The Marketing Arm has partnered with The Hartman Group to develop an occasion-based, strategic shopper marketing framework across 13 retailers in the food, drug, mass and C&G channels. This framework allows CPG and retailers’ shopper marketing teams to design communications, promotions and merchand ising in direct alignment with the most important eating occasions for a retailer’s shoppers. Further, it drives the efficiency of shopper marketing programs at both the brand and retail level.
Why did we make this investment?
Because something has to change. Lines are blurring as shoppers move seamlessly through a wide range of store types and across multiple product categories. Traditional marketing and shopper insights alone do not tell the rich, nuanced story of today’s complex shopper.
There’s something buried beneath the cultural theater of shoppers madly chasing promoted items around America’s only food retailers. This is the seldom- discussed, seldom-acknowledged fact that retailers actually show significant variation in the eating occasions of their shoppers.
The traditional breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacking frame will never reveal this story. However, by combining the Hartman Group’s Culture of Food lens with traditional day-part analysis, we get a strategic shopper marketing framework that uncovers surprising nuances in the eating patterns of retailers’ shopper base.
The key cultural distinction that divides every eating day-part is the distinction between Instrumental Eating Occasions (IST) and Savoring Eating Occasions (SAV). This is a crucial distinction — it delineates two very different shopper marketing opportunities and two very different sets of shopper aspirations at the shelf.
Cross-shopping between Retailer A and B is fairly common (See Cross-Shopping on right). In this highly competitive situation, each retailer has a clear competitive advantage in winning share of wallet from the other. The marked occasions are simply more prevalent in each Retailer’s shopper base and represents low-hanging fruit for the efficient spending of shopper marketing dollars.
What does this mean for you?
Occasion-based shopper marketing is about understand ing what shoppers are thinking when they enter a food retailer. It’s about making sure that good shopper marketing never forgets to connect directly with the joy of eating.
What’s important about cultural occasions isn’t that they provide us with a better way to classify shopping trips, but that they provide us with additional information we can use to further our understand ing of shopping and shopping trips.
If you’d like to learn more about how this proprietary study can help you, please contact Mike Paley.
