RESEARCH
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Five Rules for Virtual Shopping Research
Retailers - and their manufacturing partners - face many challenges. What is
the right assortment at the shelf? How much space should be allocated to
store brands? How should the category be arranged? What promotions are
most effective?
There are many ways to gain information to answer these questions. There are
the more traditional approaches such as analyzing past sales data, conducting shopper surveys, or participating in shop-alongs. There are newer tools such as mining frequent shopper data or conducting biometric studies. While they all offer valuable insights, none of them is definitive. Looking at past sales or frequent shopper data tells you what worked in the past, but does not allow you to evaluate new and different programs. Surveys tell you about attitudes, but not behavior. What’s needed is a tool to measure behavior in the present to better predict what will happen in the future.
Virtual shopping research is just the tool. It is essentially the same as doing an in-store test, without the time, expense and hassle. Virtual shopping is a validated way to behaviorally test a range of alternatives - including those that are more “out of the box” - to provide you the knowledge and confidence to activate them at retail.
Just like any other research tool, virtual shopping needs to be used correctly. Valla Roth, Director of Communications at Decision Insight and former Consumer Insights Director at General Mills offers five rules to effectively design a virtual shopping research study.
Rule #1: Don’t ask shoppers what they would do. Instead, put them in a situation and observe what they do.
Remember your parents saying, “Do as I say, not as I do”? And we all know that actions speak louder than words. It’s the same principle for virtual shopping research. Don’t give respondents hypothetical situations and ask what they would do. They will tend to over-think it or try to act like marketers, not shoppers. Rather, put them in a realistic situation (virtual environment) and just observe their shopping behavior.
Rule #2: Always include competitive context.
Shopping decisions rarely, if ever, are made in a void. We live in a world of choices. In fact, some would argue that we have too many choices. Whether it’s in the vast array of SKUs at a large grocery store, a quick run into a convenience store, or even shopping online, we all know that we often go in thinking we’ll buy one thing and then buy something else. So we need to give shoppers in a virtual shopping study the appropriate context to make choices. It may not be feasible to represent every SKU in the category, but if we can create an array of brands/SKUs representing 80% or more of the category share, we will have succeeded.
Rule #3: Always test in the context of the appropriate channel or retailer.
We need to provide competitive context, and it needs to be the correct one. Shoppers shop a club store very differently from grocery. They shop in Walmart stores differently from Safeway or Kroger and even Target. We need to create the context of the retailer such as signage, private brand, aisle layouts, etc. Customizing the context to the channel or store in all of these ways will make a difference. And it will make it much easier for a manufacturer to sell in the resulting plan to the retailer to gain activation.
Rule #4: Leverage the key measures that virtual shopping can provide.
Sales, of course, is the number one measure obtainable with a virtual shopping platform. No other methodology, outside of an in-store test, can provide such a realistic estimate of purchase incidence (% of shoppers buying), unit volume and dollar volume. But there are several other measures available, many of which are NOT available with an in-store test. For example, virtual shopping allows you to understand not just who is buying a product… but, also, who is SEEING a product. Such “shelf presence” measures are a critical component to any virtual shopping study. The platform also allows you to explore further diagnostics, such as the impact of test strategies and tactics on brand equity. These measures are powerful because they are asked right after the respondent has shopped. So, their perceptions of the brands and the category are in “real time,” not based on invoking a previous shopping trip. The key is to understand what measures are available, and the appropriate hierarchy of those measures.
Rule #5: Test among the right shoppers.
It’s just as important to carefully consider who is in your study as what data you collect. When testing in a specific retailer, conduct the study among the retailer’s shoppers. Not only does it make the shopping experience more relevant - and therefore provide the right data - it also makes it easier to sell the program into the retailer. It’s also good to have sub-samples of heavy category users and your brand users to be sure the new programs motivate the most important shoppers.
For more information about online virtual shopping research, visit Decision Insight at www.decisioninsight.com, call (800) 800-2124, or email leslie@decisioninsight.com.
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SECTION THREE
