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The consumer insights team is likely to present a view of the brand in which market share performance is viewed as the result of consumer preference based on beliefs about various brands. Improve performance on driver attributes and share goes up. This relationship encourages the brand team to believe that the brass ring is to engender a strong level of engagement with consumers, implying that engaged consumers account for the (great) majority of brand sales.

In a social age, the marketing teams that follow this line of thinking will try to move as much money as possible out of paid advertising, and place their priorities on social media engagement. Such brand teams aspire to maximize their Facebook fan base as well as their followers on Twitter and now Pinterest. In this worldview, shopping is basically regarded as the chore someone has to get through to acquire the brands they prefer and therefore planned to buy.

The shopper insights teams would temper this enthusiasm about engagement marketing. They know that the most preferred brand is not automatically bought.

The facts: Estimates are that as high as 70 per cent of brand decisions are made in-store; my own research across 19 consumer packaged goods categories showed an average of 50 per cent of brand decisions made in-store. Even for loyal buyers – for example, those buying a brand 50 per cent of the time or more – the retention of loyal buyers over time is suspect. Half or more of those loyal to a brand in a given year are not loyal to the same brand one year later (this finding is consistent between my own brand equity research and analysis of Catalina frequent shopper data).

The implication is that consumers usually have acceptable alternatives to consider, so constant persuasion along the path

to purchase is critical. This worldview leads marketing to realize the importance of shopper marketing and eventually, when it is mature enough, mobile marketing that facilitates the shopping process.

To think introspectively about the limits of brand engagement, keep a one-day brand-use diary. I did so and found the following:

1. I used an astounding number of brands in a day (nearly 100 by 2:00 p.m.).

2. The great majority of these brands have little meaning for me (e.g., the brand of countertop, the maker of the coffee mug, the brand of slippers on my feet).

3. Of those brands that are meaningful to me, most have acceptable substitutes.

4. Only a handful (10 per cent for me) are brands I care about so much that I would have a sense of deprivation if I lost access to them (for me, the short list included Twitter, Facebook, a particular news channel, Dove, Pantene, Diet Coke, The New York Yankees).

If we focus exclusively on brand engagement marketing, we will not create an effective marketing plan to address the 85 per cent of brand buyers who are not going to become extremely attached but who account for half of sales.

If we focus exclusively on shopper marketing, we run the risk of not creating meaningful brand differences that can generate engaged consumers who will be much more valuable to the brand and, ultimately, of fighting commoditization.

Bridging the Gap between Consumer and Shopper Marketing PerspectivesJoel Rubinson

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The consumer insights/brand teams and the shopper insights/shopper marketing teams have conflicting perspectives on brands.

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Loyalty Framework: Reconciling the Two Brand Growth Perspectives

How do marketers reconcile these perspectives, each with its own truths, and bring them together into a holistic plan for brand growth?

I propose that we utilize a framework based on loyalty segmentation of consumers, and I will show how this framework brings together the two perspectives, consumer and shopper, around some surprising insights.

The beta distribution is used to model the distribution of probabilities of purchase by individual consumers with respect to a particular brand of interest. For a typical brand with 10 per cent market share, the distribution of its share of requirements (i.e., a brand’s share of purchases by a given consumer) might look like what is presented in figure 1.

About 15 per cent of “fringe” buyers will buy your brand at least once during the year (at a one-month category purchase cycle). As such, surprising to many, half of a brand’s buyers come from this fringe segment, while less than 20 per cent of buyers are engaged, that is, buy the brand 75 per cent of the time (or greater) and account for less than half of the brand’s sales. If we add together the “preferred” and “engaged” groups, we see that those who prefer a brand still give about 25 per cent of their purchases to other brands.

Now let us consider what happens to this distribution if the brand grows to a 15 per cent share. Figure 2 shows what that would look like.

While the engaged segment must grow the most (the double jeopardy effect), notice that share must increase from each of the loyalty segments, as opposed to an alternate hypothesis which states that the sales increase would come from engaged and perhaps preferred segments, and that the fringe segment contribution would actually go down as people upshift in their

loyalty. While there is some upshifting, it is not so great, and sales still must increase from that segment.

Pinpointing Media Strategies to Affect Loyalty Segments

Now, the next question is whether or not all media touchpoints are effective against each of these segments. The answer is “Unlikely.” A recent analysis of Compete’s data regarding Facebook fan effects suggests that new Facebook fans of a brand are already predisposed to the brand, and therefore the updates or social impressions they see are disproportionately directed to those who are already loyal. In other words, Facebook appears to be a touchpoint that reinforces the brand beliefs of those in the two most favorable segments, but does little to influence the other segments.

Returning to the discussion of shopper marketing at the start of this paper, about half of purchase decisions, on average (depending on the category and brand), are made in the store. However, it is likely that such shopping styles are characteristic of the two middle groups (“acceptables” and “preferreds”). Hence, effective shopper marketing and promotional practices will disproportionately affect those in the middle of the curve, an effect that is illustrated in figure 3.

By looking at a brand’s loyalty distribution, we can see how shopper and consumer marketing frameworks can dovetail. Shopper marketing operates primarily to win the purchase at retail against the middle of the curve, where consumers have more than one acceptable brand and where their preference for any given brand does not dominate the decision process.

Consumer marketing’s role is primarily to move people into more favorable loyalty segments, and retain them there, based on brand beliefs.

Consumer and shopper marketing share a responsibility that is central to branding and is in common across all segments: the need to give the brand a certain meaning. Brand meaning gives shoppers an ability to anticipate, to predict if a potential purchase will serve their needs.

Figure 1: Share of requirement distribution for a typical 10% share brand; avg. category purchase cycle of 12x/year

Figure 2: Source of growth for a typical 10% share brand growing to 15%

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Brand meaning, if it is exclusive, can lead to moving consumers into the preferred and engaged segments. In a brand equity study, this effect would be reflected by a respondent’s checking off that a certain brand, and only that brand, stands for a particular attribute. I call this exclusivity owning an attribute.

I have found that standing for an attribute versus owning an attribute is the differentiator between someone’s preferring a brand versus being engaged with it. However, even if not exclusive (e.g., I think your salad dressing is high quality, but I think others are as well), brand meaning feeds the decision heuristics that shoppers use so the brand can raise share among those who only occasionally buy that brand.

Brand meaning also can lead to engagement. Brand meaning can and should extend beyond the functional characteristics of the product. For example, Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty gave the Dove brand meaning about beauty and female self-esteem, which reinforced the brand’s values within and beyond the product categories in which it had offerings. Any product with the Dove name would instantly convey a certain meaning, even if a shopper did not previously use or know about that product.

How do you influence brand meaning? The obvious answer is advertising, but there are other ways as well. For example, brand meaning can be built and managed by retail activations where the meaning becomes obvious (e.g., McCormick spices barbeque center, where there is a free-standing supermarket display of a variety of products and spices needed for a successful outdoor barbeque). In fact, in 2009, BASES (the leading marketing research service for forecasting the sales potential of new products) found that in-store exposure was the greatest source of brand awareness for new products.

Summary and Conclusions

By bringing together the perspectives from consumer and shopper insights into a loyalty framework, we see that the

marketing approach that calls for building brand engagement, placing a premium on social media strategies, is not wrong; but it is incomplete in light of the high level of active decision-making that occurs in-store.

Marketers need to develop a fully integrated consumer and shopper media strategy that is mapped to address each of the brand loyalty segments. Use advertising and shopper marketing to build brand meaning that will shift less loyal consumers toward becoming more loyal. Use social and owned media to help build a relationship with consumers that will move their beliefs about a brand to exclusive meaning, leading to engagement. Use shopper marketing to win the 50 per cent of purchases at retail that are up for grabs.

From a research point of view, it is important to track the four loyalty segments. Size the segments, understand what the key differentiating beliefs are between segments, and understand how touchpoints map to each of the segments. Set goals for loyalty segment sizes and purchasing levels, toward your brand, such that they tie out to brand growth goals and monitor progress. If one of the segments is falling behind its goals, it suggests that the part of the marketing plan which maps to influencing that segment needs to be dialed up. For that reason, the tracker needs to be timely, and the marketing/media plan needs to have the flexibility for adaptive course correction.

ReferencesAllan L. Baldinger & Joel Rubinson. “Brand Loyalty: The Link Between Attitude and Behavior.” Journal of Advertising Research, 1996 (November/December): 22–34.

Jack Neff. “This Upfront, P&G May Want to Boost Spend on Piggly Wiggly.” Advertising Age, 2010 (May 3). Available at http://adage.com/article/news/upfront-p-g-boost-spend-piggly-wiggly/143643/

Ooh-tv. “New POPAI Study Shows That 76% of All Purchase Decisions Are Taken In-Store.” Ooh-tv.com, 2012 (May 29). Available at http://en.ooh-tv.com/2012/05/29/new-popai-study-shows-that-76-of-all-purchase-decisions-are-taken-in-store/

David Raab. “CMO Council Study: Customer Loyalty Is Fleeting.” MPM Toolkit, 2009 (July 6). Available at http://mpmtoolkit.blogspot.com/2009/07/cmo-council-study-customer-loyalty-is.html

Joel Rubinson. “Surprising New Study on Facebook Marketing Effectiveness for Brands.” Joel Rubinson on Marketing Research, 2012. Available at http://blog.joelrubinson.net/2012/06/surprising-new-study-on-facebook-marketing-effectiveness-for-brands/

Wikipedia. “Double Jeopardy.” Wikipedia, 2011 (June 5). Available at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_jeopardy_%28marketing%29

Joel Rubinson is president and founder of Rubinson Partners Inc., a marketing and research consultancy. He is also on the faculty of NYU Stern School of Business, where he teaches social media strategy. Joel can be reached at JoelRubinson@gmail.com

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Figure 3: Mapping touchpoints to loyalty