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I'll Be Shopping Alone

By Bill Schober, Editorial Director, P-O-P Times

"I hate that new Dominick's," said the wife, slamming the door while swinging her barely half-filled shopping tote onto the kitchen counter.

"First, they make you wade through a Starbuck's, and a lot of wine, and some sandwich place, and a million salad and sushi bars," she declared. "Then, when you can finally find the actual aisles" -- ["That's the 'center store,'" I added, unhelpfully] -- "there's nothing there. I wanted low-salt canned soup, double-roll toilet paper and unscented detergent. I couldn't find anything. I want the old Dominick's."

And with that, a year's worth of "shopper marketing" charts, graphs, seminars, white papers, ISMI e-newsletters, PowerPoints and camera-phone photos from work seemed to crash into my house, my home, my kitchen. "Whoa whoa whoa," I said in hushed, conspiratorial tones, as if there might be a Safeway vice president eavesdropping from the pantry. A new "Lifestyle" format supermarket had finally come to our neighborhood, I explained. The center-store aisles she seemed so fond of were in "crisis," so a lot of strategic thinking had been applied to that store perimeter (that area she said she had to "wade through"), as well as the muted lighting, widened aisles, wood fixtures, and well, yeah ... sit-down sushi bars.

Nuh-uh. No sale. And with that, I realized that my better half somehow had slipped through the cracks of the dozens of shopper profiling monikers (Mrs. "Affordable Gourmet"... Mr. "Grab-and-Go"... the "Platinum Customer"... the "Seekers of Discovery"... and, lest we forget, "Barry, Buzz & Jill") proliferating throughout retail these days. But I'm not worried. My wife is an urban, Lyric Opera-patronizing, WWD-subscribing, vegan, communications professional who uses environmentally sound shopping bags, knows her way around an Appellation d'Origine Controlee, and has even been observed rustling up a soy-milk latte from time to time. I'm pretty sure they'll manage to fit her in somewhere: Ms. "Patently Impatient," perhaps.

After all, when I ventured into her allegedly impenetrable new Dominick's, it took me less than two minutes to locate every everyday Campbell's, Cottonelle and Tide center-store-crisis-causing CPG item that she couldn't find. I liked the whole store, in fact. Still, I couldn't help but chuckle at the irony that in her case, at least, it wasn't the usual suspects -- corrugated floorstands -- that had "cluttered up" the experience.

My wife's somewhat reactionary reaction to the "Lifestyle" format mirrors the vibe you get from some CPG marketing executives. Earlier this fall, when a new report from Information Resources Inc. (IRI) said that the number of secondary displays deployed by some chains was declining due to retailers' efforts to build their brands, you didn't exactly hear P-O-P producers popping champagne corks. Some CPG brand executives lament that the increasing granularity of their shopper outreach wreaks havoc with their ROI calculations. And the Institute's own Steve Frenda predicts that without some form of industry-wide standardization, the proliferation of nuanced shopper profiles and differing nomenclature by individual chains will become an unmanageable mess, as CPGs try to ride herd on "Platinum Gourmet Grab-and-Go Jills" run amuck.

At the other end of the scale, however, was the impressive line-up of CPG marketing practitioners and the ideas they shared at the Kelley School of Business's seminar program, "Measuring & Managing Shoppability," in November. The virtual shopping technologies demonstrated -- video tracking, 3-D simulation and electronic interviewing -- were impressive. But even more so was the commitment of CPG brands and their executives to decoding the store. Among the speakers were:

  • Dave Milka, consumer insights director at S.C. Johnson, who explained how his company uses RFID-triggered aisle-analysis simulation tools to make recommendations on adjacencies, traffic flow and product visibility.
  • Sonja Mathews, director of channel insights for Frito-Lay, who described the recently unveiled S.M.A.R.T. Learning Center, an ultra-advanced shopping lab with customizable shopping environments and high-tech animation on the periphery that creates the illusion of being in a massive store.
  • Sheila McKay, customer and channel insight manager at Hewlett-Packard, who talked about HP's "shopper insights store" in Vancouver, WA, and how it is used for account visits and customer research.
A cynic might argue -- and not without at least a grain of truth -- that "shopper marketing" is just another hammer for retailers to bludgeon brands. But based on the serious investments being made by these and many other in-store marketing leaders, something tangible, and significant, is brewing out there.

Whether my wife likes it or not.

Published: December 2007

Source: In-Store Marketing Institute/P-O-P Times

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