For the past six months, executives from 10 retailers have been working together on a set of best practices for shopper marketing, identifying the roles and responsibilities that should fall to retailers and the manufacturers they work with. At next week's In-Store Marketing Expo (Oct. 6-8, Navy Pier in Chicago), the team will give an overview of its research so far.
The Retail Commission on Shopper Marketing is led by Dr. Brian Harris, chairman of The Partnering Group, and Diane Wallace, vice president of shopper marketing for Coca-Cola. The team includes executives from Food Lion, Giant Eagle, Marsh, Meijer, Schnucks, Shop Rite, Supervalu, Walgreens, Walmart and Wegmans.
"It's really interesting to get all these retailers together and get them to share how they view shopper marketing," said Peter Hoyt, executive director and CEO of the In-Store Marketing Institute. "We see the necessity of a new model of collaboration as being essential if shopper marketing is going to flourish. If you look at the alternative, it's more likely that shopper marketing would end up having been a fad, because it's so hard to get good programs in place consistently."
Shopper marketing is an emerging discipline, Hoyt said, but one that has lacked concrete guidelines up until now because there usually isn't one point person within an organization in charge of determining the value of a proposal. Codifying those organizational guidelines and best practices is the goal of the Commission, which will publish the final results of its research in April.
"Most retail organizations have to reorganize," Hoyt said. "The purpose of this is to lay the groundwork so that retailers and manufacturers know what they need to do to get to a better place, so that programs that benefit the shopper and the retailer and the brand can come to life. Without that, shopper marketing is very hard and people tend to go do other things."
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Other sessions, and the show floor
The Retail Commission's presentation takes place Wednesday morning at 9:30. Thursday morning, Ken Harris of Cannondale Associates will share the results of the 2009 PoweRanking Survey, which spotlights the manufacturers and retailers that have the best trading relationships.
Harris will be joined by marketing executives from Walgreens and True Value, who will share feedback on what makes a great retailer/manufacturer relationship and how retailers can work to cultivate them.
Other sessions of interest to customer experience professionals include a Tuesday afternoon symposium on marketing to women in-store, a Wednesday afternoon discussion on the theatrical aspects of the in-store experience, and a Thursday afternoon overview of the Walmart "Smart Network" digital signage initiative.
Hoyt noted that the economy has taken a toll on the exhibit floor — total exhibit space is down about 35 percent from last year's show — but he said that's an inevitable result of a poor economy. Approximately 125 companies will exhibit their products and services, a list that runs the gamut from digital menu boards to mounting brackets, from sheet metal and die-cutting to video production software and digital shelf talkers.
At press time, more than 3,000 attendees have preregistered for the event — according to Hoyt, 700 of those signed up in the past few days, and the list is still growing.
