The more you know about your customer, the better the outcome
After appearing at Mumbrella's Retail Marketing Summit last month, Cartology's Robbie Hills offers a reflection on the day's content, and why it is all about the customer.
It was a jam-packed room for last month’s Retail Marketing Summit and being in that room was true acknowledgement that the way brands and retailers communicate with customers has undergone seismic change that is showing no signs of abating.
With speakers from FMCG brands such as Nestle, Reckitt, and Goodman Fielder, to retailers Mecca, Catch, Rebel and New Zealand’s The Warehouse Group, plus media owners and agencies, there was one central theme at the summit that really should surprise no one: the customer.
So, my take on a few sessions that piqued my interest?
Customer behaviour has changed so dramatically that brands and retailers have consistently embraced the ‘pivot’ just to keep up. That changing behaviour was simply accelerated by Covid and there was – and is – no return to what we know about customers “BC” – Before Covid. The lines between ecommerce and commerce have blurred, accelerated by the online shift in customer behaviour leaving us with what is really now commerce – it’s all encompassing.
Omnichannel shopping is now the norm, as is an expectation for ease and convenience paired with personalisation at every stage of the customer’s shopping journey. Add to this the current inflationary environment and supply chain challenges, and we’re seeing customers pivoting rapidly again, changing their purchase habits to accommodate their budget, or product and brand availability.
Cartology’s Mike Tyquin [second from left] during a panel session at Mumbrella’s Retail Marketing Summit
What is clear, and what brands, media owners and retailers need to lean into is trusted relationships with customers, tapping into their engagement and the context of their shopping journey to reach them at the right moment.
The more you know about your customer, the better the outcome.
There were some fascinating trends that emerged – and for an ex-Googler like myself, I found myself drawn into particularly around the need to further unlock first party customer data for more detailed insights to inform marketing strategy and spend.
From a customer perspective, the expectation for brands to know how and when they shop, what they want and serve relevant content is only becoming more prominent and we heard this from the team at Customology. As the cookie continues to crumble, that first party data strategy is going to be critical to success and a key opportunity for brands, particularly so with retail media.
Data has tremendous potential to make a customer’s experience with a brand seamless across all touchpoints on their nonlinear journey.
It is a true battle to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving consumer landscape. So what is working? And what work still needs to be done?
We know the customer journey is no longer linear, and marketers are evolving their thinking through the line to engage them at each point of their journey. It can no longer be trade vs brand activity, that’s not how customers view their journey, but both Cartology and our valued partners are still on this journey to identify ways of working internally to break down the barriers of brand v trade and think holistically about retail media. With this in mind for brands, marketing teams are seen to be transforming to include data scientists and ecommerce teams to help leverage the opportunity for their brands.
There is still work to be done to unlock the significant customer data that Cartology holds to be more precise at each part of the customer journey. The size of this opportunity has not gone unnoticed and Cartology announced that for the second year, it is conducting a meta study that will identify which channels work best across certain customer cohorts and categories. This will provide a more powerful end to end proposition for brands, and help address the complex connected media planning opportunities. Further unlocking customer data to help get the retail media channel right for brands is a key focus for Cartology in the year ahead.
All three marketers at Goodman Fielder, Reckitt and Nestle identified connected media planning as a key improvement with the session highlighting the importance of understanding ROI on every category and how this impacts the weighting of media budgets.
With all this in mind, it’s unsurprising that the retail media campaigns that resonate with customers leverage quality customer insights and impact at multiple touchpoints on the customer journey. There were two powerful examples of successful brand campaigns that harnessed the key insight of consumer values being; environment and sustainability. Both campaigns – for Goodman Fielder bread brand Wonder and Reckitt’s dishwashing brand Finish – focused on recycling and water saving respectively with end-to-end retail media campaigns. Both brands experienced growth – ~12% growth of Wonder during the campaign period and 11% sales growth for Finish, with 24% new to brand customers for Wonder and 69 million litres of water saved for Finish.
The next 12 months will be very interesting to watch as marketers and retail media owners address these opportunities. But the overarching theme will dictate success – if it isn’t working for the customers, the rest doesn’t matter.
Robbie Hills is director of client partnerships and sales at Cartology.
“The more you know about your customer, the better the outcome”
In other news, water is in fact, wet.
A serious question though, in spite of my snide comment above.
What purpose do summits such as this actually deliver? A room full of some of the most highly paid, senior individuals in the industry, confirming one another’s biases and reciting the same platitudes and cliches.
Genuinely curious to get a viewpoint on this.
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