially with upstream innovation plans?

Several years ago, I was working with a leading restaurant client, talking about how they were driving traffic to their locations. This chain was (and is) a generalist in a marketplace with a lot of specialty competition. Every year their marketing plans included “featured cuisine,” promotions such as Italian or seafood, to celebrate their menu variety. The problem was their brand did not transcend their advertising message of “doesn’t Italian food sound great right now?” As a result, the appetized marinara-seeking public drove right past the generalist to their favorite Italian eatery. The generalist picked the fight, but the specialists won the occasion because they had the “judo” advantage of the consumer’s current cuisine-driven preferences.

The idea of judo, using naturally occurring momentum in growth, is not new; in fact, it has propelled Procter & Gamble’s marketing efforts for decades, with brand extensions as well as brand marriages such as “Swiffer with Febreze” that ride the coattails of consumer habit and trust. Where judo is underleveraged is in the aisle and at the shelf. Upstream product innovations that consumer research show to have great potential often fail to get trial and build momentum because the company neglects the consumer’s existing shopping habits.

For that same reason, go-to-market plans that focus on communicating the same benefits with both out-of-store and in-store messaging risk being out of step with the shopper right at the moment they are ready to buy.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble of retail news this month. Truth is, Black Friday is tangible and truly “urgency” based, whereas Cyber Monday may be more myth than reality. I haven’t seen people lining up in the hallway to use my computer to get an e-deal at the crack of noon.

The whole notion of Cyber Monday is doomed because of mobile devices as well as shoppers’ new perspective on holiday urgency. In brick-and-mortar retail, deals (or the excitement of discovering a deal) are actually capable of being newsworthy. By contrast, online deals are the rule not the exception.

Shopping and buying on the Web or with a smartphone is not about shopping on the retailer’s terms, but about shopping on your terms. The result is a steady stream of sales because we all have our own schedules and unique habits and obligations.

The Black Friday idea assumes shoppers will remain willing to have mass experiences with the high risk of wasted time due to slim inventories. Because of this inherent “fragmented urgency” versus “mass urgency,” winning in e-retail is about creating site loyalty via one-click relationships and providing enhanced accessibility anywhere through mobile apps.

RetailWire ran an article on 11/18 with the title “Study: Beauty Ads Make Women Feel Bad,” which summarized the findings of a recent study indicating that ads for beauty-enhancing products, such as makeup, caused women’s self-esteem to take a hit. The study was interesting, but perhaps more interesting was a comment made by David Livingston, part of the RetailWire BrainTrust. Livingston’s response included the following, “As long as the ads are effective in selling the product, the customer’s self esteem is just a casualty of selling.” I appreciate his let’s-get-real approach, and I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest that he was endorsing this “fact” as much as stating it. However, I am troubled. Is empathy dead?

It may be effective to sell products at the expense of the buyer’s self-esteem, but is it necessary to move product in that way? When doing shopper insights work, I believe it’s absolutely critical to be able to have empathy for the shopper—not just to be able to understand him or her objectively, but to step in his or her shoes in order to understand the decision making process as it relates to budget, time and interest constraints (and how all those factors come to bear in-store with a screaming toddler and a complaining pre-teen in tow).

It will be interesting to see if Kohl’s will have a better holiday season than their competitors this year. Their chosen message is not great price. They are making their liberal return policy a point of difference. In a world of deals, low price guarantees, extended hours, layaway and other value claims, is it risky making return policy your trump card?

Likewise, Best Buy is making “product support available Christmas Day” its headline. Both of these brands seek to humanize themselves by showing a more empathetic side to retail.

I’m sure I will still be bombarded with deals from these guys via direct mail and Sunday inserts, but I find it interesting that they are investing national media dollars in non-price messages. Like four-wheel drive in New York City, both retailers are touting benefits we hope we don’t have to use, but will make us feel more empowered when we do have to make a return or call tech support to help us with our gift giving when we stumble.

Sunday mornings usually find me sitting on the sofa with the Sunday paper, digging into my favorite section—the ads. While most people throw them away without even looking at them, I eagerly page through the paper with baited breath in search of ads and coupons. Seeing all the great deals is the motivation I need to start my weekend shopping.

Like most people, I clip out the coupons with good intention of using them, but usually end up forgetting them at home or in my purse. Nonetheless, I really like to see what’s new. While flipping through the coupons last Sunday, I was a bit surprised to see this Campbell’s Soup ad:

As soon as I spotted the phrase “Browse our 4 easy segments” I recognized the fingerprints of a brand manager—the word “segments” gave them away. Farther down the ad you see how they break out the segments into “healthy kids,” “classic favorites,” etc. This ad is a perfect example of how we understand our shopper, but it takes things too far.

“Creativity happens when you bump things together, connect the unconnected, see relationships others don’t see. When you have a lot of things going on in your life–different interests, you travel, you try new techniques, you expose yourself to different cultures and disciplines–you’ve got more of these points of intersection.”

I stumbled upon the quote above, not from the writings of the latest business guru, but from, of all things, a book called The Knitting Experience, Book 1, The Knit Stitch, by Sally Melville. By nature of working at an agency, variety is part and parcel of my job. Partnering with different clients who have unique challenges offers me constant opportunity to find points of intersection.

Melville, whose book was one of my first, articulates what lived experience has shown me to be true: more doing equals more thinking, more creating. However, I find that the workday world is not sufficient to foster these meaningful connections. So in addition to knitting, I’ve recently started wheel pottery classes, and as a result, a connection has come to light: the importance of being able to find the balance between rigid process and interpretation.

It started in pottery class. Every Saturday morning, I am reminded of the patience, focus, and humility required to learn something completely new, not to mention the perseverance necessary to keep trying in the absence of rapid progress!

Pottery, in turn, reminds me of when I was learning to drive a standard shift or learning to knit–for both, my learning curve was long. Someone could tell and show me a hundred times, but knowing and doing were hopelessly distinct until one day when it just came together–when my feet and hands just knew what to do.

While our annual 2010 State of the Retail Industry report delineates the challenge for retail brought about by consumer behavior changes in reaction to the great recession and the rapid adaption of mobile technology—many of those challenges will take several years to address. To find seven things that retailers can do right now, we asked our experts.

Scott Jeffrey, Chief Creative Officer

Push for differentiation. There is no time to rest on your laurels. Realize that innovation isn’t a stage, it’s an ingrained brand behavior. In fact, stop thinking of innovation as a “next step” all together–”step” as in a phase of something that stops and starts, or merely cycles through.

My ideal retail brand would be one that never completes a store design prototype. The “never done” mentality is always asking, “What else? What else can we do to make it better?” That type of thinking requires courage. Belief in the importance of change. Granted, not every one of your new ideas will be a game changer, but once you entertain doubt and back off, you pretty much lose momentum. Particularly now, when the customer expectations are so far ahead of what most retailers are delivering in terms of the brand experience.

The minute you rest on your laurels and let your brand and your stores get outdated, you have a really big, hardest-to-do maneuver on your hands: a turnaround. If you have a fleet of any size, you’re in danger of being too big and too rigid to manage a turnaround. But if you’re a constant seeker, a brand that remains loose and nimble, the maneuvers are much smaller and easier to manage. Your creative adjustments and transitions will be happening all the time. Knock down any silos in your way and get to that mindset as soon as you can.

Bill Chidley, Senior Vice President, Shopper Sciences

Consumers’ rapid adoption of the smartphone means it’s time to start thinking about connecting and communicating through that little screen. To make the most of the opportunity to drive demand, mobile optimization should be a top priority for your brand. It’s all about being in the game. Don’t try to justify mobile initiatives with ROI. Move forward with a reasonable hypothesis and prepare to learn and adapt.

Don Rethman, Senior Vice President, Architecture

Consider doing a site survey. Do your shoppers expect to share their shopping experience instantly? Do you plan to make fast calls to action in the store? Your building needs a wireless-based backbone to support that, with wireless connectivity that allows for transitions. This goes even beyond the creation of mobile hot-spots. Buildings must have a distributed, robust and flexible IT infrastructure which will allow technical access to all spaces. It helps if you’re working with architects who are aware there is such a thing as a path to purchase so they can help create a store that increases productivity and doesn’t skimp on the brand experience.

Amanda Yates, Vice President, Strategy & Analytics

It’s vital to map the “customer journey” to understand where best to make the wireless investments, as well as other investments that help your brand drive choice. Mapping will provide the insights that will help you gain advantage and protect sales by offering shoppers what they want in the modes they desire. Not every retailer will need a full-blown program, but each must understand the needs of its customers, what information and access they are looking for and where or how they want to access it. Once these insights are known, the appropriate level of investment and how to spend it will become much clearer.

Dave Nixon, Executive Director, Digital Strategy

The multi-channel ideal is a seamless transition from the physical shopping experience to the virtual experience through every digital touchpoint–one that’s painless for the shopper and profitable for the retailer. However, for most retailers that’s not the first thing you can do. There will be silos to take down, brand strategy work and brand engagement initiatives to adopt before that nirvana is reachable. I’d like to elucidate further on what Bill says (above)—“Get in the game.”

Companies that spend too much time planning their next technology steps will find themselves playing catch up to those that are already moving. One of the main benefits of digital is the ability to deploy it quickly and then modify or adapt the solution depending on the performance metrics for success. In that respect, adopting new digital platforms into your channel strategy is less expensive and presents less risk than physical channels. The time is now to leverage digital technologies for increasing revenue, efficiency and customer loyalty.

Kris Medford, Ph.D., Director of Shopper Sciences

Get to know your shoppers again. Segmentation that is a few years old is downright archaic so make sure your insights are recent and actionable. Who are your shoppers—both those in your store today and those you want in the future? What’s important to them from a digital perspective, and how can you use digital help to make your brand be more relevant to their lifestyle?

Justin Wartell, Senior Consultant, Brand Strategy

The physical store needs to evolve from its position as the “jewel in the crown” to a “tool in the arsenal.” For retailers, the most important thing that can be done right now is to (re)examine the relationship between the physical brand experience and all of the other expressions of the brand. Brand experiences are inter-connected organisms that create an overall customer feeling about the brand. By understanding the role that retail plays in the context of the other touchpoints that are, or can be, deployed, retailers can drive loyalty, reputation, efficiency and value across their organizations.

At this summer’s annual IIR Shopper Insights in Action conference, there was a surprising focus on biology and chemistry, and how all of these subconscious human processes relate to decision making.

This year, the conference had a slight feeling of Bill Nye the Science Guy meets shopper insights. We heard some intriguing facts about how our senses of smell and sight, for example, work in relation to branded scents, and—of special interest to me—why we humans tend to look beyond what is right in front of our faces.

In Shopper Sciences, we are often called upon to create disruptive solutions in store, putting brands in the shopper’s line of sight. One of our constant challenges, especially in mass retail, is that it’s not just our client that wants to be disruptive. It’s every brand in that category, and every category in every aisle. We’re working in any extremely noisy environment.

A: When I’m shopping at my local Kroger.

No, not the “Post” as in Raisin Bran; I’m referring to the physical post, or column, that is in the cereal aisle at my store.

The scene is this: my wife asks me to go get the Multi-Grain Cheerios so she can shop in peace for 10 minutes. She says, “Get the big box, unless the smaller box is on sale,” adding, “The Cheerios are close to the post about half-way down the aisle.”

If she wouldn’t have given me that navigational pointer, she probably would have bought herself 15 minutes of peace. The merchandise presentation in the cereal aisle is such a mess, so lacking in organization, I could easily have squandered more time, forced to scan every package, not finding what I was looking for. But since she gave me the post as my pole star, I managed to navigate past the lions and tigers and bears to the Cheerios. After a moment of anxiety while I scan the shelf for validation—Ta-dah!—I find the Mutli-Grain big box not on sale!

Contrast this with my second mission, during which my wife gets only a few minutes of peace.

Having read the article about the half-mile-long beaver dam in Alberta, Canada, it occurred to me that those beavers exemplify something frequently overlooked in the retail design business, the idea that it’s okay to fail.

You would have to imagine that over the reported 2800 linear feet of dam in what is basically a flat terrain, there’s the likelihood that sometimes it just doesn’t work the way they intended. The colony has to react quickly to failure to ensure the safety of their habitat. If any of you beavers are reading this post and would like to broaden your portfolio, by all means, give us a call. Failure is an option in design as long as it’s smart failure and failing for the right reason. If it helps the idea move forward, then it might just net out the absolute best result.

In today’s market, retail brands developing a new design concept rarely have the luxury of time. Business pressure demands short design-and-build timeframes, followed by testing and refining.

While I spend my days understanding shopper behavior and applying rigorous research and analysis methods to help companies “grow categories,” I spend my weekends shopping like crazy. With my bank account being the victim of all of these great growth strategies! As you know, retailers and manufacturers are always finding new ways to create incremental growth or, simply put, make shoppers spend more.

One of my favorite places to shop is Target. Before I even make it into the store I have generally blown $20 on the dollar spot. After piling my cart with a bunch of stuff I really have no use for, my second stop is always the shampoo aisle. Regardless of need, I always stop. Something about the colors and the arrangement of the shampoo aisle just makes me feel so clean and orderly and I generally end up picking up something guaranteed to fix frizzy hair or give me more volume.

Well, much to my surprise, my venture into the shampoo aisle a few weeks ago yielded a fantastic new surprise! The new Pantene display! Aisle violators grabbed my attention as they organized the offering by color and hair solution. That’s right, hair solutions–easily found! And not only did the aisle violators frame up the offering, but the bottle packaging was new and perfectly coordinated with the signs. You can image my excitement as I quickly zeroed in on the “fine” solutions area. I left the aisle with a whole new system of hair care.

There has been a tidal wave of automotive advertising flooding the airwaves the past few months with claims and promises of improved product quality, safety, style, gas mileage. Media spending is way up, with every manufacturer trying to entice customers back into the showrooms.

But to what end?
Consumers hate car shopping and they don’t want to go back into the dealership. Big surprise—the shopping experience there is still one of the most frustrating, untrustworthy, and manipulative games you can be subjected to.

Add to that the fact that the recession has also caused most dealers to suspend investment in their facilities, and you understand why the thought of venturing into a dealership is bleak. Promising better on TV only to deliver the same old retail experience only fuels consumer frustration and mistrust.

Instead, consumers do everything they can to stay out of the dealership, with online research and shopping being the preferred norm. Now even purchasing online has gained popularity.

Successful brands like Apple, Whole Foods, IKEA, even Walmart, understand how to leverage the power of shopper insights to deliver game changing customer experiences that build brand excitement, loyalty and bottom line results.

Auto companies must do more to improve the customer experience in showrooms! And there couldn’t be a better time. With the recent upheaval in the industry, the marketplace is ripe for someone with the courage to innovate and completely reinvent the paradigm. Success will come to those who differentiate.

The upcoming flood of hybrid and electric car provides an excellent opportunity for change.

While I was listening to WNYC Radiolab the other day I came across an interesting episode centered on choice and decision making influencers. Being a designer, I am always searching for new ideas and concepts to weave into my work, so I clicked on the link. In an hour the host took me through a whirlwind of studies examining the variations of why we choose the way we do and what factors can influence our decisions. And what does it all boil down too?

Stress has a tremendous affect on our ability to make appropriate selection.

To quote my mother, this over-simplified answer is an “astute observation of the obvious.” However, when broken apart, the program’s individual experiments struck me as simple learning blocks that could easily be applied to a retail environment.

Basically, if a person is over-stimulated in an environment a simple decision of what apple to buy can become ridiculously hard because there is too much information for them to just make a choice. They start to tune out their fast moving intuition to make a more educated selection on an item that they could really care less about. In the end, those who were over-stimulated tend to be disappointed.

As I was finishing up payment at the pharmacy, a young male employee strolled into the area and struck up a conversation with the staff by saying, “That new Kotex packaging is sharp!” Silence. Then, apparently mistaking the silence as a request for clarification, he continued, “You know, the black packages? They are really cool looking!” More silence. Based on a quick survey of their expressions, everyone seemed to be thinking the same thing, What is an 18 year old guy doing talking about feminine hygiene products?!

Even as I grabbed my purchase and escaped the awkwardness, I began to contemplate what transpired. Given that I spend my days knee-deep in shopper sciences, I found the situation quite compelling. Good packaging should be, in part, disruptive, and the new U by Kotex packaging is definitely that. The sub-brand is unique in the category, both in shelf presentation and in the “get real” tone of the advertising. A+ on disruption.

Companies under pressure to stem margin erosion may jump headfirst into shopper marketing before they are ready. In doing so, they could overlook the need to solve fundamental problems in the shopping experience and end up with unpredictable results in the store.

The urge to dive in is understandably tempting. Brands that invest in shopper marketing are seeing three times the return as compared to traditional marketing disciplines. But the discussion revolves around a very small percentage of brands, such as CVS/pharmacy and Mars Snackfoods, ShopRite and Kellogg’s, Walgreens which just announced it will engage in a shopper marketing pilot with The Hershey Company, and of course the eminence of shopper marketing, Procter & Gamble. All have been working on shopper marketing for years and have an extremely high level of expertise.

Carpenter to focus on Interbrand North America

While we can all agree that price matters more to the consumer than ever, it’s not the be-all, end-all of shopping. At some point, the hunt for best price has to stop. And why it stops is up to the retail brand.

Shoppers attach to brand, not price. Brand—the distinct way you do business—needs to provide a reason to activate the purchase, a reason beyond price. It can be trust, convenience, fun, effortlessness, time savings, fashion or many other factors a brand makes itself known for.

Many retailers have learned the hard way that price-based competition is simply not sustainable. To survive, they need a balanced value proposition unique to the brand that makes the shopper confident she has found the right choice among similar offerings of the product or solution she seeks.

This year, retailers have made headway in the battle against “sameness” by negotiating exclusive famous name brands, making sure their private labels stand for something besides “cheaper” and by infusing the shopping experience with emotional appeal. One brand that renewed its value-plus-reason image is Old Navy. After veering off into fast fashion inspired by the designer runway, it has returned to bright basic family apparel surrounded and supported by its kitschy sense of humor. Shoppers are returning to the store and business is on the upswing.

The past year has seen an explosion of interest in shopper marketing. Reportedly 60 percent of brands and retailers are investing in shopper marketing efforts, up from six percent previously. Most, however, admit to being in the learning stages of the emerging practice.
Finding a common language is the first challenge. The term encompasses in-store media,