Selecting shopper marketing retail partners - biggest isn't always best

Which retailers get most of your shopper marketing investment? Let me guess. Is it the big ones? The powerful ones? The demanding ones? If that is the case for you, then you are not alone. As I scan articles online, the majority of examples and case studies are with retailers like Walmart, Tesco and Carrefour. And to a certain extent this is not a problem. They are your biggest customers, right? It all depends on why you are investing in these retailers. Merely investing in big retailers because they are, well, big, isn't the best way to maximize returns from your shopper marketing. What is? Check out the rest of this article!

Selecting shopper marketing retail partners - biggest isn't always best

Its totally natural to assume that your biggest customers are the best place to spend your shopper marketing monies. They are big after all! They have lots of shoppers. We'll see big sales numbers, right?

All true, but that doesn't mean it is the best place for investment. And certainly not all the time. Big retailers are great at hoovering up investment. They pressure brands to invest. They entice with shiny new ways to spend our funds such as retail media networks.

But that doesn't mean there are the best place to invest. How to find out? There are some key questions we'd recommend you ask before deciding where to spend your money.

Big retailers have lots of shoppers: but do they have the shoppers that you are targeting?

If all we want to deliver is a big uplift in sales, then big retailers may well do the trick. Perhaps that is why we end up working with them so often. But there is more to shopper marketing than selling stuff. Strategically, we're trying to drive a specific change in the behavior of a specific target shopper. Does this retailer have those shoppers? Does this retailer over-index in the shoppers that you are targeting? If not, there is a good chance you'll miss your strategic objective, or you'd be better off pursuing that objective with a different retailer.

Selecting shopper marketing retail partners - Do they allow you to interact with shoppers in the way that you'd like?

So many great shopper marketing ideas are sacrificed or compromised by retail policy. A great campaign idea that is stripped down to a display and a discount because the retailer has a clean-store policy. It's happened to us all right? And of course in any retail collaboration there needs to be a degree of compromise.

But if the retailer's policy has forced you to compromise so much that your campaign doesn't deliver its objectives anymore, is it worth it? Yes the display and the discount will help drive sales, but originally the campaign was designed with some higher order objectives: to encourage specific consumption behavior, or drive trial. Is it still going to do that? If we have to compromise the heart of our campaign objectives, then the retailer might not be the right one!

Selecting shopper marketing retail partners - Do they share data so that you can evaluate, learn and improve?

While everyone I meet agrees that evaluation is key, too often we don't do it, and often because retailers are reluctant to share the data we need to evaluate. If we can't evaluate, we can't improve. And that means that returns won't improve. So over time, we'll get better returns out of retailers that share data, versus those that don't. Hmmm...

Selecting shopper marketing retail partners - Do they have a great track record of compliance?

Perhaps I should have put this at the top of the list. Perhaps it is so obvious I shouldn't even bother mentioning it. But, here goes.

Some retailers are much better at implementing our plans than others. I was working with a client last week planning for a negotiation with a retailer. One of the key 'wins' that the client wanted was to get the retailer to agree to a new planogram. But having spent several days previously visiting stores, I knew that the retailer was really bad at following planograms. So how valuable was getting a head office agreement? Not so much.

If the shopper doesn't see your activity, it doesn't exist.

Think consumer & shopper first, not retailer first, when selecting shopper marketing retail partners

I'm not suggesting that you should boycott your biggest customers and starve them of investment. That would be crazy. But we need to be shopper-centric (and consumer-centric) in our planning, rather than retailer-centric.

1. Which consumers are we targeting? What do we want them to do?
2. Which shoppers are therefore important? What do we need those shoppers to do?
3. Where can we connect with those shoppers and make that happen?

If shopper marketing processes begins with the retailer, they run the massive risk of driving more money into retailers which are large, but typically are less flexible, often less profitable, and less likely to deliver a return on investment. At engage, we begin our shopper marketing process with the consumer, not the retailer (let me know if you'd like to know more!)

If you'd like to know more about creating shopper-centric in-store activity, check out our training programs or get in touch now: happy to connect and understand more about your specific situation so we can design the right approach for you and your team.