The client’s question

Consumer product companies use a variety of communication channels to promote their brands, such as print, television, on-pack and in-store displays at the point of sale (POS). In each of these communication channels, it is important to understand how your message can best be put forth to the shopper to drive purchase. Inside the store, brands have only a few seconds to compel shoppers to choose their product over the vast array of other competing products.

With this in mind, we were approached by our client, Sharon, from a global consumer products company. She wanted to know:

“What is the single most important thing we can say globally (at POS) about our deodorant products to get shoppers to buy our brand or product?”

Our approach

Closely working with Sharon and using our best practices framework to define what constitutes a strong shopper statement, we developed an effective methodological approach to address her question. Based on four key guidelines – shopper statements need to be evaluated in a competitive context, benchmarked against an absolute metric, provide granular yet robust results, and work with small sample sizes – we employed the following three step approach:

  • Understand the ability of each message to drive Purchase Intent. This metric most closely replicates the nature of a shopper statement, which is to prompt the action of purchase
  • Utilize MaxDiff methodology to create more granularity and provide a ranking across a large set of items
  • Uncover open-ended feedback to explore the reasons behind the success or failure of certain shopper statements and to further optimize the tested stimuli

The results

Based on the output from this study, we at SKIM were able to identify absolute purchase probabilities for each of the shopper statements. In this manner, we identified which shopper statements had the most potential to increase effectiveness at the point of sale. The insights collected from the open-ended questions allowed us to work with Sharon to further fine tune the shopper statements even beyond the scope of the project.

As a result, we were able to provide a clear recommendation on which shopper statements were most influential in prompting shoppers to purchase their product at POS.