Getting Specific
Been hanging out at the In-Store Marketing expo the past few days, where I overheard the words “shopper marketing” 2,747,387 times. Talk about buzz. I think at least half the conversations were people arguing about the definition.
Most descriptions include these basics: product marketing that takes into account specific needs/requirements of specific retailers, and marketing that considers specific consumer behaviors as well. As any CPG marketer already knows, one-size-fits-all died 10 years ago. Now a brilliant brand idea has to be translated into dozens of configurations and applications.
What used to be called Account-Specific Marketing, applied individually to each distinctive retail account, has now morphed into Consumer-Specific Marketing, addressing the specific desires of men & women, boys and girls, veterans, boomers, Xs and Ys, urbans, sub-urbans, rurals and a smorgasbord of ethnic divisions.
All of this Shopper-Centric marketing requires tons of insight into the minds of the various consumer targets, matched up with the data from the retail accounts, and, finally, the brand’s data and desires.
That’s a long way away from the simple 25¢ FSI that you used to call a national promotion.
It’s not revolutionary. It’s evolutionary. It’s the well-tested principles of direct marketing sneaking their way into mass.
And that’s a very good thing. Because the more targeted the approach is, the better it can be measured and ranked. And the better the chances of reaching that holy grail of personalized, effective one-to-one communication with consumers of all shapes and sizes.
