Summit 2011: Finding the Motivation Behind the Buy

Too often, retailers and manufacturers get bogged down with data in an attempt to stay connected with their customers, but they shouldn't be using just legacy analytical tools to sell to today's empowered shoppers, said John Ross, chief executive officer of Shopper Sciences, during the 2011 Shopper Marketing Summit. Ross' session, titled "Messing with Sasquatch: The Truth about the Purchase Funnel (and Other Marketing Myths)," explained why the traditional tool sets —multivariate regression analysis, transaction logs and ROI analysis — should be seen for what they are: tools built in a world without Facebook and other social media. Most of these tools rely on science that matured well before the Internet existed, he said.A new data set that puts the shopper's voice at equal weight to the transaction or buyer's voice is needed. "Shoppers are critical," Ross said. "They can teach you what you're doing right or why they didn't behave the way you wanted them to. We have to reveal that in ways that become a core part of our business, or we may find ourselves mysteriously reacting to things in the marketplace which may not be represented in our pages and pages of data."To get a deeper understanding of shopping behavior, Shopper Sciences uses MRI scanners, sensors, and cameras to measure heart rate, body temperature and breaths per second from a distance. The company's proprietary research software can pinpoint the moments that trigger a reaction. When these moments are plotted and massed thousands of times over, they enable manufacturers or retailers to build a road map of what is actually driving conversion to a retail store.With the help of this tool, a cake manufacturer whose messaging centered on flavor and price determined that, in fact, neither was very relevant to conversion, said Ross. Instead, shoppers were making decisions before they got to the store based on cake-related ideas or recipes, party and event planning tips, recommendations and previous purchaser reviews. "What we found is the cost of ingredients pales in comparison to cost of the failure at the event," Ross said. Understanding what is driving the mindset before a shopper enters the store is essential for understanding conversion.By looking at large audiences over time, just what is driving a large amount of conversion becomes obvious. "We have to then go in deeper on each one," he said, "because we need to understand not where or how it was influential relative to other choices, but why." Dissecting the shopping experience into individual constructs to see the positive and negative of what is going on will help companies begin to understand where they're failing or succeeding.Finally, Ross said shopper marketing's expanding mandate is being driven by the shopper. "It's their decision where shopping begins and ends, and we have to build an infrastructure and place where we can listen to that. If we do it, marketing is easy. It's no longer about repeating last year's "sale-a-bration;" it becomes about giving them what they want smarter, easier, better and faster."

Summit 2011: Finding the Motivation Behind the Buy

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