You have nothing to lose but your reins

Surely everyone in CPG knows that the time has finally come to empower your Shopper Ninjas with exactly what they need to make a material difference to your business’s sales? That means providing adequate budget, people, and space to breathe; and if that means taking some of those things from their consumer colleagues then so be it.

But why should we? That’s just now how the world works, is it?

It needs to be. The balance of power has shifted so irrevocably between brand and retail, that it really is time to stop banging the big brand broadcast drum, and think properly about genuine engagement along the Path to Purchase.

It is time to work properly with your retail partners, climb down from the Ivory Tower, and accept a huge dollop of reality source smothered all over your ‘brand health’ (and don’t let ‘digital or traditional’ be a distraction. Today’s shoppers don’t delineate a difference so neither should you).

To do this you need to properly understand a few things: Triggers & Barriers; the seamless interaction of traditional and digital engagement mechanisms; the omnichannel Path to Purchase; the need to accept that for a lot of brands loyalty now just means securing that single repeat purchase.

Brands are living and dying more than ever before at the Point of Purchase. Sadly too many businesses still only pull the promotion lever to try and correct this. The solution is in your hands: start taking shopper seriously.

The need for this seismic Shopper shift has been bubbling away in the shadows for some time. It has finally become endemic. The only things holding back the long overdue r/evolution in your business are its legacy behaviour and thinking. Every successful business today is proudly ‘customer {shopper} obsessed’. It is time to step into the light.

by Marc Warburton – Founder of Daedal

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Taken from the 2019 Expert Insights On Retail Marketing Guide. Tap into the mindsets of practitioners and experts alike and see what they have to say about the state of retail.