FEATURE STORY
SECTION ONE
SECTION TWO
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How Can Measuring Shopper Behavior
Improve Brand and Category Sales?
Increasing brand and category sales is what every marketer and retailer aims for. Sophisticated technology is now enabling trading partners to meet their goals by measuring and analyzing shopper behavior in any store.
For example, let’s look at frozen food, which is a dynamic category in grocery stores. There are dozens of products ranging from ice cream, pizza and snacks to vegetables, entrees, and meals. Innovative products such as new ethnic foods continue to be introduced.
As a result, marketing and merchandising frozen food is challenging. An increasing number of exciting new products need to be placed in a fixed space. Even when the planogram is set, product visibility becomes an issue with shoppers peering through glass doors to find their favorite brand.
Unique technology in the form of in-store measurement of shopper behavior is now available to help trading partners address these challenges and ultimately increase brand and category sales. The process from VideoMining Corporation automatically converts video into precise, statistical data on the shopping process. The goal is to improve navigation and shopability in the store. The technology can be used to measure behavior to any department in any store in any trade channel. But let’s go back to one of the most challenging departments - frozen food.
“Because of the complexity in presenting a growing number of products in categories into a fixed space, the merchandising and marketing issues for frozen food are more pronounced than other grocery categories. It is important to have an objective and precise measurement of how shoppers are behaving today to respond to the opportunities. If you want to test a concept, you want a precise measurement of how effective it is in improving shopping, merchandising, and sales,” said Rajeev Sharma, founder and CEO of VideoMining, the leading provider of in-store intelligence for retailers and consumer product manufacturers.
Cameras throughout the store track and analyze each consumer transaction from the point they enter
the store until they make their purchase. In addition to cameras, a sophisticated type of video analysis software can be added to identify what types of shoppers are in the store - male or female, young or old, etc.
Finding opportunities for improving marketing and merchandising is where the technology comes in. Video very carefully documents thousands of interactions in the aisle. Cameras precisely capture the shopping process:
- Where shoppers come in?
- Where they go first?
- How much time do they spend in the aisle?
- How many times do they stop?
- What is the shopping process in a category?
“Once you document all of that in a holistic way for a whole department, you have for the first time a bird’s eye view of how shoppers are actually interacting with products and categories,” says Sharma. “That also begins to present opportunities to look at the big picture - displays, store design, department layout, and so forth.”
An overriding consideration is the shopping experience itself. Well- merchandised stores that are easy to navigate and offer smart assortments enhance the experience don’t give people a reason to shop elsewhere.
“You really need to understand the shopping process,” stresses Sharma. “Just the physical process of how shoppers navigate the aisles between categories, and once they are in the category, how they actually find and choose products. How can positioning of the categories within an aisle be moved so that it’s ideal? What kind of adjacencies should there be? Signage may help, but when is there too much signage? For frozen food, do they stand on front of the door and make a choice, or do they open the door and look?”
Want answers? As the saying goes, one picture is worth a thousand words.
More information about this technology is available at www.videomining.com.
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