The Digital Dilemma: Determining the Right Mix of New, Traditional Tactics

Schaumburg, Ill. — In an ever-changing digital environment, consumers are adapting to digital at their own pace and terms, making it difficult for marketers to know where to best focus their shopper marketing efforts, according to Julie Quick, senior vice president and head of insights and strategy at Dallas-based agency Shoptology.“For everybody who’s out there using Apple Pay to buy their groceries, there’s somebody sitting at home with an FSI and a pair of scissors,” Quick said in March during a Shopper Marketing Summit presentation. “And that’s OK, but it really creates a great challenge for us as marketers, because if you’re in CPG ... your audience probably reflects shoppers that are all up and down this [digital and physical] continuum. … So, it’s really hard for you to know how much you need to move toward brave, bold new media versus sticking with some things that are more traditional and tried and true.”With a goal of helping marketers find the right digital and physical mix, Quick and Ken Madden, SVP and head of engagement at Shoptology, shared insights from their own research centered on understanding the “digitalness” of shoppers. The agency surveyed about 1,500 primary household grocery shoppers focusing on how they engage, and how much they engage, in digital behaviors, particularly in relation to shopping for weekly purchases in the CPG space. All participants were between 18-64 years old, and were considered “connected shoppers,” having online access and owning a smartphone.“For everybody who’s out there using Apple Pay to buy their groceries, there’s somebody sitting at home with an FSI and a pair of scissors.— Julie Quick, Shoptology“We really looked at this across two axes,” Madden said. “On the one hand, we’re looking across specific engagements and how they relate to specific purchase journey occasions. So, are people using these shopping engagements to get ideas, to get deals, to make lists to make their purchases, whatever that might be? We also classified this into three major classes of media.”The classes were “paper,” encompassing circulars and FSIs, “passive,” marketing materials that the shopper doesn’t really have to work to receive such as in-store displays, and “pixel,” which represents all digital touchpoints.The study revealed there are seven different archetypes of how shoppers engage with shopper marketing and tools, ranging from “simple shoppers,” who don’t use much marketing at all, to “hyper-connectors,” which are hyper-consumers of shopper marketing and represent one in five of connected shoppers.“What I find interesting about these folks is that they’re kind of split between Millennials, who really enjoy just the stimulation of having it all, as well as larger households, who maybe have more complex shopping,” said Quick, who also added that one in five “hyper-connectors” spend an average of $200 or more on their weekly needs.Survey results also showed that six in 10 connected shoppers are using digital almost all the time or at least some of the time as part of their shopping and tend to represent a bigger portion of weekly spending. These digital adopters also use shopping engagements classified as paper, passive and pixel almost always or at least sometimes.Data alone is not useful in creating a marketing plan, however. Creating a shopper marketing plan that is both data- and strategy-driven from the onset is critical, Quick said.“We often say around our offices that data is a servant not a master,” Quick said. “It shouldn’t tell you what to do. It should make you smarter so that you can make the right judgments. So as we look to create a model for how to do shopper marketing engagement we want to make sure we’re putting weight into both — that the data as well as your judgment and strategic perspective come together to create your best result.”For example, most laundry detergent is bought on stock-up trips, and data shows frequent-stock-up shoppers are highly digital with three in four saying digital is integral to their shopping, according to Quick. Thus, if a brand’s prime objective is to make a competitive brand user switch laundry detergent “right off the bat, as we’re thinking about how we would activate and develop a marketing plan for this audience, we know … we probably need to be over investing in that pixel category versus the passive or paper media.”Once the right digital mix is defined, a marketer has a wide list of shopper marketing tools to work with and add some strategic filters to in order to find the tools that best fit their objective.“So, we would look at things like our target: competitive users,” Quick said. “We would look at some key points of receptivity, which is probably pre-shelf in the case of laundry. Again, it’s a deeply seeded purchase habit, you’re probably not going to just [buy] that on a whim. ... Lastly, the ‘digitalness.’ We know that from a media standpoint they favor [certain] tools and we need to have a good portion of that in the mix.”

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