A new approach to mapping the shopper journey can drive more meaningful integration between brand and shopper marketing, and ensure brand equity translates into sales more effectively. We reveal the four principles that can connect your marketing strategy to what really drives buying decisions.

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Bridging the divide between brand and shopper marketing
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Bridging the divide between brand and shopper marketing
Time and time again brands see their
hard-won place in consumer hearts and
minds failing.

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Bridging the divide between brand and shopper marketing
Sam Curtis
TNS’s Global Director, Shopper
UK
Nothing exerts so great an influence on shoppers’
choices as brand equity; the way a shopper feels
about a brand and his or her existing relationship
with it. And yet time and time again brands see their
hard-won place in consumer hearts and minds failing
to translate into strong sales performance.
The challenge of integrating different elements of
marketing activity is consistently listed by CMOs as
one of their biggest concerns. And nowhere is the
challenge greater than when it comes to bringing
brand and shopper marketing together.
Brand and shopper marketing have traditionally
existed in silos, with their own techniques, forms
of knowledge, objectives and KPIs. One has a
natural alignment with sales, leveraging an in-depth
understanding of the retail environment and how
to activate within it; the other, a full understanding
of brands and how to build and maintain them.
One gets criticised for not understanding retailers;
the other for not understanding consumers. When
marketing is set up this way, it’s easy to see why a
disconnect so frequently exists between people’s
experience of brands as consumers (watching ads,
engaging on social media, consuming content) and
their experience of them as shoppers, when they
actually try to buy their products. This disconnect
has become more noticeable as the lines between
consumers and shoppers have blurred.
Why shopper marketers need to start
talking brand
For a long time, this disconnect didn’t seem to
matter – and it certainly didn’t outweigh the value
of specialist skills within the brand and shopper
marketing teams. Now though, the balance is shifting
– and the requirement to connect brand and shopper
marketing is becoming increasingly urgent. Saturated
categories, economic slowdown, and smaller stores
with fewer products on shelves are all far less
forgiving of poor execution; and they make it vital to
carry brand advantage into the shopper environment.
It’s not just about tougher trading conditions.
Consumers themselves are tearing up the traditional
concept of the purchase journey on which the
division between brand and shopper marketing
is often based. eCommerce today is both a brand
engagement and a shopping environment; mobile
a potential purchasing tool as well as a marketing
channel. Stores themselves are a brand-building
space, not just a sales-oriented one. Gone are the
days when we could decide whether somebody
fell within the remit of the brand or shopper
marketing team based solely on which environment
they were in.
Integrating different
elements of marketing
activity is consistently
listed by CMOs as one of
their biggest challenges.

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Bridging the divide between brand and shopper marketing
Divided by a common language
CMOs haven’t ignored this issue – or its urgency.
They’ve brought brand and shopper marketing
teams together; they’ve asked them to develop
shared marketing plans and strategies. However,
all of this has limited impact when brand and
shopper remain divided by a common language –
when they talk about the same objectives but use
fundamentally different metrics and measures to
manage them. Research may not be responsible
for the gap that exists between brand and shopper
marketing – but by helping to develop a common,
connected view of the journey from consumer to
shopper, it can certainly help to bring them together.
The four-point playbook for better
integrated marketing
We compiled data from more than 30 studies to
provide a unique view of how shopper behaviour
is evolving – and how more meaningful integration
between brand and shopper can address a fluid
and connected shopper journey. In particular, we’ve
identified four changes to shopper marketing
research that can set any brand on the way to a
more effective, integrated approach:
We’ve identified four changes to shopper marketing
research that can set any brand on the way to a
more effective, integrated approach.

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Bridging the divide between brand and shopper marketing
1. Take brand equity more seriously in shopper
marketing research
Shopper marketers are trained to think in terms
of missions and occasions as the primary drivers
of shopping behaviour, but in doing so they are
overlooking what our research confirms as the
dominant driver of purchase decisions: brand equity.
In our recent work we compared the brand equity
of 7,400 shoppers across 7 different categories and
related this to the purchase decisions they made.
The correlation between equity and brands
purchased was above 0.8.
It doesn’t help that when shopper marketing studies
do try to capture the role of brands, they do so using
different metrics – and by asking different questions
– to brand marketing. Most shopper research will
ask what brands a shopper considered – but they
won’t explore why they considered them, which
brands they have a relationship with or how they
feel about them. If we want to integrate shopper
marketing more effectively with brand, we need to
start measuring brand equity in the same way – and
start building models and KPIs around it.

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Bridging the divide between brand and shopper marketing
2. Forget the path – focus on the decision point
The concept of a path to purchase, where each
individual goes through the same set of stages,
is an increasingly misleading one, and marketing
strategies built around it are increasingly out of
touch with how purchase decisions are made.
In reality, the shopper journey is an expanding
collection of potential decision points, at any of
which a shopper could make a final choice about
what they will buy. Around 60-80% of brand
decisions are actually made before a shopper has
even reached the shelf, and increasing numbers of
purchases are being made online, without shoppers
setting foot in a store at all.
Shopper marketing’s role is to convert shoppers –
and this needs to take place wherever and whenever
shopper behaviour shows that point of conversion
to be. By focusing on the decision point for a given
category or product, we can direct limited marketing
and media budgets to where they will actually
make a difference to shopper choices. This may
well involve shopper marketers sharing touchpoints
(and occupying the same media channels) as brand
marketers. The focus of integrated strategies should
be less about dividing up the media environment
between brand and shopper; more about
establishing a coherent approach to sharing those
channels for a multitude of marketing objectives.
The shopper journey is an expanding collection of
potential decision points, at any of which a shopper
could make a final choice about what they will buy.

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Bridging the divide between brand and shopper marketing
3. Discriminate between touchpoints
It’s tempting for shopper researchers to give
equal weight to any touchpoint that a shopper
interacts with – or alternatively, to ascribe greater
influence to those that occur just before a
purchase. This variation of the ‘last click’ distortion
comes about because of the difficulties shopper
marketing has differentiating between the roles
that touchpoints play. Just because a shopper
interacts with a touchpoint doesn’t mean that
touchpoint exerts any influence over them. And
asking shoppers themselves to recall retrospectively
which touchpoints had the greatest influence on a
particular purchase is problematic.
You cannot hope to understand the influence
of touchpoints on a brand purchase without
understanding the relationship that the shopper has
with the brand to start with. By building the brand
relationship into touchpoint impact models you
can get a truer picture of the moments that really
make a difference to shopper purchase decisions.
You can then align these models to the gaps and
interruptions that exist within the shopper journey
for the brand and reveal those exerting the greatest
influence. And when you build models of shopper
behaviour on this basis, you have a far more robust
means of deciding where to target your investment.
Across the studies we have done we have
consistently found touchpoints that punch 3-4 times
above their weight when compared to reach alone.
We have consistently found touchpoints that punch
3-4 times above their weight when compared to
reach alone.
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4. Identify the barriers for shoppers who have
equity for you already
Barrier studies are one of the traditional mainstays of
shopper marketing research. However, from a brand
equity perspective, it’s clear that not all barriers
are equally worth studying. There is little point
interrogating shoppers as to why they didn’t buy
your products on a particular mission or occasion,
if your lack of any brand relationship with them
means you did not even enter their consciousness.
When trying to understand why you have lower
sales in a particular retailer or on a specific occasion,
understanding the relationship between equity and
conversion will allow you to identify whether you
have a brand building task or a shopper conversion
task to undertake.
When you know the barriers you need to overcome,
linking this to the most motivating shopper
needs that exist in your category will ensure the
messaging you design to overcome the barriers will
hit the mark. As a further build it is also critical to
understand the mindset of the shopper you want
to target – are you looking to influence shoppers
when they are buying on routine or when they are
genuinely exploring the category? While the latter
may be less frequent, it can also be the time when
shoppers are most open to influence.

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Bridging the divide between brand and shopper marketing
Insights to bring marketing teams together
It’s impossible to design a truly integrated approach
to brand and shopper marketing without data and
insights that embody the connected nature of the
shopper journey. When decisions can increasingly
take place in any environment and at any stage,
it’s vitally important to identify the most influential
points for spending your marketing budget. And you
can only do that by understanding your audience
as both consumers and shoppers. Asking brand
and shopper marketing teams to work together
more closely won’t usually be enough to make that
happen. But giving them a common understanding
of those with the potential to buy your products will.
It’s vitally important to identify
the most influential points
for spending your marketing
budget. And you can only do
that by understanding your
audience as both consumers
and shoppers.
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About Intelligence Applied
Intelligence Applied is the home of the latest thinking from TNS, where we discuss the issues impacting
our clients, explore what makes people tick and spotlight how these insights can create opportunities for
business growth.
Please visit www.tnsglobal.com/intelligence-applied for more information.
About TNS
TNS advises clients on specific growth strategies around new market entry, innovation, brand switching and
customer strategies, based on long established expertise and market leading solutions. With a presence in
over 80 countries, TNS has more conversations with the world’s consumers than anyone else and understands
individual human behaviours and attitudes across every cultural, economic and political region of the world.
TNS is part of Kantar, the data investment management division of WPP and one of the world’s largest insight,
information and consultancy groups.
Please visit www.tnsglobal.com for more information.
Get in touch
If you would like to talk to us about anything you have read in this report, please get in touch via
enquiries@tnsglobal.com or via Twitter @tns_global
About the author
Sam Curtis is TNS’s Global
Director, Shopper, and has led the
development of our approach to
modelling the Connected Shopper
Journey for brands. To find out more, contact
Sam at sam.curtis@tnsglobal.com.
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