Understand the challenges retail and brand insight teams face when looking for shopping insights to support their internal clients in category, trade or marketing teams.
With Amazon buying Whole Foods, there is no way back for the retail industry. Disruption is now.
Shoppers are, after all, not distinct from consumers or moms or people generally. Shopping is just another facet in the diamond of human personality and behaviour. But now the severity of the recession perversely gives research a real opportunity to step up to the plate and bring real innovation and understanding of the dynamics of shopping and the motivations of shoppers. These had already been changing dramatically as a result of the increasing influence of the Internet. The TNS Digital Life study shows that students, young people and housewives now routinely spend over a third of their leisure time online. Much of this time, it may be assumed, is taken up with comparison shopping and price checking. This in turn changes the dynamics of the actual, physical shopping experience itself, since people are much more informed by the time they reach the store. Globally and domestically, therefore, research into the attitudes, behaviours and psychology of shoppers is more relevant today than ever before. Now is the time for research to innovate and for researchers to invest in this area.
In a new book The grocers: the rise and rise of the super-market chains the authors Andrew Seth and Geoffrey Randall report an estimated 3% of an average adult life will be spent in a supermarket. "The store themselves partly reflect, and patently drive, significant shift in social patterns- the irresistible growth of self-service, new global foods availability and sourcing; new feature, storage and display techniques; car-borne shopping; out of town centres and the decline of urban as well as rural high streets". This dynamic sector accounts for 4% of total research spending.
The purpose of this chapter is to explain how market information based upon retail sales is derived and used by manufacturers and retailers to make better business decisions. Since the emergence of mass marketing, manufacturers of fast turnover packaged goods have wanted information about the performance of their brands, both against key competitors, and the market as a whole. For the fifty years prior to 1980, such information came from two main sources: consumer panels and retail audits.
The paper reviews the developments which have taken place in the retailer panel services in the late 80's and early 90's, with specific reference to the move from retail audits to scanning based services and the current trend towards census data. The dramatic growth of data volumes associated with these changes have brought into the industry the need for the latest in information technology and a new way of handling and analyzing the data. The paper discusses the trends towards harmonising data, structuring hierarchies and creating order. It draws a clear distinction between multi-dimensional databases and data warehouses and between data mining and data drilling, and explains in some detail the meanings behind the terms. Whereas much of the technical and theoretical aspects associated with the latest technology are kept to a minimum, there is a focus on the essence, meaning and implications to the end user. The current trends toward manufacturer specific data warehouses are challenged and it is argued that users who now re-focus on modelling and analytical techniques and data mining technologies will quickly benefit more than their competitors who continue to focus on ordering data in their own data warehouse environments.
This paper describes how consumer panels in Great Britain have been developed in recent years to provide a wide range of services that are of specific relevance to grocery retailers. The paper will go on to describe in more detail three new services that further enhance the retailers understanding of their consumers buying behaviour. The first of these looks at catchment areas, or the distance that consumers travel to their chosen retailer and the ways that this affects their purchasing. The second analyses the classification of a retailers stores into clusters and examines the ways that these can then be employed to maximise their sales with particular reference to Category Management. The third segments consumers by the ways in which they shop and using this to identify areas of strength and weakness.
The needs of FMCG manufacturers and retailers require that suppliers of information for marketing decision support take an integrative perspective to what to offer to their market. After discussing the different ways that can be used in looking at a more integrated analysis of marketing data, two new information services will be defined and illustrated. These two new services are both based on analysis of aggregated information in independent sources. Special attention will be paid to the developed model for integration of information coming from internal sources ConsumerScan and InfoScan by looking at the strengths and weaknesses of both instruments and taking into account the differences in market definitions used in these instruments.
Three principles, drawn from several hundred experiments on positioning service businesses, help to summarise why a customer databank system assists the retailer in the continuity of organisation-wide strategic planning. Principle 1 : In marketing a service which caters for customer lifestyles, it is important to ask continually : which business are we in today, and what business should we be in tomorrow? Principle 2 : Four planning horizons contribute to the challenge of positioning a service business. Like a club, a total service policy should aim to unite : functional purpose, staff, members (i.e. customers), operational facilities. Principle 3 : A national chain of outlets comprises a global heart with local faces. For the customer, offer to stay competitive, the heart of the business needs a marketing edge : price (e.g. economy of scale), quality (e.g. expert central buying), added value character (e.g. a more enjoyable shopping experience). Together these principles help to focus on particular issues of measurement and analysis which research for retail strategies should address.
The consumer has ambivalent feelings about the new car dealer, who has long been protected by the exclusive franchise system. In the U.S. market there are signs that the dealer franchise system is already undergoing a revolution, caused by changes in the industry and in the broader consumer environment. In a crowded market the product must be redefined and broadened to include the service element. Customer satisfaction with individual dealers Is now being monitored by market research studies carried out by the manufacturers. Such studies can monitor progress within a franchise, but it requires a larger, industry wide CSI survey to show the position of the franchise relative to competition. Some of the larger multi-franchise dealers are also seeking to build a corporate identity based on quality of service, which may in time conflict with the manufacturers image objectives.
The retail trade in Finland is very much centralized; the four major chains dominate the market. Mass marketing by making use of mass media and mass bargains has been very powerful in the past few years. Segmentation of the consumers by shop chains or by type of shop has occurred in a very small extent. Buying loyalty has decreased and people do shopping in several chains and and in several types of shops. Our survey shows that the customers of supermarkets in different chains differ very little from each other concerning sociodemographic and psychographic factors. Today and especially in the future it is more essential to study segmentation by benefits or situational segmentation. The choice of the shop can be effected by fast tepo special bargains and going over to an other type of shops happens easily. New shop groups that sell dry food stuff and non food-products have clearly taken customers from the traditional trade chains.