During a recent meeting with a new client, I asked a very simple question. “Why would someone buy your product?” The uncomfortable chuckle that followed revealed the typical response we get when we ask this question, “because it’s the best XYZ on the market.” The conversation continued with, “Okay, but do customers know that? And if they don’t how do you get them to know your product is better“? “Duh, that’s why we are hiring a marketing firm”. Touché. However, this tells me they hadn’t thought about the shopper journey yet in their shopper marketing strategy.
But, when a grocery shopper heads to the store, a whopping majority already has in mind what they need to buy. The shopper journey starts long before they reach the shelf where your product is sitting. It’s important to understand the shopper journey in order to align marketing budgets, prioritize the spending and, ultimately, craft the right message to consumers at the right time.
The Journey
The shopper journey typically starts with a need (i.e. “Mom, are we out of Oreos?”). The shopper could also be influenced by a multitude of factors such as sales, advertising, social media, etc. Keep in mind, a need isn’t always that the consumer is out of a product they typically buy. The need may be seasonal, especially around holidays. The rumors of a canned pumpkin shortage come to mind. However, brands can proactively create the need with marketing and that’s where the stages of the shopper journey come in.
There are 5 stages in a shopper journey:
Awareness
The moment a consumer becomes aware of a brand or a new product—the very basic start of the journey.
Consideration
After a consumer knows a need that they have (ie. we’re out of snacks) the shopper actively considers the options.
Purchase
This is when the actual purchase happens, but it is broken into 2 stages: Point of Purchase and Point of Sale, but for marketers to get a deeper understanding of the customer, we focus on the point of purchase—or basically when a consumer decides whether or not they will buy a product.
Experience
It would be foolish to believe that after a consumer has purchased your product that the journey is over. Not so. This is when the shopper tastes and/or uses the product.
Advocacy
The last stage in the journey is after the shopper has purchased and used a product, they share their experience (good or bad).
And those are the 5 stages of the Shopper Journey. Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll cover the stages more in-depth and identify tactics in the shopper marketing toolbox. Plus, we’ll see where they fit into the stages of shopper marketing.
If you have any questions or would like to learn more about shopper marketing for your food brand, please reach out to the NewPoint team. If you are interested in more food brand marketing topics, please visit our Food for Thought page or check out NewPoint’s Patrick Nycz’s book: Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain.
To identify and isolate areas for improvement in shopper marketing program strategies and tactics to further your CPG brand growth against set KPIs:
Maximize the economic performance of your CPG brand shopper marketing investment
Increase velocity at retail and consumer brand affinity
This shopper marketing audit will detail and contrast your CPG brand shopper marketing and messaging versus that of industry standard competitive practices and will include, but not limited to:
Target market reach, integrated retail marketing support, promotional continuity & awareness, offers and incentives, and tactical execution timing
Go-to-market launch strategies, timing, and tactical execution
Deliverables
Marketing Communication Audit Report
The deliverable will be a white paper with NewPoint Marketing findings and recommendations related to marketing activities in one retail partnership or DMA/market as defined by the client.
Brant brings 20+ years of experience to NewPoint as chief brand communicator and marketing-plan contributor.
Brant’s specialty is bringing an outside, investigative perspective that can feel alternately “rigorous” or “exasperating” depending on your point of view. Yet, he never fails to uncover a business’s unique selling proposition—one which can serve as a brand foundation for marketing that is compelling, creative and “sticky.”
Throughout his career, Brant’s applied his skill set to a broad range of business applications along the food supply-and-service chain. His services have provided vital clarity for all types of operations, from the more conventional food and food equipment manufacturers to the adjacent enterprises that partner with them, such as the Purdue University College of Agriculture.
Stephanie Bossung
Food industry marketing expertise—from retail to food-service and food-service equipment— is a natural outcome of having deep knowledge in every facet of a business’ operation. With 10 years in branding and business development, preceded by 15 years in mass media and promotions, Stephanie is an FMI Emerge mentor, holds an executive-level expertise in sales, marketing, media, and production management.
This exceptionally diverse skill set adds value for NewPoint clients by providing a full complement of perspectives on food-industry brand management endeavors.
Wired for a hawkish attention to detail while also maintaining a high-resolution view of the big picture, Stephanie is uniquely able to provide astute branding direction and simultaneously apply the business principles necessary to squeeze more bang out of every marketing buck.
Patrick Nycz
A member of the Forbes Agency Council and quoted in the New York Times, USA Today and Adweek, Patrick Nycz is the author of Moving Your Brand Up the Food Chain: Marketing Strategies to Grow Local and Regional Food Brands. He is an FMI Emerge mentor, an American Advertising Federation’s Silver Medal Award winner, and the Founding President of NewPoint Marketing, a full-service food industry marketing firm focused on food industry brands On a mission to grow.
Patrick’s vision for NewPoint emerged from his team’s success using this proven model for food industry clients and is fueled by NewPoint-funded food buyers and food manufacturers research around tracking consumer, industry, and ongoing food trends.
Kristy Blair
Since starting her 20-year career in commercial graphic design at one of the foremost catalog retailers in the world, Kristy’s visual branding skills have organically narrowed into the food-industry niche.
In that time, she’s directed graphic identities for snack food and restaurant startups, print materials for multiple agricultural seed companies, display graphics and merchandiser signage for major food-equipment manufacturers and everything in between.
Today, as one of the key brand architects for NewPoint clients, she continues to lead our visual research & development team, always working to find the innovative median between the best practices worth honoring and the accepted rules worth breaking.