Digital CPG Blog

“If we ever move, it had better be to someplace with good grocery delivery, because I’m not sure I can live without online ordering!”—a mom

Here are some of our favorite rituals of the online mom shopper:

1. She’s shopping around, because she knows that options are only a click away. A full three-quarters of moms shopped online in the past 30 days and half would do all of their shopping  online. That’s a lot of online shopping! She’s using a variety of tools and services to get the job done: 53% of moms use expert parent sites to get product recommendations and 48% use retailer websites. One mom told us: “I was in the Babies R Us store in the gates aisle and I went on my phone to the BRU website and ordered the gate online, with the “ship-to-store” option, so that I could pick it up while I was at the store. I saved $10!”

Action: Execute complementary digital, mobile, and in-store programs that leverage each medium’s ability to support moms’ needs and behaviors.

2. She’s shopping as a sport, promoting savings to build social currency and seeking discounts and deals before buying items big or small. She uses coupons, barcode scanners, QR codes, and buying services to compete—84% agree with the statement: “When I save money on a shopping trip by using coupons, sales or other deals, I feel like I won.”

Action: Give mom offers at unexpected times and in new places. Enable her to share with others and reward her efforts to create loyalty.

3. She’s reading the labels and is willing to make trade-offs based on price, effort and availability; but she won’t skimp on safety. More than half prefer purchasing organic or natural alternatives when shopping for groceries. Case in point? This mom says: “I will spend a little more at the farmer’s market or Trader Joe’s, because I know I am supporting something I love and believe in.”

Action: Detail Dr. Mom with info & ingredients; educate her on causes in support of children’s health and safety.

4. She’s demanding convenience, rewarding brands that simplify her life and will pay more to make her life easier. Thirty-eight percent would pay for online shipping to save time, and 35% of moms agree that simplicity, multiuse, and convenience are the biggest priorities in the technologies she buys. One of our moms hasn’t shopped in a physical store at Christmas in 10 years: “Let’s put it this way, I recycle A LOT of cardboard!”

Action: Demonstrate that you get her needs by focusing on convenience, ease of use and saving time.

How can you put these steps into action for your brand?

The stats (via LukeW):

• Mobile traffic came close to tripling year over year Black Friday 2011 reaching 14.3%. Mobile traffic on Black Friday 2010 was 5.6%. (source)
• In 2009 less than 1% of online sales came from mobile. (source)
• This year there was a 371% increase in the number of customers shopping on their mobile devices. (source)
• Shoppers had a 41.3% bounce rate on mobile devices versus a rate of 33.1% on other computing devices. (source)
• PayPal saw a 516% increase in mobile payments on Black Friday 2011. (source)
• Mobile traffic to Usablenet clients was up 60% from the same period last year. iOS devices accounted for 42% of the traffic. (source)
• The iPhone and the iPad accounted for 10.2 percent of all Black Friday online traffic. (source)
• Shoppers using the iPad accounted for more actual purchases per visit than shoppers using other mobile devices, with conversion rates reaching 4.6% for the Apple device versus 2.8% for overall mobile devices. (source)

What’s Next?

• 46% of smartphone and tablet owners are planning to make holiday purchases through their mobile devices. (source)
• More than 60% of mobile buyers will make their mobile purchases from the confines of their homes. (source)

Companies have been using consumer data for years, but with the advent of the web, more and more consumers are increasingly paying attention. And asking, who controls your data?

“People are getting more savvy about the fact that there is value associated with their data,” said Laura Simpson, Global IQ director for McCann Worldgroup. Ms. Simpson believes there’s an opportunity for marketers that offer deals and discounts in return for personal information and are transparent about the exchange — notifying consumers that they’ll receive a customized newsletter near their birthday if they provide their birth month, for example.

It’s in that context that personal “data lockers,” or online information repositories designed to be the digital equivalent of a bank with security infrastructure in place, are forecasting a marketplace where consumers have considerably more leverage.

Personal is a startup in open beta aiming to recast the consumer-marketer relationship altogether. With $7.6 million in funding and 42 employees, the site works by allowing users to enter their personal information in structured-data fields within individual “gems” — or buckets of data in categories ranging from banking particulars to liquor-cabinet contents to babysitter instructions. They can share gems with selected individuals, and it’s also intended to be a tool to auto-populate forms.

Personal plans to launch an anonymous marketplace early next year, where marketers will be able to target users based on their personal information. It envisions a scenario in which consumers are compensated for buying products or viewing ads for products that are likely to be relevant to them.

Let’s take a quick trip to Sweden to get some digital marketing inspiration. I am loving the concept and think it would be a great way to engage blog communities.

To seed buzz and demand for the opening of a new online store, Swedish interior design retailer Lagerhaus (no they don’t sell lager) has implemented an interesting variation on the online pop-up fan-shop trend.

Rather than take the traditional route of opening a temporary pop-up shop on their Facebook page, as Oscar La Renta, Burberry, Chanel, Joop!, Electronic Arts, Heinz, and others have done, Lagerhaus created a distributed pop-up shop widget for blogs – and invited leading popular interior design blogs to embed the widget on their blogs and customise it with their favourite products (see campaign video below).

…what’s smart about this alternative blog-based pop-up shop campaign is the extra reach and credibility they have.  By embedding the pop-up shop on popular blogs, more people are more likely to see it – than on a brand’s Facebook page, and it will have  implicit, if not explicit, third-party endorsement from the blogger hosting the pop-up shop.  It’s social proof, baby.

CPG’s core demographic – the young mom – is usually a very active blogger, and this seems like a no-brainer to try back here in the States. What do you think?

CPG is lining Amazon’s ad pockets:

In its first analysis of display advertising on the Amazon.com home page, Macquarie Group reported that CPG marketers such as Philips and Procter & Gamble accounted for the biggest share of ads during the second half of the fourth quarter, at 28%. Other top ad verticals for Amazon included media (23%) and financial services (10%). Another big chunk (28%) was dedicated to house ads for Amazon Local’s daily deals service.

Meanwhile:

Yahoo and AOL continued to show signs of weakening demand, based on home page ad trends, while YouTube remained strong and MSN had steady gains from both the third quarter and the year-earlier period.

Where is your brand advertising? And where do you find the best results?

New start-up Birchbox delivers beauty samples to a customer’s door… for a fee!

The company curates four-to-five samples monthly and delivers them to every customer who is paying $10 a month. The company also seems to have  a built-in loyalty program for Birchbox fanatics. The site also features rich content including interviews, beauty tutorials and videos.

Of course, any customer can then buy a full-size version of the sample they receive.

It strikes me as incredibly interesting that commerce is to the point where not only are consumers requesting free samples, but are willing to pay for them. However, it doesn’t seem like a particularly good solution to build loyalty among the individual brands as the customer is constantly receiving new items to try. Time will tell, however!

The Internets… they keep changing things. Like making shoppers more prepared when they reach the store, and less apt to be enticed to products they didn’t come in for:

It’s no secret that technology has changed in-store shopping behavior. Whether it be through mobile phones, barcode scanning, or price comparison shopping sites; consumers are more prepared than ever in the store aisle. According to a new study released from Deloitte, nine in 10 shoppers know what they’re buying before they arrive at a store, and more than eight in 10 (83 percent) have a set of brands in mind that they will consider.

Of course, when considering the holiday shopping season ahead of us, we know in-store shoppers are more mindful of finding online deals or coupons. According to the study, 80 percent of surveyed shoppers say they do their own research online and have a pre-determined price point and a potential savings amount in mind before they step into a store. Furthermore, two-thirds of consumers shop when they know products will be on sale.

Three-quarters (75 percent) of survey respondents assert that they are smarter shoppers than they were a year ago, and nearly nine in 10 (86 percent) believe they are getting more precise in what they buy.

Is it time for the public relations industry to take on themselves? And is it time to redefine your own strategies and definitions in this age of social media?

Finding a new definition for public relations is “a process we know is overdue,” said Rosanna Fiske, the chairwoman and chief executive of the public relations society who is also associate professor and global strategic communications program director at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Florida International University. “We felt we could no longer let it go.”

“Before the rise of social media, public relations was about trying to manage the message an entity was sharing with its different audiences,” Mr. Lavelle said. “Now, P.R. has to be more about facilitating the ongoing conversation in an always-on world.”

“In a world where the ordinary consumer is walking around with global publishing power in his or her pocket,” said Mr. Tisch, who is also chief executive at Argyle Communications, “the role of public relations and corporate communications has shifted from creating content to attempting to influence the content that’s created by others.”

Alex Tosolini, Vice President, Global e-Business, Procter & Gamble shares insights and lessons from their direct-to-consumer effort:

P&G is very focused on consumers—we say the consumer is boss. And we have a go-to-market strategy that openly declares “win wherever people shop.” That’s important to understand, because as more and more people around the world are shopping in different channels, our role is to be present wherever they are.

A couple of years ago we launched the eStore with two objectives. The first one was to learn about this new space. And the second objective was to generate insight that we could share with all our retail partners so that together we can provide the best possible experience for consumers.

We are learning that more and more people are spending time online to interact with the brands, even if they buy offline. Brand-building is becoming a digital exchange, rather than a one-way exchange.

The second thing we are learning is that content is very important to help consumers make a decision. We know that what we call “enhanced content” is very important to establishing an even stronger relationship with consumers. When you go on-shelf, most of your interaction with a brand is through what you remember you saw at home or the packaging you see in front of you.

Online, as you know, you can interact with the brand with two-way, always-on communication. You can upload videos. You can read ratings and reviews from other people and other activities.

We’ve talked about how difficult and unfriendly mobile commerce experiences are in the past — which means consumers don’t engage in m-commerce nearly at the rate you’d expect them to, considering they’re using their phones for all sorts of activities, according to a recent survey, such as:

56% of respondents were expecting to use their devices for shopping-related activities this holiday. More than a third (38%) will likely use the device to find store locations, 34% to compare prices, 28% to research deals or find coupons, and 27% to get product reviews.

How to get consumers over the hump of information-gathering to purchase? Well, their reticence may be melt… if there’s a deal in it for them!

In a survey of 1,000 U.S. consumers, 62% said they were willing to use their cell phones to make a purchase if offered an opportunity by coupon, discount offers, text alerts, gift cards or loyalty points.

The actual impetus to buy by mobile device, however, does plummet without a direct incentive or prompt, as only 22% said they would make a purchase on their devices.

Not only are poorly designed m-commerce experiences holding consumers back, but expecting consumers to pay using payment methods they always have doesn’t work.

Generally, consumers remain unsure as to which mobile payment options are available, let alone reliable and trusted. The survey asked what m-payment solution might increase their use of direct m-commerce. A quarter said that a payment solution tied to their own financial institution would encourage their greater use of mobile payments, and 22% would be encouraged by PayPal availability. Only 18% said the presence of a credit card solution would persuade them to use mobile commerce.