Biz Schools Get in the Shopper Marketing Game

While the term "shopper marketing" has been in use for at least a decade, in the last few years its practices have begun to coalesce into a true discipline. "There always has been collaboration between retailers and manufacturers," says Brian Bodendein, Deloitte's shopper marketing practice leader. "But now there are capabilities, in terms of technology and drawing insights, that weren't possible before. There are better ways of using insights to target and activate customers. Also, the traditional ways [of marketing] no longer work as well."As shopper marketing becomes increasingly important for CPG companies and retailers, business schools are taking a closer look at incorporating it into their curriculums. One hold-up, says Chris Hoyt of Hoyt & Co., is the variety of -- and occasionally conflicting -- opinions as to what constitutes shopper marketing. But while everyone seems to have their own definition, most agree that it involves thinking about the shopper at the store level, agreeing on collaborative duties, and deciding how best to integrate the various elements of the partners' marketing programs.Professionals have been learning on the job through trial and error and then developing best practices based on those learnings, says Christopher Brace, owner of The Shopper Intelligence Agency, New York. "This rather steep learning curve is what makes it difficult for some companies to get their shopper marketing function up and running," he adds."Most companies have left it up to a few functional experts to define and champion the process and educate the organization on it," adds Kris Abrahamson, director, shopper marketing for Downer's Grove, Ill.-based Sara Lee Food & Beverage. At Kimberly-Clark, Dallas, Karen Durand is in such a position. As senior manager, Shopper Marketing Center of Excellence, she says that her primary responsibility is to "develop best practices, processes and procedures to formalize this discipline throughout the organization."Although Mike McMahon, senior vice president, Integrated Customer Marketing at ConAgra, has both a client and agency background, he says it wasn't until the company started "investing in this space four years ago that I became connected to it. Once we launched the Integrated Customer Marketing team in 2008, we accelerated our understanding and learning."To train staff, Deloitte's Bodendein says some companies are rotating their marketing executives through various sales functions, putting them in the field and having them sit in with sales groups. "Short of formal education," he says, "it gets them into the mindset of what matters to retailers."Formalizing that education, almost all agree, is a necessary and probably inevitable next step. Transforming shopper marketing from an "on-the-job" training regimen into an academic curriculum would not only benefit business school graduates themselves -- making them more marketable -- but will aid the industry as a whole. "When people are able to study case studies, metrics and learn theoretically, there will be a different level of discussion," says Beth Ann Kaminkow, president and COO of TracyLocke, Dallas. "That level of intelligence does get applied to practice."What Schools are DoingMost in the industry see shopper marketing as marketing, not as a separate discipline, says Durand. "It's all about the integration of consumer, shopper and customer objectives and perspectives into the design of brand planning and how best to go to market. Following an introduction about what shopper marketing is and how it fits into the marketing model, I would like to see shopper marketing principles and measurement built into current marketing courses."At the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Associate Professor of Marketing Dan Flint says the school is undergoing a complete refocusing of its efforts. Last November, it debuted the Shopper Marketing Forum. Directed by Flint, the forum includes an executive summit each fall and an open conference each spring. "These meetings are open discourse among business leaders, faculty, Ph.D. students and M.B.A. students," he explains. "These conversations lead sometimes to research projects that benefit the scholastic community as well as the businesses involved." At the inaugural forum -- sponsored by Crossmark, Deloitte and The Nielsen Co. -- participants included Walmart, Kimberly-Clark, Nestle, Procter & Gamble and Mars Advertising, among others. Changes to UT's marketing M.B.A. concentration are ongoing, says Flint, but began this fall. "We see shopper marketing as strategic and not merely as a tactic or an extension of category management," he says. "We rest our thinking on three pillars: collaboration for shopper insights, strategic planning and supply chain execution in support of shopper marketing. We reach out to faculty and students in retailing, statistics and advertising, all in different departments here at UT." Flint says that long term, these concepts and skills need to be taught at all levels: undergraduate, M.B.A., Ph.D. and executive.He notes that students must realize that in shopper marketing the hardest work is in creating multiple collaborative relationships and managing a high number of diverse initiatives across a variety of retail channels. "This means understanding the details of how brand management, sales and advertising (as they relate to shopper marketing) have changed," Flint says. "The skills required have changed. The business-analytics skills needed are significant. The ability to communicate at multiple levels across multiple functions is far more complex than it used to be. This will most definitely make our students more marketable. If it wouldn't, we wouldn't be doing it. This is in direct response to our customers, those who hire our students."In November, Brace of the Shopper Intelligence Agency and Abrahamson of Sara Lee began co-teaching a "Shopper Marketing and Brand Loyalty Strategies" course through New York University's School of Continuing and Professional Studies. The three-day course is for entry- to mid-level professionals and included speakers from The Partnering Group and Envirosell. Brace says that while this first course is geared more toward how manufacturers need to execute shopper marketing, they plan to develop a second course focused on how retailers execute shopper marketing."I don't think it is important to teach shopper marketing skills solely for the sake of shopper marketing," says Brace. "It is important for the purpose of developing truly integrated brand marketing plans. Shopper marketing is not an end in and of itself, but a means to more integrated plans. Shopper marketing as a standalone discipline outside of the brand's consumer plan defeats the benefit that shopping marketing can bring."At NYU's undergrad and graduate level, Mickey Goodman, adjunct professor of marketing in the Stern School of Business, says that shopper marketing is becoming a part of a number of curriculums. Key areas of study include: shopper behavior; retailer/customer power; trade marketing (customer marketing, shopper marketing) strategies; and planning, tactics and evaluation. "My approach is both conceptual/theoretical and case study," Goodman says.Although Goodman does have firsthand experience in the area, he says that tools such as a "textbook-worthy" shopper marketing book and strong shopper marketing case studies are critical for professors who do not have firsthand knowledge. "[When these] are written and available through schools like Stern, Harvard and Northwestern's Kellogg," he says, "shopper marketing will become a more mainstream and widely taught aspect of the marketing curriculum."Raymond Burke, E.W. professor of business at Indiana University's Kelley School of Business, says he believes shopper marketing begins with shopper insights. In his MBA course, Applied Marketing Research, students are exposed to a variety of shopper research techniques including exit interviews, human observation, computerized customer tracking and virtual-reality simulations. "The course uses several cases to illustrate the application of these tools and the analysis and interpretation of the data," Burke says. "For example, I developed a case on observational research with research firm Envirosell where students analyze shopper behavior in the skin care category and develop recommendations for store layout, product organization, and brand merchandising and packaging. A second case, developed with General Mills, illustrates the value of using virtual-reality simulations to measure the on-shelf impact of new product and packaging concepts and the effects of category clutter."

Biz Schools Get in the Shopper Marketing Game

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