Conference review

By Orlando Wood

The chocolate shop-lined streets of Brussels always seemed a most fitting backdrop for a conference that would focus on the drivers of retail choice, and neither the host city nor the ESOMAR Insights Conference (Feb 28 - Mar 1, 2011) were to disappoint. The conference set out to explore how an understanding of the modern shopper can leverage business opportunities for both brands and retailers across the world, and its shelves were stacked with content as rich and diverse as a Belgian beer cellar.

The conference tackled the cultural, emotional, social and even biological drivers of choice, and examined the influence of our physical environment and of different retail channels on our behaviour.

The opening session kicked off with a brilliant presentation by Tom La Forge of Coca Cola on the macro cultural factors influencing shoppers and consumers around the world. Tom identified the slow-changing macro forces influencing the environment businesses operate in: global economic growth, universal and mobile data access, resource scarcity and environmental change, and said that it’s to governments and to powerful brands that people are increasingly looking to take a lead; ‘Consumers will judge us as much on the content of our character as on the content and quality of our drinks’.

Tom was followed by Melanie Howard of the Future Foundation, who identified three cultural trends that are impacting on retail and retail research:

  1. The rise of the global maximiser – we are more and more making the best choice rather than simply ‘satisficing’, i.e. no longer making choices that are merely good enough
  2. The quantified self – we are increasingly monitoring, capturing and sharing information we think is interesting and important about ourselves
  3. The integration of the play ethic – fun is no longer frivolous and is being increasingly built in to communications and retail environments

Cultural differences between regions were the subject of Aruni Ghosh’s presentation (Nielsen in conjunction with PepsiCo). He used Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as a basis for an analysis that explained why some products performed well in certain regions of the globe and less well in others. Cultural context is important, and analysts should entertain caution, they asserted, when grouping countries together to perform regional analysis. In an engaging workshop, Diana Derval would later overlay a further dimension – that of biology – on the different cultural drivers of preference. She asserted that biological differences between people within and across countries can lead to the unexpected success or failure of products in market. Differences in our individual ability to perceive the senses and our level of exposure to pre-natal hormones can heavily influence our preferences, she argued.

The use of the on-line retail channel was the focus of Reineke Reitsma (Forrester), who flagged the vast growth of on-line shopping, and predicted that the number of on-line shoppers in China would increase from the 108 million we see now to 278m in 2050, and that already young adults in China spend three times more time on-line than they do watching TV. Danielle Pinnington (Shoppercentric) pointed to the average visit time on Facebook and highlighted the opportunities that on-line social networks offered for retailers, but cautioned that Facebook (and other social media) is primarily a social space, and that retailers need to play by its rules; get it wrong and the stakes are high.

Two presentations offered tactical support to retailers and brand owners who were looking to improve in-store navigation and choice from display. In a repeat performance of their presentation that won best case study at the ESOMAR Congress in 2010, Wim Hamaekers of Rigil Marketing & Sensory Research and Ronald Laan from Heinz, showed how eye-tracking could complement more traditional evaluative measures, and even change marketing recommendations. However, they urged caution and suggested that eye-tracking can in isolation mislead, and that a multi-disciplinary approach is always preferable: ‘Hot spots tell you everything and nothing at all’. Sven Diekman (eye square) showed how 3D visualisations of shoppers’ movements around a store, coupled with where they were looking, could help retailers to better understand store movement and flow, and monitor the effectiveness of in-store communications.

As the day went on, it became more emotiona. The problem with traditional one-to-one marketing that targets people on spend is that it doesn’t allow you to take the next step, argued Debra Walmsley (Leapfrog) and Stephen Barr (Persuasion Engines). They showed how ‘Heartroom’ (the existing or potential engagement with a brand) rather than ‘Headroom’ (the potential value of an individual to your business) can help to highlight channel potential and communication opportunities that will enhance customer acquisition and retention.

Philip McNaughton (Face) and Beth Corte-Real (Coca Cola) talked about the challenge of transferring brand love for Coca Cola into a cluttered store environment, where communications are heavily price-focused. A multi-mode user-generated research approach from Face, where respondents texted their responses to an on-line community, revealed how shoppers make decisions across various retail environments and what got young adults excited by the category.

The final session of the afternoon focused on the ethical concerns posed by social media research. First we heard a client-side view from Alexander Linder (Swarovski), who called for legal and ethical guidelines on its use, and the agency view from Niels Schillewaert (Insites), who highlighted the threats to market research in this area from CRM and data companies. Adam Phillips ESOMAR’s Legal Committee Chair then clarified the fine line between listening and watching on the one hand and spying on the other. He introduced ESOMAR’s draft guidelines on social media research, and urged the industry to provide feedback on them during this brief consultation period. The guidelines can be found here.

The second day of the conference picked up the emotional theme again and focused on the improvements an emotional lens can bring to the in-store experience. First up, an engaging performance from Corinne Sandler and Lana Novikova (Fresh Minds) that would go on to win best conference presentation. Corinne and Lana showed us how a segmentation model based on universal emotional command systems might explain subconscious decision-making, and when coupled with a ‘relationship-cure’ model, could guide initiatives to improve shopper engagement. ‘We are not thinking machines that feel; we are feeling machines that think’, Corinne proclaimed, a quote from psychologist Antonio Damasio.

Lluis Martinez-Ribes (ESADE) opened by telling us that retailers had a choice – either make incremental improvements to what they currently do or innovate. Using a multi-disciplinary research approach he demonstrated through a superb case study how a new retail brand was able to put the emotional ‘wow’ back into supermarket shopping, reducing the effort and inconvenience usually associated with shopping and providing inspiration for shoppers looking for new food ideas.

Orlando Wood (BrainJuicer) and Wendy Lanchin (The Marketing Store) made the case for in-store emotional measurement, asserting that ‘emotions drive behaviour and behaviour drives profit’. They showed how measuring emotion with BrainJuicer’s pictorial FaceTrace® measure uncovers a level of emotional understanding that can point the way to a more engaging store environment. They showed how it can inform brand owners about the in-store emotional context in which their brand is bought and how it might pave the way for more emotional (and effective) in-store communications.

Driving customer loyalty was the focus of Robert Passikoff’s and Karen Tillson’s session (Brandkeys & Bloomingdales, respectively). They revealed a predictive model for measuring customer loyalty drivers that recognises the importance of emotion in its customer loyalty engagement index. The interactive session challenged the audience’s assumptions about what actually drives loyalty for different store types. Dirk van Kemseke from Levi’s then described the current challenges of the fashion industry from the point of view of an established player in the marketplace, and how observational research and in-store size measurements led to the innovation of Levi’s Curve, a new style of denim jean that is designed to fit the four main female body shapes.

The onward communication of shopper insights was the theme of the paper presented by Stephanie Grootenhuis (Kraft Foods) and Bernhard Treiber (4DShopper) that was nominated for the Best Paper Award. Their challenge is to communicate the shopper insights across Kraft – a huge multi-national company, which by the admission of their own management, requires 2 years to communicate ideas to the very last person in the organisation. They showed how 3D films of the retail environment with voice-overs and card sets for their sales staff help to communicate the shopper insights uncovered in research. The communication of ideas and putting them into context chimed with earlier speakers (Reineke had already referenced David McCandless’ TedTalk on The Beauty of Data Visualisation: http://www.ted.com/talks/david_mccandless_the_beauty_of_data_visualization.html)

Natalie Berg (Planet Retail) gave a compelling closing presentation, which examined the changing dynamic between retailers and brand owners. She identified the reasons for the increased power of retailers; media fragmentation, retail consolidation, growth in quality and prevalence of private label and the greater ability to compare prices (transparency). What can the brand owner do? They should rationalise their ranges and learn to collaborate with retailers, they should focus less on price and instead re-engage shoppers, and they should learn to find other routes to market, Natalie advised.

So what should we take away from this conference? Well, several themes and implications emerged.

  1. Cultural changes and technological advances are rapidly changing the way that we shop, so both retailers and brand owners: you need research that can help you understand this new world, and how and why people shop!
  2. An understanding of the person (or the shopper), their influences, their emotions, their drives and biases, will serve as a springboard for retail innovation. Research that focuses on the emotional experience of the shopper will lead us to think about shopping trips as ‘events’ that can engage and delight.
  3. Both implicit and explicit measures have their place, but best to use behavioural data such as eye-tracking to help to explain what is happening in store, rather than as a replacement for other research approaches. Embrace multi-disciplinary approaches!
  4. Communication of shopper insights across a large brand owner or retailer business is a challenge many of us face, so embrace play and get creative about how to do this best!

All in all, a very stimulating conference and well-worth checking out.

- Orlando Wood -