SHOPPER MARKETING
10 Rookie Shopper
Marketer Mistakes
By Olga Yurovski
I
f you’ve already completed
your initial on-boarding (and
are no longer drinking from
a firehose), check out this list of
some typical mistakes shopper
marketers make. It is a compilation
of testimonials, or “stories from the
trenches” we collected over the years
from seasoned shopper marketing
executives.
These folks have been around the block
and dealt with the frustration and
embarrassment of not getting it right
on the first try. Their real identities have
been hidden for their own protection (but
there’s no judgment here! We’ve all been
a rookie).
Running
A
Shopper
Marketing Function From
HQ
“Due to a prolonged hiring freeze, we were
unable to establish a field-based shopper
marketing team, and for the longest
time, it was just me and my manager
running the shopper organization out
of headquarters. Both of us had small
kids and were unable to travel full time,
so we tried to manage the business via
conference calls and occasional in-market
visits. That didn’t work out too well. We
were always extremely busy, but I never
felt we were the experts in our retail
customers’ marketing strategies because
our customer relationships were weak.
One of the mistakes I made (and I see my indus-
try peers repeating) is operating not like a stra-
tegic function, but rather like a tactical exten-
sion of the brand in retail, thus allowing my team
to be micromanaged to death. Instead of relying
on the customer experts and empowering my
team to make investment decisions on the fly,
based on the quickly changing retail landscape,
I watched headquarter-based brand and finance
teams approve every small investment decision.
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Brand teams viewed us as a bottleneck
and eventually learned to bypass us and go
straight to Sales to discuss strategy. It was
a tough situation for a while, but things
turned around once we expanded the team
and developed deep customer expertise by
having ‘feet on the ground’.”
Believing Any Agency Can Do
Shopper Marketing
“We had this awesome digital agency
our brand team loved and highly
recommended. When we announced
our shopper marketing agency pitch
competition, we included them into the
process. We could sense that they lacked
shopper marketing expertise, but we
believed we could learn together plus
they already knew our brands so well and
they had a great relationship with our
brand team. After giving them a chance,
we quickly realized that the retail world
is a completely different story from
a digital marketing world. Things are
messier, less driven by the data and more
by the relationships. Our sales teams
were frustrated that they had to teach
us - and our agency - basic stuff about
how retail worked, and that the ideas the
agency proposed could never be executed
at many of the retail customers’ stores.
We wished that our new SM team had a
more seasoned shopper marketing agency
partner.”