At Advertising Week in New York, recently, Communicus attended Match Marketing Group founder Michael Dill’s session in which he explored retailers’ engagement with today’s connected consumer. While this kind of online and mobile engagement works for retailers, Dill explained how it also holds enormous opportunity for CPG brands.
Rising price pressure from private label brands has prompted CPG companies to increase their advertising investments and focus on shopper marketing initiatives, including retail and CPG brand marketing collaborations. But there is still some risk with joint advertising partnerships. Given increasing retailer savvy in leveraging purchasing data and more ROI-based analytics to evaluate and optimize shopper marketing initiatives, creative messages can become more divergent across retail outlets. Increased emphasis on short-term sales lifts often comes at the expense of long-term brand-building.
Too often, marketers view shopper marketing activities as a way to generate a short-term sales boost, ignoring the potential for powerful brand-building. While shopper marketing initiatives are a great way to generate short-term sales impact and capitalize on impulse decisions made at the point-of-purchase, when used to their full potential they should also help to build long-term brand equity. The most successful initiatives both impact behavior and convey a meaningful brand message.
So how do the most successful organizations leverage shopper marketing to build brands? The first, and most critical, step is to ensure that all shopper marketing efforts are creatively tied to base brand equity advertising. From a consumer standpoint, all shopper marketing efforts (across retailers) should employ the same look and feel as the base brand advertising campaign. These creative ties help to drive beneficial synergies. As consumers engage with more elements within the same campaign, the brand and advertiser are reinforced in consumers’ minds. This leads to stronger brand linkage (consumers more able to identify the sponsor) and persuasive impact (greater changes in behaviors and brand perceptions).
While the medium doesn’t lend itself well to longer-form storytelling, it does provide an opportunity to convey a singular, concise message to consumers when they are engaged with the product or category at the point-of-purchase. The most successful in-store displays tend to have a simple, clean visual that reminds consumers of the other advertising they have seen for the brand – bringing to front-of-mind the messages and brand connections they’ve gained from these other brand communications.
Seamless integration of shopper marketing tactics with base brand advertising can be more easily said than done. Brands often work with promotional and retailer partners who also have input into the creative direction. Additionally, these elements are often produced by a different agency than the one who drives the base campaign, as evidenced by General Mills’ recently announced new shopper marketing agency roster, making integration an increasingly difficult task.
These dynamics put increased pressure on the internal brand organization to ensure cohesion and integration across all brand communications. While not an easy task, creative integration is critical if brands are to capitalize on the power of in-store experiences to build long-term brand equity.
How does your organization view shopper marketing? Is it just a short-term sales driver or also a brand-building tool?
