How consumer insights and shopper research can bring light into your business decisions
Are you trying to navigate your business without knowing much about your shoppers or consumers? Do you have blind spots when it comes to crucial success indicators or sales drivers?
In my 15+ years’ experience in FMCG and consulting I have seen many companies struggle to understand their current and potential customers and helped them to gain vital insights and allocate their often scarce resources in the best possible way in order to grow their business further – with a customer-centric approach!
What do you know about your customers? What do you not know?
How much do you know about your potential customers and why they have not bought your product yet? Which barriers prevent shoppers from buying your product? Do you know what would make them buy your product?
And how can you apply these insights in your everyday business and across your organization to grow your sales? How can you ensure that your existing customers stay loyal to you and at the same time win over new customers and grow your market penetration?
From customer understanding to execution
It all starts with better understanding your customers – both shoppers and consumers - and also those that do not buy or use your product yet.
These insights need then to be integrated into the product and market strategy. Ensuring that the operational tactics, that execution is meeting these demands in the Moment of Truth will ensure a positive impact on sales.
Any strategy is only as good as its execution! Because the customers only see the execution. Execution is the customer experience! And only the product that attracts shopper’s and consumers’ attention and matches their needs will create sales.
The five areas crucial for a better understanding of your customers and growing your sales
Shopper & consumer needs and usage occasions
Understanding the shoppers’ and consumers’ decision-making process and how their needs vary in different situations is crucial to develop the right product mix, to make the product available at the right place and ensure availability at the right time. Every time your product is not available when a consumer needs it is a lost sale.
Consumer needs can differ for example along time of day, seasons, life stages or location. Also, how much time a shopper has available in any given situation defines what and how they shop. If the product is supposed to last long impacts what the shopper is willing to pay and how much time will be spend on the buying decision. Shoppers are faster to make the decision to buy a cheap item but take their time for a more expensive item. If shoppers are in a hurry, they are more likely to buy a known or cheap item. And they are more likely to try something new if it is on promotion.
Are you missing out on needs and occasions that would turn potential into new customers?
Product & price strategy
Product mix and price & promotion strategy need to take into account the shoppers’ and consumers’ needs – and how they differ over time or by occasion. Aligning product and price strategy with consumer needs and usage occasions will allow you to optimize your sales and your profit and reduce costs for the wrong product or promotions that only subsidize sales that you would have had also at a regular price.
Distribution channel
As convenience is becoming a crucial part of the shopping experience, being available when the consumer is in need of your product is getting more and more important. Convenience can mean ease of access as well as speed of access. Consumers do not want to go out of their way to fulfill their needs and they want them to be fulfilled immediately. This is becoming more and more relevant for the younger generations.
Therefore, the need for convenience defines and broadens the channels your product needs to be available at. Be where the consumer is! And nowadays that could mean be available online.
Product placement
How the product is presented in the store is as important as where it can be found in the store. Depending on the customer’s need the shopping routes through the store differ widely. A shopper that has an urgent need and little time to shop might not even make it past your product if it is strategically placed in the back of the store.
What products are placed together also strongly influences the shopper’s choice. Understanding what products are so far bought together and creating respective product bundles or joint placements can have as much as a positive impact as understanding unmet needs of new product combinations.
Too often product placement in the stores is driven by operational requirements or even set up by manufacturers. Only problem is that consumers shop very rarely by these criteria!
Changing the setup of a category or store design to meet the shoppers’ needs will boost sales with existing customers and attract new customers through a better shopping experience. The product placement needs to create a good experience for the time when a shopper wants to browse and get inspired but also for time when the consumer is in a hurry, for example during the weekend versus during the lunch break.
The bigger a store is the more important it becomes to build a “convenience corner” close to the entry or exit for those that do not have the time to pick up the needed items distributed throughout the store. Essential items for such a “convenience corner” could be typical top up items or meal bundles, e.g. sandwich & soda, in a supermarket or typical gift items in a drugstore or furniture store, for example changing by the season.
The less time a shopper needs to find the products in need, the more time is available for shopping further products. In this case, time is money – in form of additional sales!
Moment of truth
In order to allocate your budgets and resources to where the buying decision is made, it is important to understand if the shopper is planning the purchase ahead of time or if and how much you can influence the decision at the point of sale. Do you need to invest in marketing or instore advertising? What mix is most effective? Which message triggers a purchase? And what is creating a barrier for the consumer to choose your product?
The price, for example, is of high importance to the Danes. Easy to read price signage is therefore crucial during the Moment of Truth when the consumer decides to buy or not to buy.
Understanding translates into sales
Having worked for many years in Consumer Goods, shopper and consumer insights were crucial for the discussions with retailers. Not only had retailers these insights often not available but more problematic was that stores were designed more after operational processes than shopper needs and customer satisfaction. Execution did not take into account the shopper and consumer needs!
The downsides were lost sales and shoppers choosing other retailers that better served their needs. But the lost sales were not only the products in focus, it was the whole shopping list that eventually was bought at the retailer that listened to its customers.
Understanding consumer needs, the decision-making process, how shopping trips serve different purposes and how this needs to be reflected in the in-store execution directly translates into sales.
Wilke as your partner to bring light into your shoppers’ and consumers’ decision making and into your business decisions
At Wilke we have extensive experience with helping our customers to better understand their shoppers and consumers – and how to win over those that are not customers yet. We have great success using among others methods like mobile ethnography, shop-alongs, exit interviews, focus groups or online surveys to provide deep insights into the following aspects and help our customers activate these insights throughout their organization, allocate their resources more effectively and efficiently and grow their business.
Wilke services for a better customer understanding and sales growth:
- Channel strategy
- Store design
- Online store performance
- Marketing effectiveness
- Go-to-market strategy
- Customer journey improvements
- Customer experience satisfaction
- Market potential simulators
- Consumer and shopper needs
- Usage occasions and demand spaces
- Shopper segmentation
- Brand awareness
- Sales drivers and sales barriers
- Decision tree at Moment of Truth
- Price & promotion optimization
- Product & concept testing
- Portfolio optimization
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