A Shopper Marketing Story
At AtoZ Corp., a leader in branded consumer products, we were ready to take our shopper marketing capabilities to the next level. Even though we’d been implementing a seemingly common sense approach, we knew we weren’t maximizing our return on
marketing investment.
The “old school” in our organization just rolled their eyes at shopper marketing, dismissing it. Even among the believers there was no agreement on how to define it, what it could accomplish, or their role and responsibilities in the process. For instance, when the question of what makes for a good insight came up in a meeting, it was met with confused stares around the room.
We knew we needed outside help, an objective third party who the industry recognized as exhibiting real thought leadership and who had been through this process successfully, so we came to
Shopper Intelligence.
A2Z
Shopper Intelligence quickly identified some fundamental disconnects: AtoZ wasn’t aligned around a consistent set of shopper marketing principles. Without an established “center of gravity” to our approach, teams were pulling in different directions, minimizing the benefits of our efforts.
We also lacked a clearly defined, cross-functional, collaborative process with agreed-upon roles and responsibilities in building, executing, and measuring shopper-marketing programs.
Lastly, consumer and shopper plans were being built in silos—despite the fact that, as Shopper Intelligence swiftly made us understand through their Consumer-Brand Relationship Cycle©, consumers and shoppers interact with our brands seamlessly, transitioning deftly between the two roles in an ever-evolving
brand experience.
Zeroing in on these issues helped Shopper Intelligence identify the desired new behavior we needed to adopt. They weren’t going to just “consult and run”; they set out to provide us with the skills and tools necessary to make the new behavior sustainable so it didn’t become another one of those “things our company starts and then ignores.”
We started with Shopper Intelligence’s training courses, immersing ourselves in the key principles of shopper marketing and insights. This was a huge step towards aligning us around the same center of gravity. None of the other firms we considered offered any type of skills training.
The richness of the material spurred great discussions, helping us hone in on a vision and definition for shopper marketing that was uniquely AtoZ. Armed with this, we worked through all the implications of bringing it to life, identifying any organizational hurdles along
the way.
They also broke down our bunker mentality—no more silos!—replacing it with a cross-functional process designed to integrate consumer and shopper plans. They provided us with two important tools, the Insight-Connectivity Model© and the Key Strategic Initiative Planning Process© which now serve as the foundation of our new integrated planning process.
At every turn, Shopper Intelligence lived up to their commitment to inspire our organization to behave differently. At the start, we saw the journey ahead of us as daunting, a real tough climb, but Shopper Intelligence’s experience with other companies across different categories made it easy.
