CPGmatters: What If You Could Search Consumers' Shopping Baskets?
Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of a current article from the monthly e-zine, CPGmatters, presented here for discussion.
Catalina Marketing has spent two years examining 250 million shopping baskets weekly from 130 million separate shopper identifications. The goal is to probe the gap between what shoppers say they buy in surveys and what they actually purchase.
"If you don't observe their behavior, if you don't know their preferences and tastes, how can you customize your content or your marketing to meet that and respond to this 'me' generation?" said Todd Morris, Catalina's SVP-business development, in a recent webcast called, "What If You Could 'Search' Your Consumers' Shopping Basket?"
Mr. Morris is talking about the data-based equivalent of prying ("Oh, you say you're on a diet? What are those cupcakes doing in your basket?") without the embarrassment factor.
With this shopping baskets view, he claimed, CPGs can see the full mix of what people buy in food, drug and mass today and over time, and determine who is profitable or not, how much they spend on a brand, who's defecting from a brand, and predict who might be soon.
What Catalina found might send CPGs scurrying to prepare for market share battles. Fewer than three in ten (29.6 percent) consumers remained loyal to Sprite brand beverage from year 1 to year 2. A quarter (25.9 percent) became switchers, not loyal to any brand. Another 14.8 percent became loyal to competitors, and 29.7 percent left the brand entirely.
This behavior-based or search-level advertising can find people who stay loyal on their own, and model them out. Basket search can predict people who will defect. The marketing campaign can change based on observed behavior that's searched, he added.
CPGs also need to know what percentage of brand volume is actually reached by their traditional demographic media target. An analysis of three different client brands found a jarring separation between the media target and the actual target, one as high as 88 percent.
"Understanding this behavior is core to actually making [a brand] part of the 'me' generation and searching...to reach smaller subsets of households, provide relevant subject matter to the right audience, and ultimately improve ROI," Mr. Morris added. "To accurately target, you need high-quality information."
Discussion Questions: What insights do you get from shopping baskets that you don't get from shopper surveys? Should shopping basket analysis play a larger role in understanding consumers' behavior?