Leo Burnett - Cultural Fuel

Kiosk manufacturer Frank Mayer & Associates have come out with SlideBuy, which is an interactive touchscreen that can slide back and forth on the shelf.

What’s especially valuable about this innovation is that it doesn’t take up shelf space and therefore displace SKUs or needed stock.  Sure, a portion is covered at any given time, but it is easily moved and with just a little more thinking in the shelf design, you’ve got a pretty great assistant at the ready to help the shopper.  Plus, they’ve solved the issue of cord tangles.  Pretty cool.

They also have a non-digital version.  If you like that sort of thing.

Source: retailcustomerexperience.com

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Google announced its investment in Pixazza, a service that is aiming to be an AdSense for images, meaning that what currently can only be done on search query text or contextual text, could be happening even within images. The idea has been around for a while, but no one apparently has tried to offer it, or previous go-to-markets have failed. Google’s investment could indicate that it is now deemed as mature enough to go to market with it.

Essentially, how it works is that website owners tag products contained in the images of their websites, and link to providers offering these products. Obviously the generated click-throughs then are paid for by e-commerce vendor.

What is particularly smart about the business model is the involvment of “shopper experts”, meaning anyone out there who is a shopaholic. You can sign up to become such an expert and get paid for finding and tagging products on websites and matching them to Pixazza merchants, such as Amazon, Bluefly and others.

The trick is going to be to balance blatant price tagging with maintaining the site’s original user experience.

This is the process description from the Pixazza website:

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The Japanese business magazine JapanInc reported about the test store Sample lab! which plays with the business idea that everyone loves new things that cost nothing. The designated customers of Sample Lab! are women between 20 to 30 years. They can try the newest cosmetics, snacks, electronic gadgets and energy drinks. They have the option to purchase a full-sized version of the product in-store, or to take home more free samples. To avoid “freebehunters” a membership registration is needed for a small budget.

Finally, customers have to fill out a questionnaire about the product they took home. The results are sold to the manufacturer(s). Nobody is surprised about the fact that behind Sample lab! stands a research institute.

via

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One of the largest German discount retailers, Lidl, recently started airing a brand campaign. The campaign itself, well, nothing special: the campaign is strongly reminiscent of Mastercard’s “Priceless” campaign, using people situations and using price tags for those situations. Also, the scenes look like they were selected out of stock film reels. Furthermore, it has a brand promise (”A trip to Lidl can be anything but expensive”) that, still reminds everyone: it’s about cheap prices, for which, if you’re honest, you don’t need a brand image campaign, cuz, duh, everyone knows that Lidl is a discounter, not Harrod’s. As a result, it probably tested really well in the pre-tests because it’s not saying anything (that can offend anyone).

What’s really more interesting is the fact that a German discounter actually started thinking about a brand image campaign in the first place. This is highly uncommon. The only “brand” communication we’re used to from discounters is inserts with pork loin offers, at EUR 2.99 for 500 grams for which discounters like Lidl and Aldi shell out a good 200-300 million Euro a year making sure we all have kilos of dead trees in our mailboxes. But a brand film? That’s new. So, what’s going on here?

I basically see it as a discounter’s desperate attempt to stop some trends in the making as far as the market situation is concerned. In Germany, there is a fight over market share going on among the different supermarket retail business models. Like elsewhere, we have three competing models:

1. Discounters (Lidl, Aldi, Penny…)
2. Hypermarkets (Real, Globus, Toom, Kaufland…)
3. Supermarkets (Edeka, Rewe…)

In the past, discounters really ate away the huge amounts of market share of Hypermarkets and supermarkets because of a couple of people behaviors: a) while in the past, discounters where frowned upon for having bad quality, they now established that you can even drive to a discounter in a Porsche if you don’t mind a stripped-down shopping experience: the quality is right, and it is cheaper than local supermarkets b) People’s lives and their shopping behavior has changed: people (especially the younger demographic) don’t shop for the whole week anymore, quick trips to the supermarket around the corner become more common, so hypermarkets with their huge assortment of goods are too far away, less convenient and, frankly, too huge for daily shopping convenience.

However, there are also 3 other trends that might force discount brands to rethink their strategy: a) discounters are everywhere now and have reached maximum proliferation, competing with supermarkets for local relevance which still own local convencience and quality of products, so you can’t grow more by building more outlets b) local supermarkets themselves have responded to discount pricing by increasing their share of private labels, allowing to approximate the price of discounters in a shopping environment that is more tasteful c) Organic foods are everywhere, and expected by people, and while discounters now also carry great organic food, the ambiance of organic food is still more trustworthy and personal in a more upmarket supermarket brand than picking it up from crates stored on pallets and high-fluctuation staffing structure.

So, with discounters having a hard time to grow beyond their proliferation, pure price communication not being sustainable (ever!), and shopping experience becoming a more and more important asset, discounters seem to have discovered brand advertising as a necessity, in order to mitigate the shopping experience strategies of supermarkets, such as REWE and Edeka.

However, I am not sure advertising can really help discounters here (especially if the promise is still just about price). At the very least it can’t help if discounters don’t also rethink their shopping experience strategy. Ads, after all, are just ads. Reformulating your reason for being and providing people with acts that improve their lives, in the context of their shopping needs should prove more successful in building trust than running some ads.

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More and more manufacturers and retailers are using service solutions enabled by technology. Some examples of in-store digital ad displays and real-time promotions can be found in a recent Business Week article.

One of my favourites: The Israel-based Aroma Espresso Bars.

According to the Business Week article: “When you order a morning coffee at a café owned by Israel-based Aroma Espresso Bars, an image of a croissant may suddenly appear on a digital display next to the cash register. Stop by for a sandwich or salad later in the day, and the display could flash a picture of a suggested beverage. Aroma Espresso says sales of desserts and drinks featured on the screens have increased as much as 68% in outlets where it has installed the display systems, starting about a year ago.”

And here is an example I’ve found in the Retail Customer Experience Magazine:

The SlideBuy Shopper Information System by Frank Mayer & Associates Inc. is a touchscreen placed on existing store shelving. It allows shoppers to inform themselves about the products. By gliding forth and back, product information is directly taken to the shelf without displacing existing products.

Since digital and retail worlds are more and more converging, it won’t take long until well-known social media applications from the Internet arrive in the store. Maybe Aroma Espresso Bar will soon start to display reviews, votings, rankings and recommendations by their customers.

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With more and more questions about traditional advertising effectiveness, non-traditional marketing methods, apart from digital marketing are gaining importance.

For inhouse shopper marketing discipline here at Leo Burnett, the following Deloitte study is music to our ears. The first moment of truth, meaning people and their behavior in front of the shelf is a key vehicle to increase relevance of your brand’s products.

Says Brandweek:

Nineteen percent of consumer packaged goods manufacturers and half of retailers rank shopper marketing as the most effective activity for generating strong return-on-investment. Overall, 75% of manufacturers and 86% of retailers studied ranked in-store marketing among the top four activities in terms of gaining strong ROI.

No 30 second spot will help you when your product isn’t staged the right way and can’t show off it’s unique purpose to people in the approriate context.

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We are currently undertaking a retail audit in Germany for our Shopper Marketing Retail Exchange, gauging the store experience people have in supermarkets. While doing so, we saw this:

What we see here is a cooler shelf with convenience products, such as sausages, paddies and the like. Do you see the title for the products?

“Convenience”

Remember, we are in Germany here. While the term is known in the retail industry, i.e. to store owners and purchasing departments, how many people do you think find it “convenient” to try to guess the meaning of an English word while looking at a bunch of sausages? And why on earth is it in English anyway? There are perfectly good names available in German.

You might say, who cares? When people see the products, they know what it is. Well yeah, when and if they see them. But think about it: people navigate stores by browsing or searching. When you search, you are on a wayfinding path where you check of “your” products from a list. Where would you start looking for “Convenience” food when you don’t even know the term? Also, convenience foods are often placed at tactically relevant places for cross-selling purposes. This means it’s already hard to find them when you are expressly looking for them.

For the most part, a lot of retail experiences are still like websites in the mid-90s: confusing navigation, little orientation, cluttered signage, price confusion, little customer service, and long checkout times. So, when we do experience audits, whether for digital channels or physical retail channels, what happens a lot is that I get a Gary Larson moment. While surveying the store, I was reminded of his “Inconvenience Store” Comic.

When it comes to retail experiences, it’s definitely time some stores took more of a human view point. Apart from being better for people, it also helps your sales.

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