|
Tim
Callahan
President ACNielsen U.S.
The challenges facing the CPG industry today include the following
key areas of focus: broadening coverage, increasing marketing
ROI, new product success and retail execution. Without exception,
we at ACNielsen/VNU addressed these critical business imperatives
at our just completed Consumer 360 Conference.
For the first time ever, ACNielsen and Spectra came together
and created an unprecedented consumer insight conference…Consumer
360. This conference focused on what VNU does best—understanding
the many dimensions of consumer attitudes and purchasing behavior.
Helping clients leverage that consumer knowledge and insights
was the bottom-line benefit.
Focused on bringing complete solutions that help place the
consumer in the center of every marketing decision, this new
industry conference showcased the consumer insights, industry
trends, powerful tools and cross-channel perspectives housed
within the companies that make up VNU, the largest media and
marketing information company in the world.
Leveraging best practices from companies such as ACNielsen,
Spectra, ACNielsen BASES, Nielsen//NetRatings, Nielsen Media
Research, TD Linx and VNU Business Media, the first annual
Consumer 360 conference brought together key retail and manufacturer
industry professionals in a three-day event designed to reveal
how you can obtain a 360-degree view of your consumer through
education, training and networking forums.
The conference was uniquely designed to demonstrate how VNU
companies can create a robust, complete view of your consumer,
therefore enhancing your understanding of how consumers shop
and interact with your brand or shop your stores. Attendees
learned first-hand about some of the newly-developed ACNielsen
capabilities:
- The creation of three Centers of Excellence that together
provide end-to-end modeling and analytic solutions to key
business issues such as marketing mix, pricing and new product
introductions
- The evolution toward providing deeper coverage via the
Homescan Mega*Panel
- The building of an online opt-in panel
- The development of a new retail in-store execution model
that dramatically fixes “out-of-stocks”
- And much, much more…
Navigating through a sea of consumer data can be daunting
for any marketing professional trying to drive efficient,
targeted execution. Marketers must understand everything about
their consumers while utilizing myriad data sources. In an
environment that demands increasing efficiency, Consumer 360
participants found out how they could connect to actionable
consumer insights to gain the competitive advantage.
VNU and its many businesses continue to evolve, to help you
address your challenges; invest in client-focused innovation;
deliver actionable insights and focus on world-class quality
and service. Collectively, our capabilities often deliver
integrated solutions that far outpace what any of our companies
could create individually.
If you missed the Conference, and would like a CD-ROM of the
30+ Concurrent Sessions, send an email request to: Consumer360Conference@acnielsen.com.
You will then be sent an “Order Confirmation and Agreement”
form to complete and be invoiced for $500 for this value-packed
collection of some of the actionable insights of the Conference.
Patrick
Dodd
President
ACNielsen
Canada
The battle for today’s
grocery shopper is more competitive than ever. In Canada,
the blurring of channels is accelerating at a fast pace, as
mass merchandisers, club, drug, convenience and other specialty
retailers attempt to lure more grocery consumers to their
locations. Significant capital investments have been poured
into these channels over the past few years to take advantage
of this opportunity. By all indications, this trend looks
as if it will only increase over the next few years.
Wal-Mart’s recent announcement to launch the Sam’s
Club format in Canada is a good example of this phenomenon.
However, the strong grocery retailers in Canada have not sat
idly by. They have invested heavily in renovating and upgrading
their stores. They have dramatically improved the shopping
experience in the perimeter of their stores, focused in on
better customer service and launched a number of very successful
new formats to stem this tide.
All that said, the strategy of growing sales by luring customers
away from the competition through deep discounts or by building
new locations can be a very expensive way to drive topline
growth. Many industry studies have shown that chasing these
new customers is both time-consuming and expensive compared
with the opportunity of driving profitable revenue through
your existing customer base. Maximizing each customer’s
basket when they are within the four walls of the store is
the biggest opportunity facing retailers today, as over half
the battle is already won by the time the shopper steps into
the store. With today’s hectic society of dual income
families and time strapped consumers, we are seeing fewer
shopping trips occurring, making it even more critical to
drive the size of each and every transaction.
This is precisely why ACNielsen Canada conducted original
research for the grocery industry in 2002 entitled “The
Shopping Basket Study.” This unique piece of research
answered the age-old question “What truly drives the
size of the consumer’s shopping basket?” In order
to satisfy the objective of the study, ACNielsen research
associates surreptitiously observed 4,000 randomly selected
shoppers as they conducted their shopping trips throughout
a wide variety of stores and formats. These same shoppers
were intercepted when they left the store and were asked to
complete a brief questionnaire that uncovered new insights
into the “why” or “why not” behind
the buy.
The first thing to consider is that all shoppers and all shopping
trips are not created equal. The day of simply focusing in
on the “mega-bi-weekly” family visit to the grocery
store is all but over. This type of trip has been complemented
by a hybrid of other stops at a variety of different channels.
The fill-in, top-up (the “quick trips” to the
store for eggs, milk, butter, etc.), and special occasion
trips can be very profitable baskets and must be catered to
in all store layouts and merchandising decisions.
The research also demonstrated that there were a number of
“hot zones” within the store, those being the
departments that were regularly browsed by shoppers in the
majority of trips. As an example, the produce aisle was browsed
in over 74% of the trips and the dairy section was visited
in 52% of the trips. Perhaps more revealing was the number
of “cold zones” within the store, those being
the departments that were shopped less than 10% of the time—departments
such as pet care (6%) and the paper category (10%).
The real lesson learned here is that there are a significant
number of center-of-the-store departments that are not generating
any shopping traffic during the average trip. More excitement
is required to get shoppers down these aisles.
The research also found that there is a direct correlation
between the amount of time a shopper spends in a store and
the size of the basket. While intuitively this makes sense,
the challenge for the retailer is to find a way to make that
longer visit more appealing and rewarding. Again, here it’s
the basics that make the difference. What with all that has
been invested in loyalty building solutions, customer profitability
and other scientific retailing applications, our research
showed that hundreds of millions of dollars in potential sales
are being lost annually due to abandoned purchases. Things
as basic as out-of-stocks, damaged goods or items that were
too hard to find are causing the shopping experience to be
less than enjoyable and are leading to a smaller basket.
All is not lost, however. There is still a tremendous need
for creative and effective merchandising techniques to drive
impulse buying. The research revealed that 80% of shoppers
who browsed a display made at least one purchase from a display
during their visit. In addition, four in ten shoppers also
indicated that they were influenced by in-store merchandising
and bought at least one item on impulse.
In summary, yes, the competition is fierce, and yes, customers
are time strapped and always looking for a “better deal,”
but there is still ample opportunity for retailers, manufacturers
and brokers to better understand the shopper and to focus
on the basics to win the battle for a bigger basket.
|
