Pocketbooks across the country are feeling a bit squeezed. Personal financial counselors tout the importance of “spending wisely” – thinking about what you really must spend on and cutting out unnecessary extras. This advice applies equally to personal finances and research function budgeting. By figuring out what research projects are strategically important, shopper insights can stretch a small budget to have big impact.

ConAgra Foods’ shopper insights department approached the research agenda setting process by implementing a retailer-manufacturer Co-Business Planning process which delivers specific actionable research findings to a wide variety of retailer partners.

Here are the steps they take:

1. Figure out what they want: Through a series of meetings, ConAgra Foods develops an understanding of the strategic priorities of its key retail partners, and associated research needs.
2. Look for overlaps with what you want: Research interests are then tested against internal capacity, and projects are selected based on areas where retailer interests overlap with ConAgra’s strategic priorities.
3. Look for overlaps in what they want: When the planning process shows that multiple retailers are looking for similar information, work is conducted as foundational research than can be repackaged for multiple retailers.

By developing customer learning plans in conjunction with retailers and internal business partners, shopper insights at ConAgra Foods is able to determine and produce insights and actionable recommendations that retail partners will be interested and engaged in.   

Additional information about ConAgra’s Co-Business Planning process is available in our new whitepaper, Boosting the Impact of Shopper Insights.

The same agenda setting principles can be applied by consumer insights teams – ConAgra’s Customer Learning Plan process is a shopper insights-specific example of a tested consumer insights learning process. Johnson and Johnson’s Strategy-Driven learning agenda process to identify company-level known’s and unknowns is similar in its structure and approach.

Related blogs:

• Setting Up a Shopper Insights Shop
• Santa Won’t Do Your Insight-Shopping for You

Shopping is something we all do every day. Be it picking up a newspaper on the way to work, buying groceries for the week, or investing in a new computer, regular purchases are so integral to everyday living that we may often forget just how important and frequent shopping is. But, shopper insights functions haven’t forgotten! These functions serve as the research function within a consumer goods company that seeks to better understand shopping behavior and work with retailers to develop and implement ideas to improve sales. And with all the shopping we are doing, they are very busy!

Shopper Insights functions have responsibilities that are different from consumer/brand insights teams:

1. Figure out what the shoppers are doing and thinking!

• Shopper insights teams seek to understand the shopping behavior of a retail partner’s consumers at the shelf, store, and sometimes category levels. 

2. Deliver insights to retailer

• Shopper insights teams work closely with Category Management, Sales, and sometimes Shopper Marketing to produce insights designed to attract the interest of retail partners.

3. Work to share knowledge and findings with the brand/consumer insights function and the broader business

• Insights about how consumers act in a store setting can impact the internal business partners traditionally served by consumer insights functions.

Leading shopper insights departments are developing new organizational structures and processes to help them achieve all of these goals. A recent Market Research Executive Board paper describes two different ways companies organized to achieve these same goals:

• ConAgra Foods developed an organizational structure to facilitate for cross-functional collaboration and developed processes for research sharing
• Hershey’ s developed an organizational structure to facilitate knowledge sharing and developed processes for cross-functional collaboration

Details about how these companies set up their Shopper Insights functions are available in our new whitepaper, Boosting the Impact of Shopper Insights.

Companies—particularly retailers—talk a big game about customer focus.  And in our heart of hearts, Research thinks this is right: we are the internal champions of the customer, the voice of conscience that tries to ensure customer focus throughout all business activities.

But, too often, we have trouble transitioning from “flash-in-the-pan” customer focus efforts to embedding that focus at the center of the enterprise.  It’s easy to get executive buy-in for one-off customer focus campaigns over and over again, but unless we align customer needs to strategic priorities can we really say that customer insight is at the heart of our business?

In an effort to thoroughly embed consumer focus, Tesco centralized key customer information sources and analytical disciplines into a single Customer-Insights Team that identifies key customer opportunities for strategic focus in the coming year.  In the early 1990s the UK-based grocery retailer faced declining profit margins, intensifying competition, and some evidence of customer dissatisfaction.  By centralizing its ongoing consumer focus the store reversed its slide and regained their place as the UK’s dominant grocery chain.

Tesco brought together critical customer information by uniting its data analysis, market research, and store location teams with its future assessment specialist.  Of course, consolidating these folks on paper does not a cohesive unit make.  So the Head of the Customer-Insight team instituted the following team building tactics:

1.  Create a cross-discipline editorial team with the heads of each sub-team

2.  Utilize physical co-location to reduce silo mentalities

3.  Staff larger project jointly

4.  Share all project objectives across sub-teams to encourage contribution

The primary purpose of the integrated Customer-Insight Team is to feed Tesco’s annual customer planning process.  As a result, the Team has enormous influence on the strategic priorities of the firm for each coming year.  Read more about Tesco’s Customer-Insight Team in the full case profile.  And for more on integrating analytics with other research teams check out our recent blog and whitepaper on the topic.

This weeks guest blog entry comes from Eileen Scott, Marketing Research Manager at Vanguard. Vanguard’s Client Day was a finalist in the 2010 MREB Leadership Awards.

Vanguard senior leaders receive vast amounts of information from departments across the entire company of more than 10,000 crew members. The challenge for Client Insight is to make sure our insights are heard. Our mission is for the Senior Leadership Team to be able to take action on what they know about their clients in order to make the client experience better. Vanguard has always had a “client first” culture.

In Vanguard’s “Pledge to Clients”, Bill McNabb, CEO, promises that Vanguard will “Adapt, evolve, and continuously improve, because you (our clients) should expect excellence in all that we do.”  The Client Insight group exists for this reason: to assist the company to deliver on this promise.   “Client Day” was designed to highlight Client Insights’ vast client knowledge in compelling ways to our Senior Management as well as other key leaders across the company.

The guided tour consisted of small groups who were led through four stations:

1)  A visual introduction showcasing the role of the Client Insight team, how we integrate to answer business questions, and the types of questions we answer.

2) Knowledge about our Retail clients through an interactive game.

3) Recent strategic insights from Institutional and an interactive, multi-step event to highlight a new prospect targeting tool.

4)  A wrap-up video of our own internal clients and their experience with the Client Insight team and Market Research/VOC.

In addition to the increased awareness and exposure the day brought to Client Insight, another benefit was crew development. The event’s fun and interactive format required many involved to step out of their comfort zones both in format and delivery of insights. Additionally, it required intense communication and coordination with a broad array of groups within our company to ensure the event, as well as the many visual elements, were top-notch and professional.

Following Client Day, the Senior Leadership Team, specifically Vanguard’s CEO, Bill McNabb, asked for a monthly “Client Insight Bulletin”, to ensure that key analysis and insight reached him directly and in a timely manner. This was instituted the following month. The feedback from this bulletin has been extremely positive and is “exactly what the Senior Team was looking for.”

In addition to the response from Senior Leaders, attendance at the Client Day Expo exceeded expectations by 67%. We also received requests to conduct it annually, or “take it on the road” to deliver to specific groups within our organization.

Our guest blog this week comes from an earlier post by Josh Kimball from Iconoculture, a sister program of the Market Research Executive Board discussing a new macrotrend of people reprioritizing what they buy.

’Tis the season of buy, buy, buy. But more and more people are asking Why, why, why? It’s in trying to answer this question — what’s the why behind the buy? — that Iconoculture recently launched a new macrotrend, one we call Mindful Matters. The idea underpinning this macrotrend is that people are mindfully re-prioritizing what they buy, who they do business with and even how they live. They’re adding “simplicity” and “manageability” to their personal wishlists instead of iPods or flatscreen TVs.

For Iconoculture, macrotrends are a way of talking about why people make the decisions they make. And expressions of Mindful Matters play out differently depending on one’s cohort. In Iconoculture’s annual quantitative values survey, we saw that Boomers especially had embraced simplicity: They identified with the top end of the simplicity scale, defined as “I strive to live a simple and uncluttered life,” more than any other demographic group did (Wave 1, 2010).

Of course, slower living isn’t a phenomenon that’s only about Boomers. As we’ve seen in such observations as the Great American Apparel Diet, where people commit to abstaining from buying clothes for a year, Millennials have their own way of more closely considering their purchases. Nor is the idea nation-specific. We’re tracking similar examples around the globe.

For many people feeling the pull of Mindful Matters, this marks the beginning of a more considered, maybe slower life. But for marketers, that shift in people’s values means change is afoot — and it’s happening fast.

By Anthony Bell

A recent Bloomberg article outlines the outlook for retailers during the holiday shopping season. Early U.S. retail results from the Thanksgiving weekend represent modest improvement over 2009; however, the headline 0.3% increase many not reflect the full story. Some consumers have pulled forward purchases into early November, while others are delaying purchases, waiting for deeper discounts later in the Holiday season.

MREB View: Companies that spot and react first to changing customer economics will fare better than competitors in the recovery. Traditional forecasting techniques do not work in periods of elevated uncertainty. MREB’s colleagues in Finance and Strategy urge their executives to ditch historical trends in favor of “forecast through their customers’ eyes”, identifying structural shifts in customer behavior, and ensuring that investments proposals and the resource plan reflect the altered state.  Customer-grounded understanding of market change drivers improves the accuracy of scenario probabilities.

MREB Members, learn how Amalfi Company prioritizes potential scenarios’ likelihood based on customer views to ground internal discussions around probabilities in market dynamics rather than internal perceptions.

Guest blogger Tim Henderson is Senior Director, Matures and Retail, at Iconoculture, a sister program of the Market Research Executive Board. 

Black Friday is nigh, but retailers hoping for big holiday gift sales may unwrap a turkey. Part of the reason: gift shoppers increasingly shop out of season, meaning Santa’s elves are busy buying gifts year-round rather than waiting for the traditional November-December months.

Shopping out of season is a trend highlighted by respondents to Iconoculture’s holiday shopping survey of IconoCommunities^SM members. Typical of the responses:

It just makes more sense financially – why restrict yourself to shopping during the holiday season when there are so many other opportunities to save money throughout the rest of the year? In fact, I make a huge effort to AVOID gift shopping during the holiday season because the stores are so much more chaotic and congested.

- IconoCommunities^SM participant Michelle, Gen X female, suburban New Jersey, 9.20.10

The bad news is that this trend appears to be here to stay.  The good news: Savvy merchants have taken note of this shift in shopping behaviors and responded with more creative marketing tactics, like this year’s “Christmas in July” promos from brands like Target, Toys R Us and Sears. Read More »