Reorienting for the iShopper Marketing Era

The rapid ascension of mobile tech and social media as tools for shopper marketers have left many with a feeling somewhere between high excitement and vertigo. Like tourists on their first visit to Disney World, marketers are undoubtedly thrilled but anxious they'll miss out on the best way to take full advantage of all the magical offerings.

From deal-of-the-day services, such as Groupon and Hautelook, to the monetization of Facebook and the immediacy and relevance of Foursquare and its location-based counterparts, new mobile and social platforms are challenging shopper marketers in a number of ways:

a) To filter through the "glitz" for services that can truly increase basket size;
b) To integrate new digital tactics seamlessly with traditional media;
c) To take full advantage of the opportunity to use social and mobile to build more meaningful relationships between brands and consumers;
d) And, once convinced themselves of the viability of these tools, to achieve sell-in with accounts.

Many shopper marketers are surely feeling the pressure to make use of social media, even without proof of its true contribution. Facebook alone has gotten so much media coverage, it's in danger of overshadowing numerous other worthy options, especially with the news that major retailers that are integrating commerce into their Facebook pages. ResearchFarm, in its Retail Predictions 2011 report, pointed to the 2010 tie-up between Amazon and Facebook as a seminal moment in the "monetization" of the social media user base.

"The power of recommendations distinct from company communication (paid for advertising) in combination with price comparison sites will be further growth drivers for online retailing. Moreover Facebook's 'likes' function enables a whole new set of opportunities for brand marketers to target their customer advertising -- as relevancy can be hugely increased."¹

"Manufacturers have not yet figured out how to consistently convert shopper marketing insights into actions with measurable ROI," the authors of the GMA/Booz&Co. Shopper Marketing 3.0 report wrote in Sept. of 2009. "This measurement gap makes it impossible to decide whether and where to focus investment across the range of potential shopper marketing initiatives both out-of-store and in-store, as well as to establish priorities for the marketing mix overall."

While enhanced relevancy is among the great lures in this new "iShopper Marketing" toolkit, what is of particular interest is the ability of digital technology to provide better tracking than traditional media. Whether making an actual purchase from a mobile phone or scanning a mobile barcode from a POS display, shoppers will potentially be providing marketers with the desperately needed accountability they've been seeking to demonstrate ROI to their clients.

And yet the options are dizzying, running the gamut from enormously popular services like Twitter and Gilt to bleeding-edge technologies that hold tremendous promise, such as augmented reality content for smartphones.

1 - Retail Predictions 2011 - ResearchFarm, March, 2011
2 - Shopper Marketing 3.0: Unleashing the Next Wave of Value - GMA/Booz&Co.

MarketingLab's GRID: iShopper Marketing Mobile and Social Tactics
Given the nearly overwhelming level of activity, MarketingLab recently saw the need to do a broad survey of the most common social and mobile marketing tools available, assessing each for highest adoption and effectiveness in the marketplace. The firm took a grid approach to examining each of the most prevalent marketing tools, asking in each case, what the platform could do for marketers and listing specific cases where retailers and manufacturers were having success using said option.

Use the form below to download your copy of MarketingLab's GRID: iShopper Marketing Mobile and Social Tactics. And stay tuned for more Tips in this series when we'll look for evidence into which tools provide the greatest ROI and how shopper marketers can manage the challenges of sell-in and measurement.