Then it struck me: the tablet is the first device that can actually travel with the shopper through the complete path to purchase and if the prices come down enough, retailers might lease them for free to their frequent shoppers and club members to lock in their loyalty.  The lifetime value of a shopper would more than pay for this.  Imagine the incredible marketing value to a manufacturer who can deliver the exact right message to the right person, exactly at the right moment…the point of purchase.

Research I have amassed indicates that tablet owners already spend more time accessing the internet via their tablets than their computers. Tablets are becoming preferred devices among their owners for online shopping according to Forrester.  Today that is from the living room, but why should it be restricted so?  The tablet is inherently a mobile device.  Imagine a store completely wired for wifi so you can use your tablet as you shop. Imagine you have planned your trip at home, on your tablet by scanning what you are about to run out of and by searching on your tablet for coupons and interesting dinner ideas.  While you are doing this, smart marketers and retailers are advertising their products and offers using an interactive sight, sound, motion experience. Now, you have created a shopping list on your tablet, which also contains all of your frequent shopper information for the store you are about to visit.  When you enter the store with your tablet, it recognizes your presence and greets you with a video message from the store manager.  You place the tablet in your shopping cart so you can watch it as you go and your shopping list automatically gets reorganized so you can see which items that are on your list are in the aisle you are currently in.  This will encourage a shopper to completely navigate the store which any retailer would love. While you are walking down the aisle, windows awake on your tablet delivering messages that are relevant to you based on shopping history and interactively offering you deals.

Checkout is a breeze as you have all of the offers stored paperlessly, along with your frequent shopper data and mobile payment info.  As you leave, the tablet awakes to wish you a nice day and thank you for shopping at that retailer.  Of course, this shopping trip becomes part of the stored information so planning the next trip becomes easier.

When I discussed this topic with my friend Doug Stephens (@retailprophet), he advised me to think about the trend that consumers are using the best screen for the purpose at hand. While a number of apps are being developed for smart phones, I think the tablet might be the best screen for shopping.  A number of initiatives reflect this thinking as well, most recently in the US, mediacart.  Now there is a significant initiative in China that is similar.  While such efforts have yet to succeed, the big difference I am proposing is that rather than using a foreign device attached to a shopper cart, use the same tablet you use in your living room, on the train, in the bathroom, etc. that you then bring to the store and mount on the cart.

There is still much work to build the needed in-store and cloud-based technology infrastructure to support this vision.  However, as the Institute for the Future preaches, develop foresight about possible futures to provoke strategies that need to start in the here and now.

Smartphones, tablets, iPod touch will create the mobile, app-enabled lifestyle and that means apps.  Why?  Because mobile is not like a computer with a small screen; it is transformational. Apps provide needed simplicity for mobile web access by extracting the essence of a service and put it right in front of the user, in a way that fits perfectly within the screen limitations and adds a localized dimension. For example, search for Walmart on your computer now do that on your Smartphone. Locations near your current location will be mapped and, if you click the link, you will get to a very app-like landing page rather than the one you see on your computer.  Search for eBay and the app itself shows up in the results.  They have optimized nicely for mobile search and perhaps that has something to do with their pronouncement that nearly $2 billion in gross sales were generated via mobile in 2010.  On the other hand, many grocery retailers are not yet optimized for mobile and you have to do the pinch and stretch thing to be able to read the website you get to, and then, only to find that the coupons need to be printed!

If there is any life activity that is crying out to become appified, simplified, localized and mobilized on your smart phone, it is shopping.  Furthermore, marketers want it too.  Imagine; you will be able to deliver messages and offers to a shopper as they stand right in front of your brand and its competitors that are customized from prior purchase activity.  This is behavioral targeting and recency, two principles of media placement, on steroids.

Look at this distribution of time spent on apps by category from Flurry; it appears that aiding shopping has not yet taken off.

1. Games: 47%
2. Social: 32%
3. News: 9%
4. Entertainment: 7%
5. Other: 5%

However, app developers are starting to work on this.  Modiv has been testing a mobile shopping solution called Scan It with Stop and Shop that is now about to be tested on iPhones.  It links offers to your frequent shopper history and knows where you are in the store.

Ad Age reports Finish Line unveiled a new app that is focused on shopper experience; it gives shoppers access to real-time inventory at the store nearest them. Users can check to see if an item is available in the style, size and color they’re looking for before coming to the store.

Amazon offers a price checking app so you can be in a Best Buy or Walmart, check the price of the same item at Amazon and decide if you want to order it from within the app.  Making a purchase at Amazon while standing in the Walmart “showroom”!

Truly it is the “rise of the planet of the apps”!  As an increasing majority obtains smart mobility, as smart phones replace PCs as the number one way of accessing the internet, as life becomes app-enabled, people will insist, “yeah, we want an app for that”…and they’ll get it.

In app-enabled lifestyles, marketers will see transformational opportunities to connect consumers and shoppers with their brand.  They will optimize their owned media for mobile. They will see new mobile ad units that are very impactful, and vertically integrate their relationship with consumers from the living room to the store, becoming relevant at the right time, right place, with the right message.

I’ll share more of my thoughts on the app-enabled lifestyle on Nov 30-Dec 1 at the SF Appnation III conference.

I decided to analyze my shopping cart from a recent trip and I am more convinced than ever that the traditional awareness driven linear AIDA model only drives a fraction of what goes in the cart.

Here is my shopping cart about half way through a fill-in trip, and the “play by play”.

• Wissotzky tea: I never heard of this brand before and tea was not on my list.  There was a nice in-aisle free standing display that caught my eye.  I’m not a big tea drinker, but mango and passion fruit flavor sounded nice, so what the heck?  Brand awareness, interest, and purchase all happened simultaneously.
• Olives stuffed with blue cheese:  The product was on my list but I couldn’t tell you (even now) what the brand is
• Jalapeno slices: impulse purchase.  Something I like, haven’t bought in a while, but they were right next to the olives.  Couldn’t tell you the brand.
• Kraft American Cheese slices: the only brand of American Cheese I have bought for years.  I’m sure TV advertising had a lot to do with this, but I can’t tell you the last time I saw a commercial for this product.
• Precut veggies.  Store brand. Discovered precut veggies of broccoli, cauliflower, and carrots at retail some time ago and wanted a healthy snack.
• Lemon Meringue Pie.  (Hidden under the veggies). Store brand, a regular item in the house (my wife loves this).  Discovered at retail one day.
• Home Pride whole wheat bread.  Discovered at retail many years ago and I have a strong preference for this brand (not bland like white bread, not dry like other whole wheat).

Now, I must confess, this isn’t the first time I’ve done this and it always comes out the same; a minority of the products I buy reflect strong brand loyalty and of those, many I just discovered at retail one day (Seattle’s Best Henry’s Blend and Everybody’s Nuts flavored Pistachio nuts are two additional examples.).  In fact, I once kept a diary of all brands I used (not messages exposed to but actually used).  I reached 77 brands by 2PM when I stopped (it got tiring!) but the big finding was that I only felt loyalty to 5 of the 77 and about one-third of the products I couldn’t even tell you the brand name.  For example, making coffee involves 8 brands (coffee maker, filter, coffee, countertop, spoon, cup, milk, and the outlet I plug the coffee maker into.)  I know 3 brand names of the 8 products and only feel loyalty to one (the coffee) and even at that, I don’t buy that item all the time.  However, to be fair, the coffee maker is a Mr. Coffee and I’m sure all those ads with Joe DiMaggio got that brand in my consideration set.

My belief is that three things come together to produce purchase outcome; brand meaning (usually non-exclusive, more about acceptability and matching to needs), activation (getting me to want that type of product, displays, right features, sales), and shopper heuristics (how I choose to buy this type of product).  Brands are very important, but more often than not, they add value to me by simplifying my shopper decision making rather than being a brand I am engaged with.  Brand meaning can be created via advertising, social interaction, or now more spontaneously at point of purchase via shopper marketing or mobile apps.  There is no single answer; these are just different plays in the marketing playbook to be guided by shopper insights research into the shopping styles for that type of product.

Marketers find themselves in a world where the great majority of brand-consumer relationships are based on non-exclusive brand beliefs which give shoppers choices; that explains why many or most brand purchase decisions are made at retail. Marketers will want to dial up the exclusivity of what their brand stands for and owns (see blog on this) or change the way a shopper shops.  Get them to start looking for YOUR brand rather than a type of product.  Otherwise, national brand marketers will remain challenged to support their price differential vs. store brands.

Look at this table of data of aided awareness vs. brand shares from a household products category and you’ll see little relationship.

Aided awareness is what we measure but it isn’t really what we want to know.  In an era of shopper marketing and Procter’s call for store-back thinking, CPG Marketers want to know how to get their brands noticed at retail.  That means the brand broke through the clutter and became relevant to that shopper at that moment; it got in the game.  It could even mean that a shopper became instantly aware of your brand and bought it. THAT is shelf-back thinking!

Getting noticed at retail is NOT a no-brainer; it is hard and requires great marketing. There are 40,000 SKUs in a typical supermarket and a shopper buys 1% of them over the course of a year.  John Dranow from Smart Revenue says the first thing a shopper does on a given trip is deselect 90% of what’s in the store. The 90% of products that are deselected are like the gorilla in the video with kids bouncing basketballs.  You are so intent on counting the number of passes by those kids in white shirts amidst the chaos, you don’t see the person in the gorilla suit.  “Inattentional blindness” is the name of the phenomenon and it happens to shoppers on every shopping trip.

What a marketer should want from their communications efforts is to make their brand relevant to break through the chaos.  Create anticipation, curiosity, meaning, and desire pursuant to actions like getting people talking, searching, visiting your owned media sites, and looking for your brand at retail and ultimately buying it.  Post-purchase, media can help guide the experience consumers are having with the product to get them to want to replenish as they run out.  Yes, media is about post-purchase influence; can you say “below the funnel”?

The ability for a marketer to get their brand noticed on the shelf and then instantly have people make meaning or mentally retrieve information about it is critical. Even better, is if it gets noticed first, which, any behavioral economist will tell you, is a really good advantage to have.  The best thing for a marketer is if the shopper puts THEIR brand on the shopping list by name and then every other brand becomes the gorilla. The best marketing and media strategies for accomplishing this will vary, depending on how people shop for that type of product so shopper insights must inform media strategy.

Literally, awareness is a survey construct that measures the ability of a respondent to retrieve a brand memory during survey questioning regardless of whether or not the product category was relevant to their lives at the moment they clicked the link.  In contrast, what CPG marketers really want to know is how to make the retail experience evoke a brand memory and create meaning while someone is shopping and what communications approaches best accomplish that given the path to purchase for their product.

If marketing research wants greater impact on marketing decision-making, if it is to get that seat at the table, it has to start measuring what the business really needs to know.

Postscript: if you still think awareness is a prerequisite to purchasing, come back tomorrow where I will post a picture of my shopping cart at mid-trip from yesterday with commentary.

What happens when that is wrong?  What does marketing do when it STARTS with the purchase?

This is an extreme version of what Procter calls “store back”.  However, based on shopper insights research I have conducted, I believe that, for grocery products, over half of first-time purchases are unplanned; in fact, the shopper might not even have been aware of the product before buying it.  In those cases, it all STARTS with the purchase and ENDS with awareness.  The purchase funnel is totally flipped.

When it all starts with the purchase, the role of marketing communications changes.  Now marketing must get the product noticed at shelf and impart meaning to it instantaneously for the shopper.  Packaging, shelf placement, thematic displays, signage, mobile messages that are location-aware, shopper offers based on that shopper’s history, and master brand familiarity become the main vectors for creating meaning.  In this communications model, when someone encounters a product they were unfamiliar with they should be able make sense of it instantly; to tell YOU (the marketer) what the product is about, rather than you having to tell them in a concept statement.  After the product is bought and being used, there is more sense-making that occurs.  If the consumer is really into the product as they are using it, now you have an opportunity to build engagement:  they might join a community, become a fan in Facebook, share comments, start seeking out advertising and recalling it, seek out the brand’s “creation story”, etc.  In this scenario, the impact of brand narrative, brand values, social media engagement, etc. come AFTER the purchase, so they solidify rather than precondition the brand-customer relationship. 

Could it really be that it all starts with the purchase?  Well, for certain types of products and retailing situations, I believe it does.  Consider this:

• Conduct a study to measure the percent of products bought for the first time that are discovered in-store (I got 50%+)
• Do you think the products bought for the first time on impulse in a Kroger’s, Trader Joes, Costco, Target, etc. are all the same and were previously known? If not, then you believe that brand adoption can START via the shopping experience.
• Consider shopping styles that people have, reflecting their relationship with a product category.  Can you imagine categories (e.g. artisan cheeses) where shoppers like to explore and find new interesting products to buy?

This last point is perhaps the most important.  People have different shopping styles for different product categories which means that the heuristics they use to make decisions are systematic.  You might not ever buy carbonated soft drinks the way you buy interesting dips that you just tried at a tasting station.  This is where behavioral economics intersects marketing; the study of how people decide is often more interesting than theoretical purchase intentions.  Hence, some products will predominantly be bought via a process that starts in-store.  Others will be bought based more on the traditional marketing model requiring awareness built via mass media. You need to study HOW people decide in order to understand when to start from the traditional end of the funnel and when you start from the other end of the funnel.

When it all STARTS with the purchase, everything that you thought was upstream becomes downstream and the thing that was the most downstream of all, the purchase, becomes the most upstream event. 

This is “store back” on steroids.

Now, the researcher in me has to ask the rhetorical question, “Does the marketing community have the research tools to act on this new way of thinking?”  Rhetorical because, I don’t think we do.