Our resident retail expert Matt Nitzberg is back from The Shopper Insights & Retail Activation in Chicago where he spoke about the retail revolution.
In this presentation you’ll find:
A current assessment of the new retail environment
How businesses are winning despite new challenges
A quick intro to Nepa’s Consumer Science Platform
We’re happy to share with you this recording of Matt’s presentation from the conference. Please contact us with any questions regarding CX and/or Marketing Optimization.
Path to Purchase – Connecting Dots in the “New Era of Shopping”
May 31, 2018
Sam Richardson
Share this article:
Recently we covered the basics of Path to Purchase in our Q&A with Matt Nitzberg. This week, we’re talking to Lindsay Cowan – who was invited to speak on understanding Omnichannel shoppers at the upcoming ESOMAR Shopper Experience Summit (June 6th, Amsterdam.) Lindsay provides us a great preview of her talk on how leading brands are connecting the dots to generate more sales and build a stronger brand.
First, why is it important for organizations to understand path to purchase?
It’s important because organizations are missing growth opportunities by not understanding the role and value of online and offline touchpoints in this “new era of shopping”.
Companies use path to purchase insights to optimize media investments across all paid, unpaid, earned and owned touchpoints. This understanding is helping companies create integrated communications and campaign strategies for different shopper mindsets.
You mentioned we’ve entered a “new era of shopping.” How do you see new consumer behaviors creating new opportunities for marketers that understand path to purchase?
Marketers that see beyond the generic, one-size fits all stats we hear over and over again like “70% of all decisions are made before the arriving at shelf,” are winning the battle to convert new shoppers at different points along the Path to Purchase. Consumers are increasingly taking non-linear journeys to buy products, smart marketers that connect these dots across online and offline channels will better understand how touchpoints trigger or influence action at different stages of the journey. The opportunity then is for marketers to invest more effectively to attract new shoppers, get on the shopping list, optimize conversion and increase penetration.
In the new era of shopping what are some of the new KPIs marketers should be watching?
We focus on developing “touchpoint effectiveness” rankings so that investment and focus can be prioritized to the right areas to create optimum shopper conversion. I believe that any approach should isolate why, where, when and how shoppers are converting or not converting – and measure the role of each touchpoint individually, as well as in combination with other touchpoints. To determine this, we track the impact of all offline or online interactions to understand which ones influence and which ones convert.
In your presentation you’ll be talking about discovering hotspots and opportunities after diagnosing path to purchase data. Do you have any examples of “Ah Hah!” moments when Nepa helped a client improve their strategy?
Being that the path to purchase is unique for each category, each project we’ve done has several “ah hah” moments. One key area is to understand how shoppers research before buying…..even in a low engagement, high penetration category. Interestingly this is not just true for categories in developed markets, but also for emerging markets. Even where the majority of purchases are still made in store in these markets, shoppers are still researching and using offline touchpoints as vital influencers in their decision making. So, the “Ah Hah” moments have come when a client understand specifically which touchpoints they need to target to which customers and when.
A specific insight that I will share in Amsterdam is that a brand that operated on the traditional belief that 70% of consumers had made their decision before shelf identified that only about 45% had fully planned their purchase – we helped them understand what type of shoppers could be influenced. In a category where influencing just 5% of these undecided shoppers to make a category purchase equals over 3 million pounds per month, this knowledge was a true game changer.
What’s the most important take away from your presentation that you want to emphasize?
To win in this “new era of shopping” brands must master the path to purchase by understanding the effectiveness of every touchpoint, both online and offline, and as part of an interconnected shopper path.
And finally, for those of us that will not be in Amsterdam, how can we learn more?
Immediately, you can pop over to blog posts by colleagues, Robert Beatus and Matt Nitzberg, that provide additional perspective on the challenges marketers face amidst changing buyer journeys. After, the presentation in Amsterdam, I will be hosting a webinar with the same content – and you can register your interest in that here. And, for those that are very eager to understand their consumers purchase journey, contact me here.
This has been a real pleasure, Sean. I’m excited to create the webinar for all who are interested.
Thanks, Lindsay – we really appreciate the insight. Have a great time in Amsterdam – it sounds like the ESOMAR audience is in store for a really insightful presentation.
Important Customer Experience Learnings From The CXPA Insight Exchange
May 22, 2018
Sam Richardson
Share this article:
It’s been two weeks since we’ve returned from New Orleans where we connected with over 300 other customer experience professionals at the 2018 CXPA Insight Exchange. The overarching theme during this two day event was to create business value – something that we really relate to at Nepa.
A keynote delivered by Graham Tuttom from Comcast was a great start to the two day immersion into CX. He is no stranger to these events and his experience in CX is impressive. His philosophy is that organizations should think of CX as their best product. According to him, the holy grail of CX is having all business units behave as a team and employees that are empowered to empathize with customers. This makes CX part of the company culture and employees feel like owners. At Nepa we agree that our mission as CX professionals is to create tools that provide information and opportunities for empowerment. For the majority of the organization, CX is a strange and complex animal, it’s our job to make it more approachable with better tools and technology.
Another great talk by Bruce Temkin of Temkin Group, was a state of the union address for the CX Industry. Titled Past, Present, Future of CX(PA) he expounded where the CX profession is heading and stressed four principles for making CXPA grow within a well managed organization:
● Focus on people
● Connect CX to business and brand
● Stay positive and passionate
● Support our collective community
His main point was that we as CX professionals have a great opportunity to take our rightful place at the C-level discussions, but in order to achieve that goal we need to continue to push our industry forward by following the four principles.
If you were at CXPA to meet new partners, you were in the right spot. It was a who’s who of vendors providing a broad array of services from CX design to Customer Service solutions, to CX feedback platforms. It was great to see many complementary solutions that we use as inputs in our CX analytics applications. If you felt a little overwhelmed by the number of partners, drop us a line – we’ve worked with many and are happy to share our experiences.
The most valuable takeaways came from the opportunities we had to exchange ideas with other CX professionals during shorter round table discussions and one-to-ones. In smaller groups, we explored a diverse range of subjects from creating a CX cultural change to the growth trends in the industry to methods on how to calculate ROI on CX investments. In discussions with our fellow CX professionals, we sense a budding optimism that organizations are realizing how important CX is for future business success, but with attention comes expectations.
A CX professional needs a diverse set of skills: change management, business development, analytics, technology, story telling, financial, design etc…the list goes on. We need to understand how to improve the experience and drive business efficiently. Are CX professionals the birth grounds for future CEO’s?
We can talk CX all day. Have a question? Email us at sales.us@nepa.com.
Shopper Marketing expert Matt Nitzberg recently joined Nepa as the Chief Client Officer of Nepa US. Matt brings a wealth of global experience helping marketers make better decisions. To help understand the dramatic changes in shoppers’ journey to buy products and services, we sat down with Matt for a short Q&A about the evolution of the path to purchase. Read on for Matt’s timely observations, encouragement, and watch-outs for brands that want to master the path to purchase.
Let’s start with the basics: What is the “path to purchase?”
“Path to purchase” (P2P) describes the process shoppers execute and experience as they move toward a buying decision. It includes the active efforts of shoppers (such as researching a product or downloading coupons) as well as their passive experiences (such as seeing advertising when watching online videos).
What’s changing in the P2P?
I’ll mention three broad changes that are relevant for brands.
New expectations: When I can click a few images and have items delivered to my car the same day, it reframes what it means to “go shopping,” doesn’t it? Amazon and other customer-centric organizations are creating new expectations for personalization, availability, ease, and fulfillment.
New influences: The range of touchpoints shoppers can seek or experience is expanding through new media options, platforms, apps, IoT interactions, and self-guided research. Of course, individual influences have interactive aspects as well, so each new touchpoint creates multiple new combinations. We recently completed a category project which measured the impact of more than 50 online and offline touchpoints and many sets of combinations.
New, nimble competition: New, direct-to-consumer brands and business models (such as the various online marketplaces, subscription services and clubs) are creating new options for shoppers.
What complications does that create for brands?
The evolving path to purchase creates complications for brands on two fronts:
With shoppers: Besides choosing a category and brand, shoppers have many options regarding the buying and fulfillment process. This can challenge both mass and niche brands, unless they adjust their strategies. For example, in laundry detergents, both Tide and Seventh Generation have achieved higher market shares in ecommerce than in brick-and-mortar stores.
Internally: Brands have always faced upward pressure on growth, downward pressure on costs, and challenges around marketing effectiveness. As the P2P becomes more complex, with more touchpoints and influences out of a brand’s direct control, it’s become even more challenging to connect cause and effect and operate with clarity and confidence.
What additional changes should brands expect in the next 2 – 3 years?
Brands will continue to experience an incredible amount of change in the path to purchase ahead. Some of the main areas to watch-out for are:
Rising shopper expectations: Now that shoppers have enjoyed years of continuously improving shopping experiences, ongoing progress is expected. Standing still will be seen as moving backward, and the rate of change will continue to accelerate.
Increased competition from retailers: Retailers have first-party data, the physical or virtual real estate, their own brands, control over price, and increasingly sophisticated analytical and marketing capabilities. They’ll look to leverage these advantages and increase market share and margins for their own brands. Amazon is investing in its own brands, and shoppers are investing time in Amazon: 55% of online product searches start on Amazon.
Increased automation in shopping: The rise of voice-first assistants and AI will shift the decision-making locus even further from the real or virtual shelf. Traditional brand preferences may be further cemented or constantly challenged, based on the instructions given to digital assistants and on their sophistication. How will you convince a robot to put your brand on the shopping list?
Improved effectiveness: The pressure to tie all activities and touchpoints – individually and interactively – to their influence on purchase decisions will increase, as organizations look to offset many of the challenges mentioned above through deeper shopper understanding and more effective strategies and tactics.
Thanks Matt! Any last thoughts to share?
This is a complex and fast-changing topic. We’d be glad to get any follow questions about mastering the path to purchase at sales.us@nepa.com.
If you’ve lost sleep wondering how to make your radio advertisements great and missed the recent MTG breakfast seminar (perhaps due to the lost sleep), we’ve compiled three keys to make great radio advertising.
This isn’t fluff – Nepa and MTG radio have analyzed over 170 radio ads on 70 dimensions each to determine what makes a great radio ad.
This data was built over several years of collecting consumer reaction to advertising campaigns. By applying advanced modeling techniques, we’re able to determine what factors drive better advertising effectiveness and which don’t.
Let’s start with what doesn’t work – as this might be a little controversial – amusing or humoring people is not a straight path to effective radio advertising. That’s not to say that amusing people is bad, but if it’s your top priority – you are likely on the wrong track.
When we look at the data, the best way for marketers to increase overall ad performance in radio is to focus on three stages of the campaign ladder – observation, sender recall, and message recall.
And here are some tips on how to optimize each:
Observation – add a known song to create stopping power that grabs the listeners attention.
Sender recall – Don’t be shy. Rather, clearly say who’s sending the message – this is most effectively done by adding a sound logo and clearly mention your brand name as early in the ad as possible.
Message recall – Don’t stop at your brand name – be sure to clearly mention your product or service.
To take your radio ad to the next level, remember the basics of advertising and don’t get lost in trying to amuse the audience.
Mastering your radio creative is a great start to effective marketing – but marketing today requires optimization of creative and spend across a growing number of channels.
Common mistakes that will make your radio ad flop!
May 17, 2018
Sam Richardson
Share this article:
Nepa and MTG radio recently analyzed over 170 radio ads on 70 dimensions each to determine what makes, or breaks, a radio ad. In this post, we give you three clear tips on how to avoid creating a radio ad that makes for difficult conversations with your boss. When you’re done, be sure to pop over to our post on what makes a great radio ad.
You might find some of these tips surprising and contrary to the what you’ve read in other advertising discussions. For that reason, we think it’s especially important to note that this is not a mere set of opinions, but a list that is grounded in hard data and facts. Nepa and MTG radio have developed a large database of customer perceptions to radio advertisements. Nepa has applied advanced modeling techniques to determine what factors drive better advertising effectiveness and which don’t.
Here are some common mistakes that lead to radio ad flops:
Trying too hard to amuse the audience – Radio listeners tuned out of advertisements that included a role play, act or dialogue in the ad.
Too many details and information – The ads that included the most detail and information were also the least successful overall performers.
These two mistakes often go hand in hand – ads that include a role-play, act or dialogue contained too much information. When these mistakes are combined in one ad, it leaves consumers very confused and ultimately disliking the radio ad.
So, what to do instead? Keep it crisp and clear and most important of all, let the listener know who you are as early in the ad as possible.
Mastering your radio creative is a great start to effective marketing – but marketing today requires optimization of creative and spend across a growing number of channels.
As Customer Experience (CX) professionals gather in New Orleans for the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA) 2018 Insight Exchange, I’m still reflecting on key themes from the recent CX Next 2018 conference in Boston. This exclusive event, which Nepa was honored to Chair, featured heavyweight CX thought leaders and a great roster of practitioners. Here’s what still resonating two weeks later:
Empathy is the bedrock of Customer Experience
Understanding and embracing customers’ needs and their context is the basis for delivering great experiences. Katherine Deschene of Steward Healthcare preaches that hospital staff must first connect with the patient before completing the task. Marijke Maartense from Philips Healthcare doubled-down on this point with an insightful talk about how to keep it human amidst a sea of technology and digitization.
CX professionals have an obligation to help every person in the organization understand their customers and their context. CX Author & Thought Leader, Kerry Bodine, introduced a bold vision for moving from orchestrated experiences to emergent experiences, guided more by simple principles or rules than a detailed playbook. Kerry borrows the concept from emergent properties in the natural order, best exemplified by the beautiful formations of starling flocks. Every employee in your company should act as individual starlings do – following a simple set of shared rules – to create beautiful customer experiences. Companies that are already doing this, like Zappos.com and Southwest Airlines, are already reaping the customer retention benefits.
Delivering on Customer Experience is heavy lifting
While empathizing with customers and having a vision for better experiences is the starting point, there is a lot of nuts-and-bolts work behind the scenes to make improvements a reality.
Dave Hodgman, Digital Transformation Strategist at Comcast, shared what goes into meeting his team’s goal of having customers spend less time on routine service requests (like paying a bill or changing a plan). Enabling new experiences for customers requires applying a deep understanding of available tools, data management systems, and corporate policies to customer needs. And, creating new experiences is not enough – CX professionals need to drive the customer adoption of new service methods. This work requires collaboration across many groups at Comcast, and without it, dreams of better experiences would not become reality.
Customer Experience Professionals need to learn a new language
The standard measurements for Customer Experience success – C-SAT, NPS, Customer Effort Score – are no longer sufficient to gain the commitment of executives. The essential metric of business is money, and we must point to financial results – including increased revenue and decreased costs – to earn the investment required to deliver better customer experiences.
Diane Magers, CXPA CEO, hammered this point in “Building and Executing a CX Strategy in an ROI Driven World”, a workshop on mapping techniques that lead you to the business value of a strategy. Diane cited an example of a CX professional who delivered on their goal of improving NPS. The program was then closed, in favor of other investments that visibly demonstrated cost savings and/or increased revenue.
The good news for CX professionals is there are many opportunities to demonstrate how their strategies and programs are driving bottom line results. There are also new ways to translate your CX measurements into financial values – a topic that I spoke on in my “Level up Your CX Measurement” presentation. The key is to link each aspect of customers’ experience to its financial impact on company financials, which both validates the current impact and enables further optimization. It’s all available in our Cultivating Customer Experience Measurement eBook.
I’d like to thank Knect365 for organizing this great event and for asking Nepa to chair this gathering of CX professionals. Look forward to next year!
Welcome to an exclusive opportunity to “Level Up your Customer Experience”. It´s a free CX seminar that is being held in Stockholm March 20th and then in Helsinki March 22nd.
This event promise to inspire CX professionals with ways to improve CX Insight programs – whether just starting out or looking to revamp a long standing program. Don´t miss out on this opportunity to learn and network with other CX professionals.
Whether you will join us in Stockholm or Helsinki, you will personally meet and listen to our keynote speaker Luke Williams, New York Times Best Selling Author of “The Wallet Allocation Rule”.
Keynote speakers in Stockholm:
Luke Williams, New York Times Best Selling Author of “The Wallet allocation Rule”.
Niclas Öhman, Founder of Stockholm School of Economics Retail program.
More to come…
Keynote speakers in Helsinki:
Luke Williams, New York Times Best Selling Author of “The Wallet allocation Rule”.
Kati Sulin, Chief Digital Officer at DNA.
Kalle Peltola, Director, Marketing & Sales at Finnkino.
Retail continues to be at a tipping point with shoppers that are drastically different than even 3 years ago, and still many retailers are using a model that – at times – is over 50 years old.
Modern retail as we know it started with using scale to deliver a huge amount of goods to the consumers at a radically lower price. These retailers thrived on being experts a running retail at scale, efficient purchasing, logistics and the large outlets that consumer went to in order to get the low-priced goods. This led to the rise of the malls and super stores, with Walmart leading the way.
But today’s retailing has shifted with the rise of technology. Amazon launching smart shopping, the e-tailer being able to offer a depth and breadth of assortment unheard of for a traditional retailer.
Which brings us to the question – are retailers ready for 2018?
We keep hearing the same stories over and over again. Poor service, store closings, empty shopping malls. In 2017, we saw a record number of store closures, nearly 3 times the number in 2016, and according to many this trend will increase in 2018.
Is the Brick & Mortar retail business destined to completely fail?
For many years, stores have had the strategy of being building more locations to be “more convenient”, but there are others that now compete on convenience instead of just location – which is what “more stores” really means.
What’s interesting is the stores that are shutting their doors – we see highly specialized stores like Radio Shack and Payless closing, along with many clothing retailers. But while we talk about all these locations closing, there are some brands that are expanding drastically to the tune of over 4K+ stores opening.
When we look at these, we see Value, Price, Convenience and EXPERIENCE (O´Reilly Auto might not be a store many of us have gone into, but everyone that works there has experience of cars and are really passionate about what they do – not someone that just applied for a job).
So, if scale and efficiency was the way for the 20th century retailer, focus and specialization will be the 21st century’s winning recipe. Because, in today’s rapidly changing competitive environment you have to choose what your competitive edge will be, is it:
Convenience
Assortment
Low price
Experience
We argue that it is very hard to choose all. There are no right or wrong choices, you just have to make one and then commit to it 100%.
What does this mean for the brick & mortar retailing?
Looking at the inherent strength on the physical world compared to that of on-line world: the person to person interaction gives brick & mortar a strategic advantage in the area of customer experience (CX). All the other, and on-line is as good or better equipped as Brick and mortar. This said, you can be very successful when running a brick & mortar 2018 with other strategies than Customer experience. Some examples: Price (Lidl, Dollar general), Assortment (Victoria Secret) and Convenience (7-eleven).
However, regardless of your chosen strategy, a company that wants to evolve and prosper must be equipped to handle rapid change in customer preference and behavior as new technology is introduced to the market, and make no mistake, the rate of change will increase. Things such as Robots and machine learning are already changing the way we do business, but has yet to really show its true potential in the off-line world of retailing.
The CX strategy – a winning path for retailers
Unless you’re going to drastically change what you sell or have plans to become a discounter, there is one approach that really can change the way your customers view your business without “confusing them”, it’s called the CX strategy, or just plain CX. The CX strategy takes time to implement and the rewards might take some time to collect, but when you do excel in customer experience you enjoy high margins, fiercely loyal customers and organic growth.
In order to be really CX centric, you need to do things on a strategic, tactical and operational level. One or two alone will not suffice. So, what do we mean by strategic, tactical and operational level?
Strategic – the foundation
Even though you need to work on the CX strategy on all levels, it starts at the top. There are three major pillars that needs to be in place to hold up the CX strategy:
Top management must genuinely believe in the CX strategy, it can’t just be something that they say and put in the annual report. It must be something that they live, breath and sleep.
You must supply the organization with the right tools to understand the customer (HR, customer service, customer feedback systems etc.).
Finally, it must be a long-term effort. The organization must be resilient. A successful CX strategy takes time to implement all the way to the front lines.
Tactics – the bridge
There are three major areas that you as an organization must ensure on a tactical level to be a truly customer centric company:
Empower the employees (link to my “magical experience” blog post)
Think local! With such a diverse market place, you should give command to the people on the ground. Provide them with local intelligence in terms of: where are we winning/loosing, which are our strongest local competitors etc. Then let the local manager make the judgement call.
Ensure that the HR process really embeds customer focus in its hiring and development programs. Award people skills and genuine customer interest. Create champions and good examples.
Operations – The moment of truth
The customer centric strategy comes down to the personal interactions between your business and your customers, the moment of truth. These are directly or indirectly always the result of your employees on the floor. If you give the right set of tools, and if they have the right mindset, you will be hard to stop in your market place. This has been proven again and again.
However, a word of caution: Never relax, always use data to monitor your customers, competitors, your business, stores and managers, because you can always improve and aggressive competitors are just around the corner. How can you ensure that? Through a comprehensive analytics platform!
Analytics at the heart of your CX initiative
Although there are many important tools that you must have to implement a CX strategy successfully, we at Nepa believe that the analytics platform should be at the heart. With analytics you can have the customer centricity of the old convenience store, but at scale! But to have an analytics platform that can achieve that, you must use a platform that merges 3 dimensions of data:
behavior (x),
sentiment (y) and
financial ($).
Let’s go a little deeper into each of the necessary data sets:
Behavioral data (x-data)
The behavioral data is basically the existing BIG data stream within the company. It looks at the patterns and build forecast models based on historical behavior. It will detect anomalies and be able to predict changes.
The shopper (y-data)
An even better analytics platform will enable you to understand the shopper in the context of their behavior, often referred to as the Y, i.e. you need to understand why the customer is behaving the way it is in order to be able to predict how it might impact your business.
Financial impact ($-data)
And finally, a true CX analytics platform is tying that behavioral data and shopper insights into top and bottom line results. Enabling you to successfully predict where to invest you hard earned dollars to get the best possible return, this based on your chosen strategy.
An analytics platform implemented in the right way will act as a catalyst for many of the key elements for a successful business. It will:
Show to top management how shopper drives their business.
Provide local managers with local, tactical information.
Build stories that resonates emotionally in all employees.
Keep tabs on changes in customer behavior and how those impact your business.
A true CX analytics platform will be the catalyst for change that you need. Let us discuss how to evolve your analytical tools for your CX platform to be a true catalyst…! Please don’t hesitate to contact us.
If you want to listen to our webinar that goes more in-depth into retail trends, and why customer experience is really the difference in competing in 2018. Here is the link .
Erik Enecker Chief Product Officer at Nepa USA & COO Global Product at Nepa
Oriflame choose Nepa as insight partner for global brand research. There is a common denominator among successful brands. They all know how to get their brand to really deliver. Oriflame has chosen Nepa to help them continuously track and explain trends and the wills and actions of their customers and competitors in 10 countries.
“We are proud to be the supplier for this strategic project. Oriflame is a strong brand and we feel confident that our collaboration will help Oriflame gain actionable insights to improve the brand position even further”, says Johan Rinaldo, Commercial Director at Nepa.
Nepa will conduct brand tracking for Oriflame in Mexico, Colombia, Indonesia, India, China, Turkey, Portugal, Poland, Morocco and Russia. Countries with widely varying market conditions. Research is done among both end consumers and Oriflame sales consultants. The main purpose is to gain insights about Oriflame brand position and the development over time.
“We set target to countries on performances according to our global strategic directions. Nepa will help us to understand our brand position in detail and how to find the formula for market success. We chose Nepa as partner because of their experience of global projects and innovative solutions”, says Frédérique Jacqmart, Consumer Insight Manager at Oriflame.