Shopper Marketing

These days, there is lot of buzz on shopper marketing. However,the are wide range of perspectives to this discipline of marketing. But at fundamental level, shopper marketing deals with gaining insights of a shopper. It tries to understand what makes a consumer shop at a particular store, what makes him navigate in a particular manner at the store, what makes him buy a particular brand and so on. The emergence of large retailers and their power has made this Shopper Marketing possible.

Shoppers can be broadly classified into recreational shoppers, planned list shoppers, impulse buyers, and planned item shoppers. A customer or a consumer can switch among the above classification of shoppers on the basis of his need, state of mind etc. So, shopper marketing aims to target a particular category of shopper and not on type of consumers.

Spare a minute and think about various retailers in the country. You will spot that retailers target particular category of shoppers. Retailer MORE, mainly targets Planned List and Planned Item shoppers, but Big Bazaar targets all the above category of shoppers.

Shopper marketing covers other dimensions such as the merchandising initiatives, enhancing the shopping experience etc. It deals with providing the right assortment of “products and services” depending on the target shopper group, thus increasing the business.

However Shopper Marketing is not a replacement for Consumer Marketing. In fact, there is a very thin line of difference between the two. Also, I was not able to identify the advantages of shopper marketing, but not now after I came across this statement “It is difficult to reach Consumers”.