Entrepreneur Evan Rutchik, Founder and CEO of Local Factor Group has made a career in large part of his ability to anticipate innovation in all its forms successfully. He and his colleagues have worked tirelessly to execute a unique vision that allows advertisers and agencies to take advantage of cookie-less data sets, custom creative and premium content to deliver high-performing marketing campaigns that are brand-safe and privacy compliant.
Rutchik has also historically been one to keep one eye fixed firmly on the future where it belongs. Case in point: shopper marketing. It has given way to a new era of shopper-focused ads, innovation with regard to retail media, and more – all of which is a major benefit to both brands and consumers alike.
What is Shopper Marketing?
At its core, the idea of shopper marketing is simple: the techniques and best practices that marketers use to improve the shopping experience for consumers along all touch points. This is done to drive not only e-commerce sales, but in brick-and-mortar stores as well.
For years, a significant focus of shopper marketing efforts was on those physical best practices like displays, product demonstrations, and other techniques that retailers could use to capture someone’s experience at the store. For example, putting up displays in strategic locations can help guide someone as they make a purchase. They can get the item they came for, and displays can be used to leverage up-sell further or cross-sell opportunities.
Demonstrations can help people get more out of the purchases they plan on making and convince them to buy products and services they were otherwise unaware of.
Examples like that represent the way things have historically been done. For Evan, it doesn’t have to get much more complicated than that on a conceptual level. Even though the technology behind shopper marketing is inherently sophisticated, the idea at the heart of it is only as intricate as people want to make it.
Of course, that technology is changing all the time and the continued evolution of shopper marketing has created a bevy of exciting new opportunities.
The Future of Shopper Marketing is a Bright One
For Evan Rutchik, one of the clearest examples of innovation in shopper marketing is also a sign of where things are headed: CTV and OTT. Short for “Connected TV” and “Over-the-Top,” these channels allow brands to, among other advantages, future-proof shopper marketing efforts. Evan Rutchik predicts that CTV and OTT will continue to get more important as time goes on as more people eschew traditional programming in favor of Internet-based content.
Perhaps the most exciting thing concerns the actionable insight that can be derived from these efforts. Retailers can employ in-store measurement techniques, for example, to ensure that all budgets are optimized in real-time based on performance. By remaining engaged, brands can create more effective campaigns as time goes on because opportunities for improvement are constantly revealing themselves.
Shopper marketing partners are also working on more effective and scalable ways to help brands connect their ideal shoppers with their campaigns. Using the purchasing data, activity information, behavioral insight, and more that users are already creating, brands can use specialized tools to increase the accuracy and efficiency of their shopper marketing campaigns, while not disrupting someone’s privacy.
Shopper marketing itself is not a new concept, yet it’s in a constant state of evolution. Local Factor Group is helping marketers maximize on this by launching customizable consumer focused products designed to drive in-store and e-commerce sales, soon to be released to the general market.
Overall, brands and consumers both thrive when a deep, meaningful connection is established between the two. Shopper marketing as a concept was born out of a desire to create that level of intimacy. Evan Rutchik has witnessed the techniques that organizations use evolve over the years, but that goal has never wavered. With advancements like CTV and OTT poised to hit ubiquity in our lives over the next few years, Evan believes that this relationship between organizations and the people they’ve dedicated themselves to serving is more meaningful (and important) than ever.
Leave a Reply