Rethinking the concept of consumer intent

Back in 2005, we did an article over on the WireSpring blog about calculating the ROI for digital signs, and started out by describing an "awareness funnel" that took walked through a shopper's first moment of truth with an item -- from becoming aware that the product existed to actually purchasing it. It looked like this:

              / \
             /   \ <- SALES
            /_____\
           /       \ <- IDENTIFICATION
          /_________\
         /           \ <- PREFERENCE
        /_____________\
       /               \ <- PERCEPTION
      /_________________\
     /                   \ <- RECALL
    /_____________________\
   /                       \ <- RECOGNITION
  /_________________________\
 /                           \ <- AWARENESS
/_____________________________\

As I was reviewing some old blog articles from Advertising Age recently, I came across another description of the same concept, this time from the perspective of consumer intent. As the article's author Troy Young notes, "Intention is one or two steps before purchase and far removed from 'unaware.' Brand advertisers love intention, naturally, but the real magic is the part before intention -- moving a consumer from being 'unaware' to being 'predisposed'.... What the data show is this: In creating value for brands, we need to look beyond 'intent to buy' and toward 'intent to engage' with a brand message." Consequently, his funnel looks roughly like this:

              / \
             /   \ <- SALES
            /_____\
           /       \ <- ??
          /_________\
         /           \ <- ?
        /_____________\
       /               \ <- INTENTION
      /_________________\
     /                   \ <- PREDISPOSED
    /_____________________\
   /                       \ <- AWARE
  /_________________________\
 /                           \ <- UNAWARE
/_____________________________\

While Young states that "the real magic is the part before intention", from where I'm standing, I'd say the real magic is in fact after it, when you complete the 2-stage process, whatever it is, that converts a mere shopper into an actual buyer. Of course, Young notes that such a process will only happen when the purchase actually demands a decision - nobody's going through 6 or 7 steps to buy a can of soda or a pack of gum. But I guess that's the difference between a brand-focused guy like Young and a sales-focused guy like me: for the brand-centric, building the consumer psyche to the point where there's real intent to buy is the biggest challenge, and thus garners the lion's share of ad funds. That's why we see so many commercials for stuff, and none of them actually say "look, just buy me already!" We're instead finessed into wanting, desiring whatever it is -- a car, the latest clothes, a new computer. But very few actually take the direct route and say "buy me now." I suppose it's because unless the viewer has an immediate need for the product, the message is lost and there's no "residual" value. With a brand-centric message, on the other hand, each commercial, print ad, banner on the 'net or other marketing device builds on previous messages, essentially assuming in advance that the viewer doesn't want to make the purchase right now, but might need to in the future.

My funnel, on the other hand, is more heavily weighted towards the top. I assume that, being a good brand marketer, the product's already going to be in the hearts and minds of my viewers. My job is to figure out how to turn all of that goodwill and built-up brand recognition into an actual sale of the product. That's one of the reasons I like digital signage so much - it's hard to find a more direct route to shoppers, or a better place to put a message like "hey you! buy me right now!" -- in as elegant and beautiful a way as possible, of course.

Tags: in-store marketing, marketing at-retail, digital signage, shopper marketing

Visual vignettes and virtual shopping

When I began teaching about food, I pointed out to my students that market researchers had much better information than social scientists, including studies that looked at how people moved through a store, what eye level was the most compelling for purchases, and whether it mattered if items were up front or back on the shelves. But the virtual shopping experience described by Valla Roth and Matt Draper of MarketTools reminds me that old fashioned social science research techniques can often provide better data than in-store surveys and tests. The system allows potential customers to walk through a supermarket on their home computers. The pictures of the aisles and the movement through the store are facilitated by 3D graphics, allowing the researcher to assess how and when a shopper might pick up a 3 for 1 deal or ignore the end-of-aisle displays.

Long before we had the computer graphics to make it virtual or sexy, I learned a similar technique demonstrated by the late Dr. Peter S. Rossi, head of the Social and Demographic Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Rossi pioneered a new method of research called the vignette technique (or in its less glamorous name, factorial survey), in which different descriptions of a situation are given to respondents, who are then asked a series of questions to elicit individual responses to each description. The vignette technique is great because it allows the researcher to measure and analyze fairly complex scenarios in a way that surveys and linear question-and-answer formats do not. Rossi and his wife Alice (an equally famous sociologist) used it to measure how people perceived their relationships and obligations to family, but vignettes have also been used in studies of AIDs/HIV, religious beliefs, and the delivery of social services to different populations. For all this, consumer market research has shown surprisingly little use of the technique, opting more for focus groups, surveys, and in-store tests.

In a way, MarketTools’ new approach is an “upgraded” vignette method. Giving the vignettes a 3D interface and having the consumer act out inside of a virtual environment combines the vignettes with a much-needed visual element. Since people are better at relating and responding to stories with a images,  we hope the collected responses will be better too. And imagine the next step: perhaps a Wii-like interface where you actually “walk” through the store and interact with objects.  It would be like The Sims for market research (but of course, in The Sims pizza never goes bad and groceries can be delivered at any hour of the day...)

Here are some limits and suggestions, though: No matter how sophisticated our graphics get, they are still a mere representation of reality. People’s main complaint about shopping on line is that the product image on the website does not match up to what arrives in their home. And while the grocery store layout is ubiquitous to most people, there is a certain fudge factor to getting it as realistic as possible, and comparable to what people are used to in the real world. In the end, real interactive video might prove more useful than graphic representations. Also, t one thing this method alone won't mimic the different types of shopping trip that people take -- the data won’t tell you if people on a milk run or a weekly shopping trip are most likely to make point-of-sale purchases. Tying the tech back to storylines and vignettes would help: give people a scenario before setting them lose in the virtual shopping world (“It’s Wednesday, only your teenage daughter will be home for dinner, and you have to be home in half an hour.”).

It’s almost impossible to follow customers around and see how they react to deals without being invasive. As much as I like talking to my informal research group in the supermarket, I don’t learn much about their point-of-sale behavior. But I am much more attuned to their overall patterns and cycles, their brand preferences, and the frequencies at which they buy certain products. I'd love to see how they make decisions in real time, even in an imperfect imaginary realm, so if that's the current state-of-the-art, I'll still take it.

Tags: shopper marketing, market research, shopping

What's in a shopping cart? Only a slice of the pie

Thursday I made a stop at the supermarket during the middle of the day, middle of the week – no market research on senior citizens this time, just a quick trip for things we needed to make it until Saturday. At the checkout I ended up with: navel oranges, apples, cilantro, lettuce, cukes, tofu, eggs, cheese, two kinds of bread, organic peanut butter, specialty crackers, macaroni and cheese, yogurt, and six different kinds of chocolate bars. Only about four things were on my grocery list. Some were impulse buys – but not perhaps what you'd think. All that chocolate was on the list. Some of the produce was not.

But what can you tell about my consuming and shopping future from just this one cart? (Here’s one hint: almost everything, including the crackers, are brands I buy all the time. The only variation was the chocolate – I buy it every week, but always try new kinds . Today they actually had new varieties on sale!). How would you characterize my purchases? What can they tell you about brand loyalty (some), consistency (a lot), and general purchasing trends (produce as impulse buy!!) ? Looking at shopping carts is a tried and true research method, and is always a staple of larger shopper marketing programs. It’s certainly better than consumer surveys. CPG News recently reported (as noted in this RetailWire BrainTrust post) that:

Catalina Marketing has spent two years examining 250 million shopping baskets weekly from 130 million separate shopper identifications. The goal is to probe the gap between what shoppers say they buy in surveys and what they actually purchase.

I probably wouldn’t mention those chocolate bars in a survey. But the shopping cart in isolation – one day, one cart – is as problematic as the shopping survey. One of the things I’ve been studying for years is everyday meals – how frequently people eat at home, what they cook, what they get as take out or prepared meals, who they eat with. The most important thing I’ve learned is that people live their lives according to patterns, but one slice won’t give you even the slightest idea what any given day might look like. For example, the Sunday dinner is different from but dependent on its contrast with the weekday supper, the holiday meal captures the extremes, and there are other punctuation marks all along the way.

Shopping carts are going to reflect patterning, too. Mine was a Wednesday cart on a week when someone had done the week’s shopping on the previous weekend. But we eat a lot of produce and always run out midweek. I’d also exhausted my chocolate supply, which sometimes (but not always) happens too. But if you looked at our cart over a month, you would get a very different picture – where do we run to for a loaf of bread or eggs? How much do we shop at little local markets or at big supersavers like Costco? What happens on a week when we do get down to the Saturday morning farm and specialty markets (the Strip District, for those who know Pittsburgh). How much did we eat out this week? Who is doing the cooking and who is being fed (the mac and cheese was for my daughter’s friend, who never eats anything else I make)?

Certainly many market researchers worry about whether people will tell “truth,” but truth is not in a snapshot. Rather it's in multiple images, over time and place (the whole pie!). More importantly, shopping carts are the repositories for later use. If we don’t find out how people are making use of the products, we don’t understand their purchases. Shopping cart data may be rich, but it's ultimately less useful if we don't map patterns of food use along with food purchases.

Still, watching shopping carts is particularly important right now as two consumer trends are butting up right against each other: one, the growing concern with organic, natural, and “green” products (which still tend to be a bit more expensive in most markets) and two, the rising cost of food in general, which tends to push people more towards bargains, coupons, and other sale items.

Mapping patterns seems like a lot of work, but without it, you’ve got tons of data and no anchoring scheme. The distinction between shopper and consumer is too simplistic to capture what’s going on (on Wed I was both and neither!!!). It also needs to be matched against what’s on sale, what’s out of stock, and what’s new in the store (seasonally, for example).

Shopping cart data needs to be put into a meaningful framework in order to make sense. If the data comes without questions and information about how the products are about to be used, all we know is what people have bought. There’s no insight into why.

But they've probably figured out that I buy a lot of chocolate...

Tags: shopping, shopper marketing, market research

Here's a novel way to study shoppers and shopping...

From the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction department comes a story (via ABC News) of an artists' cooperative that surreptitiously built a small apartment inside a shopping mall to, "understand the mall more and life as a shopper." According to artist and mall-dweller Michael Townsend, the idea for the project, "was inspired by a Christmastime ad for the mall which featured a 'an enthusiastic female voice talking about how great it would be if you (we) could live at the mall.'" The article recounts the entertaining points of the story:

[Townsend] said he and seven other artists built the 750-square-foot apartment beginning in 2003 and lived there for up to three weeks at a time.

The artists built a cinderblock wall and nondescript utility door to keep the loft hidden from the outside world.

But inside, the apartment was fully furnished, down to a hutch filled with china and a Sony Playstation 2 although a burglar broke in and stole the Playstation last spring, Townsend said.

There was no running water instead they used the mall bathrooms.

So while Townsend is now on probation (and probably far away from a mall), his story got me thinking about shopper marketing and retail anthropology. While a good number of CPG makers, malls and retail chains have done anthropological fieldwork in their stores and with their shoppers (almost always by hiring it out to a professional field service company like Envirosell), I haven't heard of anybody who did so for over four years at a stretch. And while I doubt that Townsend kept the kind of methodical, detailed notes that can yield significant insights, his little experiment would suggest that mall patrons might adopt a behavior pattern -- even a bizarre one -- and keep it up for quite a long time before someone notices.

Tags: shopper marketing, retail anthropology

Organic asks: what's the concept behind concept stores?

Concept stores are somewhat unique in their ability to capture customer and media attention with sometimes over-the-top sensory experiences, unique spaces and unusual merchandising techniques. Over at Three Minds @ Organic, though, Marta Strickland wonders whether the aura and mystique they create might not be so great. Ok, the argument centers around one trip to Ruehl, Abercrombie & Fitch's attempt to cater to the 22-35 audience who outgrow A&F's standard fare. Here's her take on the store, one of about a dozen or so currently operating in the US:

Last weekend I visited Ruehl for the first time in the Twelve Oaks mall. I have usually been too intimidated to go in the store. There is just something about a darkly lit “street corner” in the middle of the mall with disinterested text-messaging girls half my age wandering in and out of the darkness that intimidates me. The one in the Twelve Oaks mall is particularly darkly lit to the point where you can’t really see anything from the outside of the “windows” to even make you certain it is a clothes store and not some wormhole to another dimension.

Despite the cool atmosphere, though, she wonders whether or not the store's concept was the right one:

In the end, I can’t say that I "get it". Maybe I’m not the right target and certainly not a fashion expert, but chic martini lounge atmosphere + 22-35 audience = "understated" screen print hoodies… it just doesn’t add up for me.

And in just those few words I think Strickland has hit upon an idea that is frequently overlooked when retailers plan a new store concept -- namely, whether cool sells. And I'm not just talking about selling a few more hoodies or pairs of flip flops. I'm talking about whether "cool" or "unique" or "interesting" are good enough concepts by themselves to garner brand loyalty. Whether it's Organic staffers' experiences at Ruehl (they feel it creates an artificial aura of superiority) or Samsung's "Experience" store (where you can't actually buy products), concept stores occasionally focus too much on the "concept" and not enough on the "store" side of things, to their detriment.

Back in the mythical time when all stores looked the same and all personnel were equally knowledgeable, a store that stood out based purely on its ambiance may have worked. But with so much focus on shopper marketing and the in-store experience, retailers must now have remarkable staff and remarkable products to win loyal customers. There's nothing wrong with being cool, of course (well, unless like the Organic folks it's cool to the point of being clique-ish), but today's concept retailers can no longer count on it as a reliable way to convert passers-by into browsers into shoppers into buyers into repeat buyers into lifelong-loyal customers (or at least demographically-loyal, since I get the feeling that Ruehl might kick you out once you cross the 35 year old threshold).

As if to illustrate that point, check out Salon.com's article about (and creepy pictures of) A&F's 61 year-old CEO, lacquered up to look like a "casually flawless college kid."

Tags: in-store experience, shopper marketing, concept stores