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The importance of retail consumer connect points is on the rise, thanks to the appreciation of the impact of ‘last chance' media by marketers. Various options of connect points at the retail outlet are also increasing, thanks to brand clutter, new retail formats and technology. Innovation in their usage is also rising as brands seek to break the clutter in multi-brand outlet environments.
Though the number of options is increasing, the science of measuring the impact of these connect points has taken a back seat so far. Though many shopper behaviour studies have been conducted, and many marketers use insights from them to implement their ‘last chance' media strategy, the time has now come to measure the effect of these connect points and integrate them with the effect of mass media.
Unless such an integrated mechanism is created, a marketer will not be able to have a view of his entire connect strategy implementation, and will not be able to better the RoI. By doing this, the marketer can evaluate the impact of all connect points on a single platform to then create an effective consumer connect mix strategy.
This leads to the key question - can one measure the impact of all connect points, with all of them being in different units? The answer is, ‘Yes!' Thanks to technology and improvement in analytics techniques, it is possible to measure the impact of each of the connect points at the retail outlet on sales. This helps answer some routine but critical questions:
What works at the retail outlet?
Does the impact differ by the size of outlet, type of outlet, category?
How much of the particular connect point is enough for better results?
For instance, which of the following deliver higher impact as sales generating tools in a medium-sized store located in a residential area: shelf space, shop-in-shop or wall space? This order could be totally different for a similar store for the same brand located in a commercial area.
This is illustrated with a live example for a mobile handset category.
This exercise was conducted by RainMan consulting in partnership with Mudra Max. Data was collected over 1,600 outlets across the country with sufficient representation of town class, for a period of 180 days, totalling more than 20 lakh records.
This data was then put through rigorous analytics process to answer the questions mentioned above. The illustration above shows, for two brands in this category, the impact of various connect points in the 10 lakh to 40 lakh (population) town class.
There are positive and negative contributors to sales, adding up to 100.
For Brand One (above), sales contributors differ by store location. While promoters (quality, type and number), shop-in-shop and glazing contributed to sales, competitors' leaflets and promoters took away sales in stores located in residential areas.
It was found that promoters play an important role for residential location stores, while many in-store variables play crucial role in commercial location stores.
The sales contributors would differ from brand to brand. Shown above are insights for Brand Two.
Identifying Sales Drivers
Understanding contribution by promotion helps us diagnose what happened in the past. Smart analytics can also help predict the future - it can help identify sales drivers. Based on the same study, below are connect points that could drive sales more than others. In the case of these drivers, a one per cent increase in their deployment would increase sales by one per cent or more. In other words, these deliver better RoI.
Brand One: Residential Location
_ Glazing
_ Shop in Shop
Brand One: Commercial Location
_ Shop in shop
_ Glazing
_ Shelf Space
Brand Two: Residential Location
_ Promoters
Brand Two: Commercial Location
_ Shelf strips
_ Shop-in-shop
_ Outside signage
More effective in-store media deployment can be implemented through a causal relationship powered by analytics as illustrated above.
One needs to first collect the relevant data on stores, which is not a huge or difficult task today. Enrichment happens by integrating it with mass media deployment, thus getting complete insights on the connect points utilised. This is the new approach most new-age marketers are beginning to embrace, to enhance effectiveness.
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