Shopper Journey – Awareness Stage

Now that we’ve established the shopper journey stages, let’s dig in a little deeper to the awareness stage of the consumers’ path to purchase. One thing to remember, the consumer is not necessarily conscious of the fact they are in any of these stages, with the exception of possibly the consideration stage, but we’ll cover that soon. Let’s talk about the first shopper’s journey stage of awareness and tactics that can reach the shopper during this phase.

The First Shopper Journey Stage – Awareness

The moment a consumer becomes aware of a brand or a new product— the first of the shopper journey stage—is the awareness phase. More often than not, awareness tactics will include some form of advertising to catch a consumer’s attention.

These tactics really do span across multiple mediums: TV, radio, sponsored social media ads, billboards, online display ads, and much more. Regardless of the medium being used, it’s best to integrate several different shopper marketing tactics to achieve a balanced approach. However, the awareness stage in shopper marketing is one of the most expensive stages for marketers to reach consumers. But, it can be done cost-effectively if you have a well-defined media strategy. If your brand needs help defining your media strategy, please reach out to the NewPoint team!

Tactics that Work

Although awareness tactics are expensive, they do work. Now come on, there are ICONIC TV commercials with food products I’m sure you can recall. Most of you can even recite a line or two from your favorite one. As a child of the ’80s, Smurfberry Crunch was my favorite cereal, and I would be singing the song from the commercial at the grocery store when we would pick up the box and put it in the cart. Now that’s some effective marketing (wink, wink).

But really, how many times have you seen an ad or a billboard for something NEW? You then store it in your memory, only later to recall the product. You are aware of the product. Then, you decide to google the product and low and behold you end up on a brand’s website. That’s when you enter the next shopper’s journey stage of consideration.

STAY TUNED for Part 2 of our Shopper Marketing – Shopper Journey Stages series!

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.