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4 areas to focus on for shopper marketing in 2015

4 areas to focus on for shopper marketing in 2015

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As the human race evolves from the Industrial Age into the Digital Age, the marketplace is now undergoing a massive change with shoppers fully empowered with digital technologies, platforms and hardware.

The unprecedented connectivity in the digital world has allowed them to create and share content instantly on a global scale. This digital voice is the new-age “word of mouth” that will determine the fate of many established and new brands in the evolving marketplace. The physical marketplace is now complemented by a virtual one and these form the new marketplace, a blend of two.

The obvious question marketers will ask is what they must do to keep their businesses relevant.

Firstly, marketers must go digital to enhance their strategic competency. If we look back at the Industrial Age, a hundred over years ago, marketers in that era were busy coordinating their products to be produced in the industrialized factories for mass production to allow them to market to a larger audience in retail stores and other channels. Today, similarly, marketers must now use the digital technologies, platforms and hardware to market their products and services to their digitally empowered shoppers to stay relevant. Marketers must pick up new digital marketing skills to complement their traditional marketing ones to stay relevant or risk being replaced.

Secondly, in the Digital Age and new marketplace, shopper behaviour is now tracked and highly measurable to allow marketers to understand their shoppers better. Yes, customer Data and analytics are critical to any businesses and brands that desire success in the new market place. But it is no longer enough to just collect Big Data through customer loyalty programmes, shopper surveys, store traffic count and other data-centric tools. The challenge now is the analytics behind this Big Data to guide marketers to launch data-guided campaigns to achieve better ROIs. Marketers today must start to use data to strengthen their strategic customer insights to execute the promotions that their shoppers would react with close reference to their past behavioural data. Advanced marketers are already looking at predictive customer insights to drive future shopper behaviour.

Thirdly, in the empowered Digital Age, shoppers are gaining new experiences all the time through their close connectivity with their friends, colleagues, brands and so on. Marketers must know that what they are actually marketing is experience, not the product. Marketers must seriously plan their customer experience journey for their shoppers to enhance their strategic digital outreach. To excel in customer experience, be sure to plan in a component of entertainment.

Lastly, speed of delivery is now the only strategic advantage and differentiator for many business and brands competing in the same industry. Providing good customer service and constant product innovation are already a given. Shoppers today get things done through their smart phones fast. This has conditioned their similar expectation when it comes to contact with businesses and brands in the physical world. To differentiate and stand above their competition, businesses and brands must work on their speed of delivery.

The above four points are critical for marketers to focus on in 2015 to achieve business relevancy and success. The new marketplace is fast taking shape and shoppers are increasingly empowered, and the pressure is now on businesses and brands to play catch up.

The writer is Jason Ong, senior marcom manager, CapitaLand Mall Asia.

Along with representatives of brands such as Amazon, Carlsberg and 3M, EpiCentre, Ong will be speaking about shopper marketing at Marketing magazine’s Shopper Marketing conference, happening 11th June in Singapore.

To register, please click here or contact Nadiah Jamaludin at nadiahj@marketing-interactive.com or call +65 6423 0329, +65 8389 8454.

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