Unlocking the Power of Consumer Insights in Shopper Marketing

Claudia Day hosts two incredible experts, Sylwia Borawska, Senior Insights Manager, and Tatiana Khomenko (Tanya), Shopper & Category Insights Manager in this week’s episode.  

If you have ever wanted to learn more about how consumer insights have changed the CPG landscape, how insights can be used to enhance shopper marketing, or what the upcoming trends to watch are – this is the discussion for you. 

Watch the full episode above or listen on Spotify here. 

Q: How have consumer insights transformed the landscape of shopper marketing in recent years, particularly with the rise of digital channels and e-commerce? 

Sylwia: I think the biggest area when it comes to transforming the insights world is measurability. Because with e-commerce and digital space in general, we can do things that we can only dream of in the offline world. We don't have to rely on survey research. We can do eye tracking. We can do loads of different things. But this is all biased a bit by humans because humans sometimes are not able exactly to tell us what made them buy something.  

With that increased measurability, we can do loads more precise targeting. Something that we can't do to the same extent in the offline world. We do have different proxies, but with online, this is much easier to do because we can understand more or less who these people are. We can track consumer segments. We can segment people in the first place.  

Because of having so much data, we are so prone as an industry sometimes to go into the analysis paralysis mode. We don't know what to use. We don't know how to cut the data to get the best answer to the business questions. There's a lot of excitement in the industry but there's also tension.  

Tanya: I like the point of measurability. I also totally agree that I think one of the things that is transforming right now is the granularity of data, so how much of the data we have, how detailed we can go, which also means that we have to be crystal clear when we as professionals of insights talk to our business what exactly do we want to know?  

I also think that the paralyzing thing of having so much data is inability to use it in a kind of business transformative way. We can answer 100 or 200 questions within one kind of testing mode or setup. However, what are the three key things that will make us do something differently? What are the three things that our business partners in the sales or marketing department will want to know? I think that's the hardest challenge I find right now. Although the amount of data and the ability to measure everything and to react super-fast is the thing that is being transforming the insights and the shop marketing piece in the last years. 

Sylwia: It's the so what isn't it? It's always that coming back to that question, what's the impact that I'm going to bring with the data? What's the actual answer that can impact the strategy instead of going into the zillion different directions and trying to understand things that might not necessarily be the most important at this point in time. 

Q: What do you think are some of the most significant trends in consumer behavior that have emerged from recent quantitative research? And how can these insights be used to enhance shopper marketing efforts? 

Tanya: It's a no-brainer to mention pricing at this point and the pressure of cost of living. Any sort of quantitative research would see a spike in shoppers being more and more price-conscious and value-oriented.  

You have to be very relevant for the occasion. The packaging has to be correct in the amount that you buy as well. I think that the trend into paying more attention to the value that you're getting, whether it would be a price or promotion, or speed or convenience is out of most importance.  

Sylwia: I would agree so much because our wallets collectively are being squeezed so much by inflation. We see it dropping a little bit across markets, but it doesn't mean that the price is going down, right? It's just not accelerating as much as before.  

There is also a danger in that because it's so easy to promote too much and then erode your margin, erode your brand equity. So, it has a lot of long-term impact on the business as well.  

We need to be relevant as brands because that's what people are still willing to pay more for. The right experiences, the right placement, the right occasion.  

Q: How do you think brands can balance the use of consumer insights with creativity in shopper marketing to ensure that campaigns are both data driven and engaging? 

Tanya: I had the privilege to work on some of amazing brands with a hundred year plus history and I think a hundred years more to go where creativity is a pinnacle to drive the brand's value. However, I think we can benefit so much from the current diversity of platforms and the ability to test creativity and creative messaging in different environments before launching onto a large scale.  

Creativity should benefit from data in the kind of small testing in the live environment before launching it to scale to have some reassurance to have the ability to pivot the messaging or the format or the colors.  

Sylwia: I'm very passionate about combining creativity with data. One cannot probably live without the other because yes, at the end of the day, marketing is here to support the sales process. So, in that regard, it is data driven, but also marketing is about creativity because otherwise you won't catch people's attention. The way I think about it is that you need data to understand where you're going, you need to understand the direction and also the guardrails that you should be mindful of. If you're a brand, you need to understand who you're speaking to, you need to understand what works for that particular consumer slash shopper. You need to understand what the mechanics are that can make their lives easier when it comes to choosing the brand. But you also need to be creative about it at the end of the day.  

Tanya: As marketers and as insights people, we work so much with data. Sometimes we tend to overthink it, while on the other hand, the consumer or the shopper, for them, the campaign itself could be still relatively new and fresh. The campaign is sometimes perceived differently whether you're on the inside or you're on the outside.  

People are bombarded with tons of information so if anything, like you go into the online space or you go into the offline retail and you face I don't know dozens of communications or anything that is more complicated than two or three seconds, it's not gonna work. 

People are very rarely passionate about delving into complex communication, complex mechanics, and they just don't care.   

Q: What innovations and trends in consumer analytics do you believe will have the most significant impact on shopper marketing in the next five years? 

Tanya: I would say that any type of kind of voice analytics or how we interact with our assistants, Google Home, Alexa, Alisa from the Russian community, like anything that you use your voice to interact with. Any type of voice and visual search that people are using right now with AI assistance. 

Sylwia: When I was thinking about this particular point, I would say that as an industry, we're so good at telling in general what's happening and why it might be happening and what we might be doing, which is effectively using historical data.  Combining the amount of data that we spoke about when comes to online specifically and trying to somehow find a way to combine it with offline. I think this would place us in such a good place as an industry to start looking into the future.  

Thank you for engaging with another brilliant episode! 

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