Shopper Marketing. Neuromarketing Strategies to Win the Battle at the Shelf

The first book in the NMSBA Neuromarketing series has been published. Books in this series are written and endorsed by NMSBA members. The series allows you to select the neuromarketing-related topics you want to know more about without having to wade through hundreds of pages of material that may be interesting, but ultimately irrelevant to your particular area of responsibility.

The first book in the Neuromarketing Publication Series is entitled “Shopper Marketing. Neuromarketing Strategies to Win the Battle at the Shelf” and has been authored by Carl MacInnes and Dr. Peter Steidl. Carl is a senior executive responsible for global shopper marketing practice at Fonterra, the world’s largest dairy exporter. Peter is a marketing consultant and neuromarketing expert who has worked with leading corporations in 20 countries on five continents.

In this book they offer a different take on shopper marketing: using insights from neuromarketing, they explore how the shopping brain works, and how these insights can be used to develop more effective shopper marketing strategies and tactics.

“Shopper marketing” is defined in this book as marketing initiatives that are specifically designed to convert shoppers into buyers, and specifically excludes trade promotions. The data shows that shopper marketing spending more than doubled between 2012 and 2014, from 6% to 13.5% of the total marketing spend. During the  same period, we saw digital spending going from 7.1% of the total spend to 12.5%. Clearly, this is only one report and the data is limited to a sample of CPG manufacturers. But the data seems aligned with reports that major marketers such as P&G, Nestle and Unilever have increased their shopper marketing
budgets and established significant internal shopper marketing expertise. So why are more marketers allocating bigger budgets to shopper marketing? Does shopper marketing deliver a greater return on investment than other marketing approaches? Or does it amplify other marketing instruments, thus lifting their effectiveness? We might also ask ourselves about the impact on the consumer: How does shopper marketing actually work? What happens in the consumer’s mind that shapes in-store purchase decisions? What are the key factors that determine the effectiveness of shopper marketing initiatives? These and other questions are addressed in the Shopper Marketing book. But most importantly, shopper marketing is an integral element of the path to purchase, and an integrated path to purchase promises to lift the impact of each and every marketing initiative along the way by focusing it on the decisive point where sales are made or lost: the point of purchase.

Authors: Carl MacInnes & Peter Steidl