Shopper Culture

Integrating Online Shopping Experiences With Offline Retail

As an online shopper, one thing I have become really accustomed to is consumer reviews and user-generated product ratings. Whether you're looking to buy a new TV at Best Buy or order a book off Amazon, right there, at the point of purchase, you have the honest feedback from consumers who have already used the product. Thanks to online shopping, we no longer shop "alone", we have the information and opinions from hundreds of our peers to help reinforce our purchase decisions. This is one experience I think gets lost at traditional brick-and-mortar retail.

With the rise of social media, mobile applications, and instore digital-POS signage, we have had the technology to integrate these experiences for some time now. So why have we yet to see a major effort from traditional retailers to try to adapt some of the popular online shopping features to the offline shopping experience?

 
 

One retailer that is experimenting with social shopping technology at traditional brick-and-mortar outlets is Sephora, a leading beauty-products retailer. Sephora recently launched a new mobile application that allows shoppers to read product reviews when considering a purchase instore. By logging on to m.sephora.com, shoppers can enter the 12-digit UPC or product name and browse information, consumer reviews, and ratings on the product they are holding in their hand.

It will be interesting to see how traditional retailers begin to adapt to the changes in shopper behavior brought on by online retail. How far will they go to try and create a seamless shopping experience between online and offline for their customers? 

Target Holds "Great Save Event" to Compete With Costco and Sam's

For the next seven weeks (beginning January 1, 2010), Target will offer bulk items as seen in club stores Costco and Sam's - without the club membership fee.  All 1,740 Target stores will participate, offering bulk items such as paper towels, detergent, and other household necessities in its seasonal aisles.  

The move aligns nicely with Target's "Expect More. Pay Less." strategy, especially at a time when shoppers are motivated to purchase only necessary items.  By offering a club-like experience with a fun, trendy Target twist, the chain is likely to attract shoppers who feel justified in buying extra items they don't necessarily need because they'll save so much.  Will this "Great Save Event" be enough to serve as an additional trip-driver to Target, stealing share from club stores?

Target says it has no plans to offer year-round bulk bargains, and will use this year's event to determine if it will be repeated next year.  

The Shopper Continuum®

Is shopping an experience that has a distinct beginning and end, or is it an ongoing process? And, if the shopping process can ostensibly start and stop outside a store's four walls, at what point do consumers begin to act like shoppers? Most importantly, how does this affect the ways you message to them to encourage a transaction?

The Shopper Continuum™ looks at the variety of before (Pre-Tail™), during (Retail) and after (Post-Tail™) potential touch points you have with your shoppers. Click here to read more about The Shopper Continuum™.

 


 
 

Driving Traffic From One Holiday Shopping Location to Another Via Interactive Text

Hanging flat-screens and speakers were recently installed at a local mall's food court. During this holiday season, a “text in your song request, and get entered to win an XBox” promotion took advantage of this new entertainment technology. I decided to participate. I texted in my song request, and received a text reply stating “…Your song will play in less than 1 minute. Reply Xbox and enter for a chance to win an XBOX 360!” So I did. I then received another text stating that I was entered, the drawing date, and the url for the promotion background and rules.  Once my video started playing I received another text stating, “Your song is playing now! Reply bestbuy to get $30 Best Buy gift card offer w/Xbox 360 Elite purchase. Expires 12/31/09.” So I did, and received a promotional code to give a cashier.

 


This is an interesting promotion because, first, the goal was to drive people away from one shopping location (this mall) to another shopping location. (Best Buy was not located inside this mall.) Second, the location and interaction of the promotion was unique. Third, the promotion helped identify purchase intent for an XBox in a friendly way. I got to listen to my chosen music without ever having to enter the contest or replying that I was intending to buy an Xbox 360 by year’s end.

While text promotions provide the next chapter for CRM programs, I’m curious to watch how the face of CRM will evolve and change in this new digital age.

Putting Enjoyment Back Into the Shopping Experience

“Shopping is getting much less fun” was one of the key points in Integer’s latest issue of The Checkout. While there are many things that contribute to and impact this overall feeling of shoppers, I am encouraged by seeing helpful, interactive, and fun tools that aid the shopping experience.

Here are a few recent examples.

Target’s Shoe-Sizing Floor Map.

Clorox’s Wipes placed next to shopping carts.

 
Minneapolis Intl. Airport’s Piano Player located in the middle of the airport’s major shopping area. 

The power of these helpful shopping tools lies in the fact that the tools represent an understanding of the mindset and struggles/pains/annoyances shoppers experience. Second, the tools positively improve the shopping experience and provide shoppers brief moments of enjoyment. These tools can be placed anywhere during the shopping experience (parking lot, aisles, checkouts, departments, etc.). Tools can be developed at a retail level (Target’s Shoe-Sizing Floor Map), a brand level (Clorox’s Wipes), or at a shopping facilitation level (airport, mall).

With such helpful tools now in the market, it makes we wonder: what else can improve the shopping experience? Which takes me right to the parking lot. Parking is one of my pet peeves. How could parking lots be improved to make parking and entering stores less stressful? Which brands or retailers would be the best to do and sponsor this?

The Checkout Issue 6

 

In this month's issue of The Checkout, we look at how Americans are feeling about holiday shopping this season. The experts tell us the recession is waning, but is our confidence fully restored?

Our findings indicate that shoppers will be buying just as many gifts as before, but discovering new strategies to do so for less money. Half of shoppers (52 percent) plan to spend less than last year, particularly those 35 to 64 years of age. Electronics stores will be among the hardest hit, though men and younger shoppers (18-34) and they'll actually spend more in this channel. Not surprisingly, mass merchandisers like Target and Walmart, offering low prices and heavy value messaging, will see new shoppers in their stores, with 23 percent of respondents indicating they will shop that channel "slightly more" or "much more" than last year. 

Click here to download the latest version of The Checkout.

Retail on Wheels

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite TV shows, CBS Sunday Morning, had a segment on about LA’ s growing street-food culture. 

Grass-fed, free roaming beef hotdogs? Sliders on rice patties with farm-fresh cheese?  Vegan ice cream cups? It seems that, on-the-go street food has taken a turn toward gourmet.  And the response from consumers has been remarkable. So remarkable, in fact, that there is an entire Website dedicated to the Food Truck culture in L.A., N.Y., S.F. and Portland to help diners find out where their favorite meals on wheels will be next. 

Now, street food isn’t necessarily a new idea. Think about the hotdog stands in NYC and the ice cream man who came around when you were a kid. However, the way in which these visionaries are serving it up is.  They took a conventional tried-and-true way of selling food and revamped the process, by jazzing up the eats, transforming their trucks into cool machines, and keeping incredible-tasting food at a price point for the masses to partake in.  They also tapped into the viral craze of twitter, which is the perfect form of media to communicate this dynamic retail landscape that changes on a daily basis.  

What is most interesting about this shift in the food-service category is that it is just that: a shift. It is not a massive depart or a total reinvention.  It is simply a way of thinking differently by disrupting the category to create a new retail and shopping space, in this case for food.   

Can your category benefit from a simple shift in thinking? Could implementing a simple twist open up new retail channels or ways of shopping? Can manufacturers go directly to the people through different distribution channels? Can retailers expand their footprint by creating a street presence? 

It's all food for thought.

 

Print Ad Effectiveness

A full-page iPhone print ad in USA Today^(R), featured 16 call outs and 16 brands—18 brands, including iPhone and AT&T^(R). It's not a very sexy ad at all—a bunch of logos inside a big black rectangle with lots of text. There’s a lot going on. Doesn't this go against what a print ad should do? One singular message, one singular thought? It could be argued the main message here is, "There's an app for that." There isn’t even a directly spelled-out call to action. Yet, when I saw this ad, I read every single app call out and immediately went to my iPhone and downloaded four new apps. I loved my iPhone even more after engaging with my new-found apps. The ad works. Maybe not the way marketers once believed print ads should work back in the '90s or even five years ago. The world of communication is changing. Who's still playing in the 1990s?

Cyber Monday 2009

The real retail success story for the 2009 holiday shopping season is not the marginal Black Friday gains reported by some traditional retailers amid deep discounting, but the strides made by online retailers and the many new mobile and digital tools shoppers are using to facilitate their holiday transactions.

Cyber Monday is a term coined in 2005 by the National Retail Federation in an attempt to establish an online equivalent to the Black Friday shopping event. The idea at that time was that many shoppers, following a weekend of brick-and-mortar shopping, would return to their offices and use their employers' high-speed internet connections to fill in their holiday shopping.

In fact, the term Cyber Monday is already becoming obsolete, since far more Americans have high-speed internet at home, and online retailers are pushing price promotions that predate Black Friday.

To this point, online sales on Black Friday alone were up 11% over 2008 to $595 million, according to ComScore, which monitors online traffic and commerce. Cyber Monday sales increased just 5 percent over 2008, to $887 million, ComScore also reported.  Among the top 500 online retailers, sales increased 14 percent over 2008 according to Coremetrics, another online research firm. Nearly half of Cyber Monday shopping was done from home locations, underscoring the growth of high-speed residential internet.

Americans are spending more online, and they're buying more items as well. On Cyber Monday alone, Coremetrics noticed that online shoppers were buying 30% more items than the previous year among the top 500 online retailers. 

This spending was highly concentrated among top online retailers. Amazon saw 16 percent of site visits on Cyber Monday, pushed partly by demand for their Kindle reading devices. Walmart followed with nearly 10 percent of site visits, followed by Target (5 percent), Best Buy (4 percent) and JC Penney (3 percent). In other words more than one-third of online shoppers visited these five of the top 500 online shops this year.

Much of the success of online shopping in 2009 can be attributed to smarter practices on the part of online retailers. Many are adapting proven techniques from traditional retailers: special "early-bird" savings (many starting days before Black Friday), free "gift-card" savings and free shipping were among the most popular draws. 

But a big part of the story takes place behind-the-scenes. Shoppers are using more and more digital and mobile tools to facilitate both online and physical shopping transactions. They go online for product reviews and then click through to find nearby store locations with the best prices and inventory. SmartPhone applications like ShopSavvy allow shoppers to locate an item by photographing and submitting the barcode, then receiving an analysis of best prices online and in local stores, complete with store information and driving directions. Traditional retailers like Ann Taylor used e-mail to inform their best customers about extended savings hours on Black Friday. And other brick-and-mortar retailers like Walmart and Target pushed their online store offerings to help protect against the growing trend of online purchasing.

Last year ShopperCulture challenged whether Black Friday is still an accurate indicator of economic health. This year, we ask, are one-day sales figures based on Black Friday and Cyber Monday truly the best barometers of retail sales? While single-day figures make for compelling sound bites, we think a better barometer of year-end sales would be to look at the extended weekend as a whole (or longer), both online and offline, taking into account not only traffic and sales but also sales margin, in order to account for the deep discounts that have become a mainstay of holiday shopping.

Black Friday 2009

With reports on Black Friday 2009 in, U.S. retailers can breathe a collective sigh of relief that more Americans went shopping last weekend than ever before. We shopped in numbers, and we shopped enthusiastically. 195 million of us hit the malls, downtown and suburban shopping centers, and Walmart and other large-format stores. Sales were generally up, not only in value outlets like Walmart and Target but also in high-end retailers like Saks Fifth Avenue. According to ShopperTrak, retail sales were up 0.5 percent over 2008 on Friday alone.

Good news. Right? Or is the real story not about marginal sales increases based on deep discounts, but the avoiding of the loss that many had predicted? 

Big retailers enjoyed gains -- or avoided loss -- this year by recognizing a fundamental learning from the past year: Americans will buy if you let them do it on their own terms.

Retail locations were better prepared than ever before. Stores were better staffed, and better stocked. Key sales items, such as flat-screen TVs, phones, cameras and gaming systems, were centrally featured and in plentiful supply. And while shopping lots were full, we saw fewer signs of the chaos that marked Black Friday 2008. Retailers like Macy's, Walmart, J.C. Penney and Toys "R" Us offered clear incentives -- such as additional 20 percent savings between 5:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m -- with limited exceptions and unlimited stock. Happier customers and fewer returns make the shopping situation better for everyone.

The numbers tell the story. Retail traffic was up significantly in 2009. According to the National Retail Federation, an industry trade group, 195 million shoppers visited stores and websites over the long weekend, up from 172 million in 2008. However, on average they spend more cautiously. Average amount spend dropped from $372.57 to $343.31, about an 8 percent drop.

In other words, Americans are buying as strongly as ever before, but more than ever we shop with savings as the primary criterion. We are better informed about money-saving offers. We have more tools as our disposal, like digital coupons and real-time mobile price comparison apps like RedLaser (left). We expect more control over the transaction than we did before. 

Maybe the big story out of Black Friday 2009 has yet to be told. Is online shopping the real growth space? We're smarter about buying online this year, and more of us have high-speed internet connections: the National Retail Federation forecast the number of people who plan to shop today, Cyber Monday 2009, to 96.5 million in 2009, a 13 percent jump over 2008.

Which leads to two questions:

For brick-and-mortar retailers, is "flat" the new "up"?

In coming years, will digital retail be the only opportunity for real retail growth?

Stay tuned.

Turning Shoppers Into Loyal Shoppers

I recently became a Member at REI for many reasons. One is the company’s impressive return policy. This policy allows a Member to return a product, for whatever reason, and receive a new product, free. For example, an employee told me about a shopper who bought a bike from REI in 2003 and brought it in for repairs this past October, only to leave with a brand-new bike, for free. Wow!

REI just sent me a welcome coupon for 15% off. At the same time, I received a 15% coupon for Sports Authority, which provides similar products as REI for less money. Right now, I’m in need of a new pair of running shoes and a new pair of winter boots. I considered both stores.

While Sports Authority is located closer to my home, provides more running shoe product selection, and provides lower prices, this wasn’t enough to sway me. In the end, I chose to buy my two pairs of footwear from REI. REI’s return policy was the ultimate sway. I’d only have to purchase ONE TIME a pair of either type of footwear. So, basically, every 500 miles, I can take my running shoes back to REI and receive new ones – FREE. Every few seasons, when my snow boots receive too much wear and tear, back they go to REI, and brand-spanking-new ones I receive. FREE.

This act alone from REI turns me into a brand advocate and a repeat shopper and purchaser. Plus, I’m spending more time on their Web site and in their stores thinking about all the possibilities of what I could do next outdoors.

While REI (and others like L.L. Bean) has provided this service for many years, it’s still impressive.

What if CPG companies did this? What if powersports companies, like motorcycle and ATV manufacturers, did this? How would they then need to add value for their shopper? How might their relationship with their shoppers change?

DIGITAIL(TM)

What if you could enter info in an online media banner and coupons were automatically shifted to you loyalty card? How about while window-shopping you snap a pic of an item and it's automatically charged and shipped to your home. What if your mobile device could learn your shopping wants and needs and alert you when they went on sale? With retail and digital technologies - both online and offline - being utilized influence shoppers and drive sales, these are all current opportunities or near future possibilities. Click here to read more on the latest issue of the Integer Pulse. 

 

Presentation from Spark 7, 'Turning Shoppers into Buyers'

A few weeks ago in Dublin, at Spark 7, 'Turning Shoppers into Buyers', Craig Elston from the Integer Group presented leading thinking on US Shopper Marketing. 

The presentation centered around four of Integer's Shopper Marketing Tenets.

1. Understand the audience
2. Create consistent, ongoing shopper dialogue
3. Deliver innovation at retail
4. Sell today, brand always

Click here to download the presentation.

Social Media Count

For all you data hounds out there, this is fantastic.

The Receipt: A Last(ing) Impression

When is the last time your receipt surprised you? Intrigued you? Helped you? Delighted you?

The receipt is essentially the last impression a store makes on a shopper. And mostly, that impression is technical, disorganized, and unappealing.

Lately, receipts are crammed with extras: requests for surveys, sweepstakes, other offers, points balances, etc. But mostly it's more fine print--literally.

What if a receipt embodied the store's brand, right down to the color, font and messaging? What if it entertained (like this Puma Store 8-bit fun)? What if it informed (like this Burgerville nutritional info)? What if it provoked a giggle (like this Dunkin' Donuts message)?

The lowly receipt is such a missed opportunity to make a lasting impression. And we know from research that the last impression is often the lasting one.