The old deathbed story raises an interesting dilemma in retailing today: An elderly shopkeeper on his deathbed asks for his wife and then for each of his six children. When the last one replies “I’m here” the old guy demands: “then who’s minding the shop?”
In other words, if the key retail stakeholders are all pre-occupied with survival and continuity of the business, then who’s minding the shopper?
Most of us accept the fact that, given the extent of their loyalty-data insight, compared with that of the supplier, and if knowledge defines ownership, the major retailers now ‘own’ the shopper. Despite the fact that a retailer’s knowledge is mainly derived from analysis of shopping behaviour, their increasing share of consumption via own label growth also means that they have potential access to the shopper’s consumers, and their consumption behaviour. They are thus capable of leveraging shopper insight in also taking ownership of the consumer…
However, given the unprecedented changes taking place in retail, and the resulting distractions for retailers in trying to maintain growth in a flat-line economy, there is a danger that fundamental shopper-consumption needs are being ignored, especially at point-of-purchase. Retailers want shoppers to buy at their store, satisfying their generic needs, with the actual brand being less of an issue especially if a switch can be made to own label, whereas the supplier wants the shopper to buy their brand via all available channels. This highlights a potential divergence of interest between suppliers and their major customers, a gap through which the shopper may slip, unattended.
In practice, it means that brand owners need to enter the aisle and ‘hand-hold’ the shopper in an attempt to complete the intended purchase in favour of brand-consumer and supplier… This approach obviously raises important ROI issues for the supplier, with success determined by the supplier’s ‘understanding of what drives the shopper, the missions they take when they buy and the factors that influence their purchasing decisions…’, especially in the case of niche products.
While the retailer will define and try to optimise usage of all routes to their ‘shop’ in their application of multichannel marketing, the supplier obviously needs to operate via a wider definition of ‘multichannel’ that embraces all potential access to the brand. The supplier thus has to understand a wide variety of shopper needs and shopping occasions, often differing by channel, and attempt to embrace the entire brand-shopper, wherever, however and whenever they choose to seek out the brand.
This raises major issues in terms of manpower, a need for channel-shopper-specialists, a new role that needs to focus on brand-shoppers as they behave in individual channels, an organisational structure that overlays those of brand managers and NAMs, in order to justify the investment, balance and optimise the multichannel portfolio…
Moreover, in dealing with a savvy shopper determined to settle for nothing less than demonstrable value for money, with unprecedented access to price-comparison facilities, the brand supplier is attempting to be all things to all shoppers, a responsibility not to be taken lightly… Then, having made the sale, the supplier needs to track the brand all the way to consumption in order to ensure that the needs of shopper’s consumers are being met.
Only by closing this ‘satisfaction-loop’, can the supplier ensure that the cost of ‘minding’ the shopper to this extent is worth the expense.
All of this means that those of us that want to survive are entering into an era where truth and integrity become the ultimate drivers, a place where consumers can trust ‘what it says on the tin’ to deliver to their expectation. This expectation level can only be set by a supplier that fundamentally understands consumer need in a context of savvy shopping behaviour, better than their retailers and competitors.
For suppliers to go to this much trouble and expense in connecting with their consumers, it is imperative that they become hypercritical of their retailer-partners’ fitness-for-purpose in this new defensible marketing environment.
Likewise, given that the stakes are so high, they will attempt to encourage ‘their’ consumers to walk away from those retailers that short-change their customers and dilute the ‘promise’ by failing to deliver their part of the bargain in terms of minding the shopper…
