Stuart Galvin, business director, smp
Pop in-store for a packet of crisps a decade ago and the choice would be between Walkers Salt & Vinegar or Cheese & Onion. Today, there is a profusion of favourite brands, such as Kettle Chips; while new offerings like Propercorn are making inroads in the salty snack category.
The challenge for food and drink brands is there is so much choice. How do they achieve cut-through? By not being a third wheel. Instead, they need to think about the needs of the shopper and the retailer, creating marketing strategies that marry them together across the shopper journey. It’s all about finding the right shopper for the right retailer, at the right time.
To identify the principles that could help simplify this complicated task, we conducted a study into what motivates shoppers today in alcohol, grocery, personal care and technology.
Our Beyond Demographics report found there are seven mindsets – conscious, creative, fulfilled, influential, knowledgeable, secure and sociable – that offer greater insight than the old marketing methods of using demographics.
These mindsets transcend demographics like age, gender and income. Instead, they allow for flux and change within the contexts of what a shopper is searching for, in which environment, using what particular device and at which life stage.
Food and drink shoppers are most likely to be secure, knowledgeable or sociable. The secure mindset is the drive to safety, security and value; knowledgeable is about wanting to know a product is good, but also enjoying considering and selecting products, while sociable means enjoying buying for other people, like family. Meanwhile, for alcohol shoppers, the knowledgeable, secure and sociable mindsets have a notably strong influence, alongside fulfilled, which means wanting to lead a full and satisfying life.
Having a handle on the mindsets at play in their category means that food and drink brands can tailor and optimise their activity, such as media channels, messaging and promotions, with greater precision.
In practice? Consider the craft revolution which is disrupting alcohol markets like beer and gin. Thanks to ease of access to information and new brands, connoisseurship is on the rise. Shoppers want to research and discover new things (knowledgeable) but equally know that a product is a good buy (secure). Guinness has shown how sales can be driven by tapping into these two mindsets with its new range of craft ales. The line serves a craft-loving clientele, with all the robustness of a best-loved brewery.
However, even if brands do everything possible to understand and respond to the shopper, marketing cannot work if it fails to integrate successfully with specific retailer targets. Whether a major supermarket or a Shoreditch café, owners and stakeholders might have similar objectives – driving sales and growing the business – but different ideas about how to fulfil them. Each shopping environment will mean different things, and create different purchase intentions, for shoppers.
Marketing strategies need to work for both parties, as shown in our Father’s Day campaign with Glenmorangie. An Open Golf Championship sponsor, Glenmorangie installed golf simulators in-store to captivate sociable alcohol shoppers looking for a last-minute gift for dad. By offering the promotion exclusively to Tesco and Sainsbury’s, for which seasonal shopping events are paramount, Glenmorangie secured the shelf space to roll this novel campaign out at scale.
If food and drink brands are going to get noticed they need to start playing matchmaker between shoppers and retailers. Rather than being the star of the show, brands should be seen as a creative mechanism to make magic happen.