There’s so much misunderstanding about the level of decision-making in-store and it’s turning into a rather silly merry-go-round of pick-your-own statistics. Can we all please put simplistic and arbitrary figures behind us: they’ve got little to do with shopper behaviour, which is much more complex.
Most real, at-fixture shopper decisions aren’t based on the decision tree model. In most categories, shoppers have very little involvement because they just aren’t that interested. Their purchases are habituated: most shoppers buy the same thing week in, week out. So they’ve learned the location of the category in the store(s) they use and the on-shelf locations of the SKUs they normally buy. There is little or no active decision making in-store.
The significance for our approach to in-store activation could not be greater. Our whole strategy needs to move away from futile attempts to influence immediate at-fixture decisions - ‘buy this instead of that’ - and towards activities that seek to evolve scripted behaviour.
This also has wide ramifications for our NPD, packaging, marketing, promotions and advertising. It means that we need to go back to basics, examining all our marketing and advertising while asking ourselves precisely what our remote persuasion such as TV is trying to achieve.
Siemon Scamell-Katz
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