Restyle in the aisles
By Elizabeth Rigby
Published: May 27 2008 22:11 | Last updated: May 27 2008 22:11
For many of us, wheeling a trolley up and down supermarket aisles is a routine affair. But for Dina Howell, the minutiae of shoppers’ wanderings on their weekly shop is very interesting indeed.
Ms Howell, who is in charge of all of Procter & Gamble’s in-store marketing worldwide, wants all the details, no matter how small. She wants to know how many people walk down the haircare aisles in a superstore and at what time of the day. She wants to see whether bigger, brighter displays attract more customers. And she wants to use this knowledge to try to understand how P&G can sell more of its goods in superstores.
To
this end, P&G and a dozen other consumer goods companies –
including Coca-Cola and Kellogg – and 18 US retailers such as Wal-Mart,
Walgreens and Target have each spent $250,000 on “project Prism”, an
initiative led by
AC Nielsen, the media rating agency.
Infrared sensors have been dotted through 166 superstores in the US to monitor the movements of millions of shoppers as they push their trolleys along the aisles.
“It is a big test,” says Ms Howell, her eyes widening as she contemplates the information being gathered, and then extrapolated to apply to thousands of stores.
“We are getting data from the US right now and it is very interesting. Of all the business that happens [for P&G] in the US, we are getting data on 60 per cent of those volumes.”
Prism – “pioneering research for an in-store metric” – uses infrared beams to track shoppers’ movements and then correlate them with sales data. Advocates describe it as the first truly scientific measurement of the effectiveness of in-store sales tools such as shelf location and promotional displays.
The findings are still under wraps, but Ms Howell, who gave a talk about Prism at the annual World Retail Congress this year, says the research could change all manner of aspects of superstores, from how the retailers sketch out their floorplans to the types of products they stock.
“I suspect [that] with Prism we will begin to understand those aisles that you and I enjoy shopping [in] because they are so empty. Retailers will maybe start thinking ‘should I be devoting that level of real estate [to those categories]’,” she says. “I am sure that there are categories being underserved, but that data will reveal it.”
That could mean changes such as cutting back on the homeware section in return for bigger health and beauty aisles. But it could also bring about changes to how stores are set out if retailers and consumer goods companies can work out what type of shoppers go where and why.
In one retail chain, AC Nielsen monitored who was shopping in the haircare and soft drink aisles for a month. During that period, 1.7m shoppers – 1m of whom were women – walked through soft drinks but gave the haircare section a miss.
AC Nielsen estimates that half of those 1m women were between the ages of 24 and 54 and therefore the target audience for makers of shampoos, conditioners, hair dyes and styling mousse. Getting even a fraction of them to walk through the haircare aisle could eventually amount to millions of dollars more in sales.
“If you are not a huge company, you might not be able to get retailers to change around aisles,” says David Sommer, managing partner of in-store media planner MEC Retail, who is also involved in the Prism project.
“But say there is someone who you want to sell breakfast cereal to and you know they don’t walk down that aisle – you could find another place in the store where you could reach them, such as putting a sign in the dairy section to remind them that breakfast cereal is a good way to start the day and point them to aisle two.”
As well as spotting missed opportunities, Prism can help consumer goods companies work out whether in-store campaigns are really converting browsers into buyers.
“[Ahead of a marketing campaign] we monitor the amount of people walking through and we are able to know that 15 per cent of people were converted to buy that category [be it haircare, detergents and so on].
“If we then do a marketing exercise in that aisle, we can measure if the conversion rate is higher, say 20 per cent,” says Ms Howell.
“Then you can take the difference [in sales volumes] times the average dollaring [sales] and know what the size of that prize really was and not what it was projected to be.”
In July, Nielsen will start selling the Prism data to a wider group of companies in the US.
Mr Sommer says: “It is a huge deal. Up to now, in-store [marketing] was handled by the sales guys who worked for Colgate or Campbells or P&G and it was just about stocking them high and letting them fly. Now it is much more analytical, so you are not just trying to sell things, you are trying to understand who you are reaching.”
Ms Howell, a veteran of 18 years at P&G, says that reaching those women who might buy Tide for their laundry or Pantene for their hair is getting trickier in the internet age.
“The way to get shoppers’ attention is so scattered – if you think about daily life, how many things do you do in a day? So it is very important to find ways to get to her.”
Until now P&G has spent $7bn a year talking to “her” through television and print adverts. But that could change as it tries to reach out to the shopper in the aisles instead.
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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