Best Practices in Shopper Marketing Measurement, Part 3: Measuring Brand Impact

The following is the third installment in a six-part series examining best practices for the measurement of shopper marketing. This article looks at effective ways to measure brand impact. Subsequent articles will cover effective integration practices (July), retail collaboration (August) and directions for the future (September). Part 3: Measuring Brand ImpactFor big brands, measuring the impact of shopper marketing on brand equity is a big deal.Bryan Welsh, vice president of shopper marketing at PepsiCo, puts it this way: “How drinkers feel about Diet Pepsi is as important an issue as trial or awareness.” The sheer size of the potential in-store audience – upward of 140 million weekly shoppers at Walmart alone – qualifies the retail environment as a discrete media channel, and the conviction that brand equity can be enhanced in-store is a key tenet of shopper marketing.Historically, understanding brand health has been the brand manager’s bailiwick. It is standard practice to continually track various equity measures such as awareness, likability and future purchase intent, as well as specific brand imagery dimensions (“hip,” “masculine,” “nurturing”). However, these tracker studies are typically too broad, and too infrequent, to gauge the impact of a given program. Shopper marketers, therefore, have been left searching for their own solutions.Understanding the impact of shopper marketing programs on brand equity is possible, but the findings are neither cheap nor easy to obtain. The reason is that the sample size needs to be robust, over a brief executional time frame, to read a single campaign at a specific retailer. That can be dauntingly expensive, especially when compared with the overall cost of the program.Furthermore, program measurement can be slippery or error-prone, because marketing execution and retail conditions vary widely from store to store. Working under various constraints, shopper marketers try to maintain the brand experience – and the research conditions – across retailers and stores, but that’s not an easy task.Finally, there is the halo issue: What is the impact of the retailer on the brand? The retail context can have a definite effect on the shopper’s impression. For example, brands might seem snazzier at Target or fresher at Whole Foods. Measuring this effect on brand equity is sometimes discussed but rarely pursued with testing.The ‘Skinny’ from PepsiCoThe following Q&A with PepsiCo’s Welsh illustrates how manufacturers are thinking about building brand equity through shopper marketing:Q. How does PepsiCo view brand communication at retail?Welsh: “We think of the store as a medium to drive a brand message. In some cases, the retailer (where the products are showcased) is the message and vice versa. A brand message geared to appeal to Gen X females and their sense of style would be very powerful in Target. But the same message may not work in a different environment, such as a traditional grocer. The brand communication needs to enhance the shopping experience, and vice versa. For instance, Dollar General isn’t looking for Diet Pepsi to play the role of trendsetter. Instead, it is more [interested in] value on packs the shopper is familiar with.”Q. So it’s about the shopper in a particular environment?Welsh: “Right. In the sports drink category, the shopper and consumer aren’t [always] the same person. In convenience stores, the product is bought by the consumer. There is a high level of brand awareness and sports involvement. Conversely, the gatekeeper in grocery is ‘shopper mom,’ who isn’t familiar with the sports celebrities. She doesn’t care. The messages geared to the sports drink consumer would be lost in that environment.”Q. In retail environments, how do you measure the effect of shopper marketing on brand equity?Welsh: “It’s possible, but pricey. The regular metrics don’t get all the way to bright. Everyone across disciplines leans on the same metrics. As an industry, we tend to rely on sales lift – whether or not that was the primary objective.”“[For instance,] the goal in launching the Diet Pepsi skinny pack was to change the perception of the brand (see sidebar below and related article). The sales lift was terrific, but incidental. We did a deep dive on measuring changes in perception, but it was expensive. It doesn’t make sense to do this every time.“That’s why there are three main buckets of measurement. The first is lift and volume. The second is behavioral – for example, how often am I buying and what else is in the basket? The third is brand equity. This includes all pre/post-shop questions around how shoppers feel about the brand, in the context of that retailer.”Approaches and ToolsThe “Skinny Can” case is notable because the goal centered on brand equity. The measurement tool was Millward Brown’s brand equity survey, which regularly polls thousands of consumers to gauge their perceptions of various brands. The New York-based research house conducts these annual studies for many CPGs on a national basis; this is a longitudinal approach that is not typically applied to shopper marketing campaigns.To effectively use the tool to measure account-level impact, PepsiCo oversampled for shoppers at a key retailer in a separate study before the “Skinny Can” program launched to calibrate the brand equity scores there to the brand’s national scores. The resulting data served as benchmarks to gauge the program’s success as determined through a post-shop survey. The results identified a statistically significant increase in brand equity.However, the PepsiCo case was rare in that its “deep dive” into brand perceptions at the key retailer was statistically married to national brand equity measures. Since this luxury is not available for many brands or programs, a brief overview of brand equity approaches and tools is warranted.The 50,000 Foot View: DashboardsKeeping regularly updated dashboards has become common practice in the industry. A dashboard is a business intelligence visualization of up-to-date metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). While most dashboards report brand health statistics at much higher levels than a specific shopper program, the practice is a good way to keep a finger on the pulse of the brand – sales, shopper behavior, and equity.The chart below is a sample dashboard culled from several industry sources. (Acosta Sales and Marketing, Jacksonville, Fla., is one practitioner that parses metrics into hard and soft measures.) Creating a robust picture of brand health and shopper impact, as well as reconciling data points, is the goal. Performance data naturally falls into two categories: fast-moving and slow-moving. According to Agustin De Dios, director of global measurement analytics at Kimberly-Clark, “The challenge is to link the slow-moving data and analytics (such as loyalty and panel data, and marketing mix models) with the fast-moving data (various digital activities). Fast-moving data, such as ‘likes,’ click-throughs and visitors, can be downloaded as often as hourly. It would be interesting to discover if the fast-moving data could predict the slow-moving data.” Such reconciliation of data points and proof of correlative relationships among data sets is a continuing challenge for analytics teams.Sales Analytics OverlaysReading the impact of a shopper marketing program from national panel data is not practical. Most programs are too granular to be captured by national samples – one researcher estimated that it would take 10 times the typical national sample size to read a specific retailer program. Moreover, short-duration programs are missed on national surveys because they’re in and out of the market too quickly to be recorded. Unless a brand increases the sample size among the retailers in question (like Diet Pepsi did), the equity impact of a single program can’t be read. And for most programs, doing so would be prohibitively expensive.So, to understand the effect of a particular program, pre/post-shop interviews are usually overlaid onto shopper card data such as brand-switching patterns or trial numbers. Interviews can reveal a shopper’s pre-store purchase intent and what she remembered from her trip. Studying this is important, because there are a variety of possible impressions at play, from full-on brand immersion to phantom effects.Brand immersion experiences – a Super Bowl spectacular or a product demonstration – are achievable in-store. Such efforts can make a measurable impression on the shopper. On the flipside are phantom effects: In one study, research firm TNS, Portland, Ore., found that more than 20% of shoppers recalled branded elements that did not exist.Most brands monitor sales and brand perception on a national basis, and many are doing so for their largest shopper programs, too. However, it is possible to deconstruct the impact of in-store brand communication more specifically. If the store is treated as another media channel, then the “shopper” can be considered as passing the same gates as the television “viewer.”Using this concept, TNS breaks in-store brand impact into four stages: Exposure, Breakthrough, Desire and Action, each with its own measurement techniques and metrics. Exposure can include various “opportunity to see” measures, such as awareness (gleaned through pre/post-shop interviews), pass-by rates (shopping cart tracking) or even merchandising compliance (store audits).The measurements associated with Breakthrough include main message recall (pre/post interviews), stopping power (eye-tracking) and dwell time (video tracking). Desire would include purchase intent (pre/post interviews) and brand imagery measures. Finally, Action involves conversion (video monitoring) and sales (POS data).It should be noted that any techniques requiring central location testing and not in-market, such as virtual or mock stores, are better used to refine a program before launch, not to gauge in-market performance.Full Scale In-Market InterviewsFor the biggest programs, it is essential to tie in-store brand perceptions to in-market purchase behavior. SmartRevenue, Stamford, Conn., employs hundreds of researchers to conduct in-aisle observations and interviews, which are overlaid onto sales data. This approach has merit because it records real-world behavior, across retailers, during program execution.An emerging technique employs a panel of shoppers armed with software on their smartphones who record their purchases and self-administer questionnaires. This methodology eliminates the expense of hiring researchers to conduct interviews in-aisle. It also captures attitudes and behavior across channels and throughout the purchase cycle. (MESH Planning, headquartered in London, is a leader in this area.) However, the shoppers themselves are responsible for quality assurance, which may result in uneven levels of reporting and could affect results.In a similar vein, Modiv Media and Ahold USA’s Stop & Shop are bringing the capabilities of a handheld scanner to the shopper’s smartphone. Users of the retailer’s Scan It! app must first register their loyalty cards, which means that full, historical shopper information is captured. The app can deliver promotional offers, as well as record the shopper’s in-aisle location, thereby adding behavioral data to shopper card data. It also allows for a limited number of closed-end survey questions to be self-administered during the shop, permitting some brand equity measures to be taken. The app also can tie pre-shop lists to a specific retailer’s shopper card data, and to attitude data, for a participating retailer, functioning like a self-administered shopalong.If these kinds of apps proliferate, the resulting data could become very valuable. However, retailers will own the data, potentially limiting its availability to brand marketers, and the same quality assurance issues noted above might apply.Incorporating Digital ComponentsWhile the pre/post-shop interview approach offers robust brand insight, elements can be left out. What about digital shopper marketing? Increasingly, digital communication is overlapping with in-store marketing because both deliver shopper interaction. Digital and especially mobile media are proving to be a natural companion to shopping. But the use of new media in-store adds an interesting wrinkle to measuring impact.One company that measures this impact is Dynamic Logic, New York, whose AdIndex ties together qualitative and quantitative program results while incorporating the effect of digital messaging. Here’s how it works: Online exposure to a campaign is tracked using cookie technology, and a survey is administered. This information is then tied to shopper card data at a specific retailer. Control and exposed test cells are used. The output provides branding and ROI metrics in one deliverable. This technique could be used to measure the brand impact of banner ads or a product showcase on a retailer’s site.Deeper Issues and DisconnectsMost researchers use the term “brand equity” fairly loosely, especially in the context of shopper marketing studies. One analytics professional explained that, “We deliberately call these ‘brand perception’ measures, rather than brand equity,” and with good reason: most pre/post interviews do not tie back to an established set of brand equity questions (as Diet Pepsi’s study did). This creates an interesting disconnect. Why wouldn’t every pre/post interview have the same brand equity questions asked in the annual benchmarked tracker?Part of the reason is that marketers simply want other questions answered during a necessarily short interview window. What’s more, “Buyers can be promiscuous in-store, regardless of their brand affiliation. So the brand equity measure for any given shopper may or may not indicate their inclination at the point of sale,” according to Ken Featherston, vice president-planning for OgilvyAction, Chicago. “Perhaps a more relevant question is, ‘How can we plan and account for shoppers who make decisions against their brand affinities?’ ”Featherston’s group is beginning to develop brand preference benchmarks to help bridge this gap for clients. OglivyAction’s core questions focus on share of mind and category decision sets, pre- and post-shop.There is another, little discussed reason to avoid asking brand equity questions during pre/post-shop interviews: Historically, many brand marketers have viewed in-store programs as potentially eroding brand equity. More enlightened marketers, however, consider this only true in the case of straightforward price reductions.Ultimately, the future should bring additional ways to more easily measure the impact of shopper programs on brand equity. The demand for these measures is rising, as shopper programming becomes increasingly entrenched and sophisticated. At the same time, technology is opening newer, faster and cheaper avenues to track individual shoppers.About the AuthorLiz Crawford has more than 20 years of brand management and consulting experience with a concentration in strategic innovation. Over the last few years, Crawford has focused on developing integrated shopper marketing strategies for Fortune 500 clients. Currently, Crawford is an analyst and contributing writer for the Path to Purchase Institute. McGraw-Hill released her book, “The Shopper Economy,” in March.About the SponsorJWT/OgilvyAction Inc., conducting business under the OgilvyAction and JWT Action brands, is a fully integrated, end-to-end shopper marketing and experiential marketing agency with main offices in New York, Chicago and Akron, Ohio. It is part of the WPP Group.

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