Insights are at the core of the shopper marketing strategic journey. Without leveraging actionable insights from consumers, shoppers and customers, strategic plans are irrelevant. At Multiply, we use science and research to support all our campaign recommendations. We have developed a suite of shopper marketing tools that together helps us to identify the most engaging and effective media for the brand, the category and the customer.
We know that shopper marketing is more holistic and interconnected than simply just in store, with media channels stretching right along the shopper’s purchase journey. But this in turn makes the discipline very difficult to define. So, although the full journey is important and must be considered, we also know that the first moment of truth for shoppers is where purchase decisions are made or changed and brands either win or lose. It seems impertinent to ignore the great opportunities that in store and retailer media can deliver.
One of the major problems with in store media and mechanics is that it is so hard to evaluate or predict whether it will deliver on the objectives of the campaign. We decided to create intelligent and informed shopper measurement tools that would allow us to explore and quantify this area and therefore give us (and our clients) the data we require to make informed decisions on media choice and budget.
Using our Multiplan™ planning tool, we can analyse the shopper profile and the issues that really affect their brand choices. We assess the barriers and triggers to purchase as well as consider the messaging hierarchy of touchpoints to gain the best engagement. Essentially, this is a very useful qualitative planning tool for ensuring that full research of the category and shopper has been undertaken; but it doesn’t provide a strong quantitative, data-supported answer that senior management / category teams require prior to investing that much fought-over budget.
That’s where our Multipoint™ tool can help. Research carried out by POPAI (Point-of-Purchase Advertising International) gave us the groundwork and information we needed to identify the impact, engagement and conversion rates of different types of store media and the different messages that are commonly communicated in-store, such as price discounts, new product launches and added value offers. Utilising this, and integrating it with TGI data, we were able to create a robust, bespoke store media planning tool that optimises shopper media at every touchpoint by analysing reach, effectiveness and cost.
By combining both of these tools, we can not only provide a relevant commentary on the shopper, category and journey, we can also substantiate our recommendations with an index for engaging with shoppers, as well as budget effectiveness.
To take this a step further, we also created a forecasting ROI measurement tool. Whereas other shopper agencies may analyse their campaign results and refer to this as campaign investment (i.e. they take the investment of the campaign and calculate this against sales), we know that this isn’t a truly relevant formula. A return on investment to us is the financial return to your business and so many other factors need to be considered as part of that equation.
Therefore, our ROI forecast tool is a predictive model to calculate the average sales uplift that would be generated for a campaign. We focus specifically on predicting the influence of selected in-store media and mechanics before the campaign starts and as part of our planning process. Since every brand, category and store is different, we took the model a stage further to enable us to tailor the outputs to the unique specificities of different products.
We combine our estimated conversion rate (tailored for your product) and number of impacts with your financial information (average sale price and the margin %) to calculate the estimated profit per £1 spent on the campaign. Unlike some of our other models, we treat each purchase contribution in our shopper model as a one-off; future loyalty isn’t taken into account. This makes it simpler to use EPOS data to verify the success.
By combining your data and industry benchmarks to estimate the ROI, we can use this as a qualitative measurement of media channel, as well as to test media before and after campaigns to see how successful they are.
Overall, our suite of shopper marketing measurement tools can help to provide marketers with all the insights and data required to activate a strategically effective campaign that delivers powerful results.
To find out more about how Multiply can help you in your quest for shopper marketing success please give me (I’m Jenny, Head of Shopper) a call on: 0203 026 1968. I look forward to speaking with you!
