Shopper Marketing

Shopper marketing is where you understand how your target consumers behave as shoppers. You need to leverage this knowledge to the benefit of all stakeholders (brands, consumers, retailers, shoppers). This type of marketing includes management, displays, sales, packaging, promotion, and research.

It is not limited to just in-store marketing activities. It needs to be a part of an overall integrated marketing approach that considers the opportunities to drive consumption and identify the shopper that needs to purchase a brand to enable said consumption. You need to understand these shoppers in terms of how well they interpret the needs of the consumer, what their needs are as a shopper, where they're likely to shop for those needs, in which stores they can be influenced in, and what in-store activities influence them.

Basically, you need to have shopper insight. What that is is a focus on the process which takes place before the first thought the consumer as about making a purchase all the way until they select that particular item. This type of marketing challenges the assumption that the shopper and the consumer are one in the same.

It's important for many reasons, especially that manufacturers spend vast amounts of money on it, and those amounts are increasing. Many organizations even spend over 8% of total sales on in-store marketing; when total trade spend is added up it can often top 40% of total revenue.

With shopper marketing, manufacturers target parts of their marketing towards specific retailers or retail environments. This kind of targeting depends on congruency of objectives, targets and strategies between the manufacturer and a given retailer.