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or big brands, measuring the impact of shopper marketing on brand equity is a big deal.

Bryan Welsh, vice president of shopper marketing at PepsiCo, puts it this way: “How drinkers feel about Diet Pepsi is as important an issue as trial or awareness.” The sheer size of the potential in-store audience – up-ward of 140 million weekly shoppers at Walmart alone – qualifies the retail environment as a discrete media chan-nel, and the conviction that brand eq-uity can be enhanced in-store is a key tenet of shopper marketing.

Historically, understanding brand health has been the brand manager’s bailiwick. It is standard practice to con-tinually track various equity measures such as awareness, likability and fu-ture purchase intent, as well as spe-cific brand imagery dimensions (“hip,”

Part 3:

Measuring

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Best Practices in

SHOPPER MARKETING MEASUREMENTBest Practices in

SHOPPER MARKETING MEASUREMENT

Brand Impact

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n Traditional brand equity studies often are too broad, and too in-frequent, to identify the impact of an individual shopper program.

n To date, most pre/post-shop interview questions don’t tie back to an established set of brand equity questions such as those benchmarked in a year-over-year study.

n Diet Pepsi tied results from its “Skinny Can” program at a key retailer to longitudinal brand equity scores to definitively demonstrate impact. However meritorious, this approach would be cost prohibitive for most programs and brands.

n Continually updated brand dashboards have become com-mon practice. While these tools don’t report the impact on brand equity of a specific shopper program, they help keep a finger on the brand’s pulse.

n To understand the effect of a particular program, pre/post-shop interviews are overlaid on quantitative shopper mea-surements, such as shopper card data. Interviews can reveal a shopper’s pre-store purchase intent and post-trip impressions.

n Most current methodologies employ researchers to conduct in-aisle observations and interviews to be overlaid onto sales data. This approach has merit, because it is recording real-world behavior across retailers during program execution.

n An emerging technique arms shoppers with mobile devices to record their purchases and self-administer interviews. Emerging mobile apps facilitate a limited number of survey questions on top of captured shopper card and in-store behavior data. The questions can be used to help determine shopper attitudes about brands after exposure to marketing communication.

n Sales data is starting to be linked to digital media consump-tion. This connection needs only a qualitative dimension to significantly propel understanding forward.

Executive Summary

“masculine,” “nurturing”). However, these tracker studies are typically too broad, and too infrequent, to gauge the impact of a given program. Shop-per marketers, therefore, have been left searching for their own solutions.

Understanding the impact of shop-per marketing programs on brand eq-uity is possible, but the findings are neither cheap nor easy to obtain. The reason is that the sample size needs to be robust, over a brief executional time frame, to read a single cam-paign at a specific retailer. That can be dauntingly expensive, especially when compared with the overall cost of the program.

Furthermore, program measure-ment can be slippery or error-prone, because marketing execution and retail conditions vary widely from store to store. Working under various

By Liz Crawford, Senior Industry Analyst

The following is the third installment in a six-part series examining best practices for the measurement of shopper marketing. This article looks at effective ways to measure brand impact. Subsequent articles will cover effective integration practices, retail collaboration and directions for the future. To read the first two articles in the series, visit www.p2pi.org.

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constraints, shopper marketers try to maintain the brand experience – and the research con-ditions – across retailers and stores, but that’s not an easy task.

Finally, there is the halo issue: What is the impact of the retailer on the brand? The retail context can have a definite effect on the shop-per’s impression. For example, brands might seem snazzier at Target or fresher at Whole Foods. Measuring this effect on brand equity is sometimes discussed but rarely pursued with testing.

The ‘Skinny’ from PepsiCoThe following Q&A with PepsiCo’s Welsh illustrates how manufacturers are thinking about building brand equity through shopper marketing:

Q. How does PepsiCo view brand communication at retail?Welsh: “We think of the store as a medium to drive a brand message. In some cases, the retailer (where the products are showcased) is the message and vice versa. A brand mes-sage geared to appeal to Gen X females and their sense of style would be very powerful in Target. But the same message may not work in a different environment, such as a traditional grocer. The brand communication needs to enhance the shopping experience, and vice versa. For instance, Dollar General isn’t looking for Diet Pepsi to play the role of trendsetter. Instead, it is more [interested in] value on packs the shopper is familiar with.”

Q. So it’s about the shopper in a particular environment? Welsh: “Right. In the sports drink category, the shopper and consum-er aren’t [always] the same person. In convenience stores, the product is bought by the consumer. There

is a high level of brand awareness and sports involvement. Conversely, the gatekeeper in grocery is ‘shopper mom,’ who isn’t familiar with the sports celebrities. She doesn’t care. The messages geared to the sports drink con-sumer would be lost in that environment.”

Q. In retail environments, how do you measure the effect of shopper market-ing on brand equity? Welsh: “It’s possible, but pricey. The regular metrics don’t get all the way to bright. Everyone across disciplines leans on the same metrics. As an industry, we tend to rely on sales lift – whether or not that was the primary objective.”

“[For instance,] the goal in launching the Diet Pepsi skinny pack was to change the perception of the brand (see sidebar). The sales lift was ter-rific, but incidental. We did a deep dive on mea-suring changes in perception, but it was expen-sive. It doesn’t make sense to do this every time.

“That’s why there are three main buckets of measurement. The first is lift and volume. The second is behavioral – for example, how often am I buying and what else is in the basket? The third is brand equity. This includes all pre/post-shop questions around how shoppers feel about the brand, in the context of that retailer.”

Approaches and ToolsThe “Skinny Can” case is notable because the goal centered on brand equity. The measure-ment tool was Millward Brown’s brand equity survey, which regularly polls thousands of con-sumers to gauge their perceptions of various brands. The New York-based research house conducts these annual studies for many CPGs on a national basis; this is a longitudinal ap-proach that is not typically applied to shopper marketing campaigns.

To effectively use the tool to measure ac-count-level impact, PepsiCo oversampled for shoppers at a key retailer in a separate study before the “Skinny Can” program launched to calibrate the brand equity scores there to the brand’s national scores. The resulting data served as benchmarks to gauge the program’s success as determined through a post-shop survey. The results identified a statistically sig-nificant increase in brand equity.

However, the PepsiCo case was rare in that its “deep dive” into brand perceptions at the key retailer was statistically married to national brand equity measures. Since this luxury is not available for many brands or programs, a brief overview of brand equity approaches and tools is warranted.

During Fashion Week 2011, PepsiCo reintroduced Diet Pepsi to the Millennial generation by launching a new “Skinny Can,” a slimmer, taller 12-ounce pack-age whose sleek design was developed to sit along-side Diet Pepsi’s traditional packaging on shelf.

An account-specific program at Target urged shop-pers to “Get the Skinny” through branded endcaps and a cross-merch promo dangling $3 off the com-bined purchase of a four-pack and People. An ad in the Time Inc. magazine touted the offer while

presenting a fashion model posing with the product.

Diet Pepsi’s brand equity was measured through pre/post-shop interviews with Target “guests” (via Millward Brown’s panel). The brand enjoyed a sig-nificant positive lift from the effort.

The Skinny on Diet Pepsi

“The goal in launching the Diet Pepsi skinny pack was to change the perception of the brand. The sales lift was terrific, but incidental.”

Bryan Welsh, vice president of shopper marketing, PepsiCo

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The 50,000 Foot View: Dashboards Keeping regularly updated dashboards has be-come common practice in the industry. A dash-board is a business intelligence visualization of up-to-date metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). While most dashboards report brand health statistics at much higher levels than a specific shopper program, the practice is a good way to keep a finger on the pulse of the brand – sales, shopper behavior, and equity.

The chart above is a sample dashboard culled from several industry sources. (Acosta Sales and Marketing, Jacksonville, Fla., is one practitioner that parses metrics into hard and soft measures.) Creating a robust picture of brand health and shopper impact, as well as reconciling data points, is the goal.

Performance data naturally falls into two categories: fast-moving and slow-moving. Ac-cording to Agustin De Dios, director of global measurement analytics at Kimberly-Clark, “The challenge is to link the slow-moving data and analytics (such as loyalty and panel data, and MMM) with the fast-moving data (various digital activities). Fast-moving data, such as ‘Likes,’ click-throughs and visitors, can be downloaded as often as hourly. It would be interesting to discover if the fast-moving data could predict the slow-moving data.” Such reconciliation of data points and proof of correlative relationships among data sets is a continuing challenge for analytics teams.

Sales Analytics OverlaysReading the impact of a shopper marketing

program from national panel data is not practi-cal. Most programs are too granular to be cap-tured by national samples – one researcher es-timated that it would take 10 times the typical national sample size to read a specific retailer program. Moreover, short-duration programs are missed on national surveys because they’re in and out of the market too quickly to be recorded. Unless a brand increases the sample size among the retailers in question (like Diet Pepsi did), the equity impact of a single pro-gram can’t be read. And for most programs, doing so would be prohibitively expensive.

So, to understand the effect of a particular program, pre/post-shop interviews are usually overlaid onto shopper card data such as brand-switching patterns or trial numbers. Interviews can reveal a shopper’s pre-store purchase in-tent and what she remembered from her trip. Studying this is important, because there are a variety of possible impressions at play, from full-on brand immersion to phantom effects.

Brand immersion experiences – a Super Bowl spectacular or a product demonstration – are achievable in-store. Such efforts can make a measurable impression on the shopper. On the flipside are phantom effects: In one study, research firm TNS, Portland, Ore., found that more than 20% of shoppers recalled branded elements that did not exist.

Most brands monitor sales and brand per-ception on a national basis, and many are doing so for their largest shopper programs, too. However, it is possible to deconstruct the impact of in-store brand communication more

specifically. If the store is treated as another media channel, then the “shopper” can be considered as passing the same gates as the television “viewer.”

Using this concept, TNS breaks in-store brand impact into four stages: Exposure, Breakthrough, Desire and Action, each with its own measurement techniques and metrics. Exposure can include various “opportunity to see” measures, such as awareness (gleaned through pre/post-shop interviews), pass-by rates (shopping cart tracking) or even mer-chandising compliance (store audits).

The measurements associated with Break-through include main message recall (pre/post interviews), stopping power (eye-tracking) and dwell time (video tracking). Desire would include purchase intent (pre/post interviews) and brand imagery measures. Finally, Action involves conversion (video monitoring) and sales (POS data).

It should be noted that any techniques re-quiring central location testing and not in-mar-ket, such as virtual or mock stores, are better used to refine a program before launch, not to gauge in-market performance.

Full Scale In-Market InterviewsFor the biggest programs, it is essential to tie in-store brand perceptions to in-market purchase behavior. SmartRevenue, Stamford, Conn., employs hundreds of researchers to conduct in-aisle observations and interviews, which are overlaid onto sales data. This approach has merit because it records real-world behavior,

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Sample Dashboard for Measuring Brand HealthHard Measures Soft Measures

n Dollars and unit volume

n Average weekly ACV (all commodities volume)

n Percentage base and incremental units

n Merchandising compliance (audits)

n Weeks of merchandising support

n Average unit price/promoted price

n Household penetration

n Purchase frequency

n Loyalty (share of requirements)

n Total points of distribution

n Dollars per point of distribution

n Percentage shopper conversion

n Brand awareness

n Brand consideration/purchase intent

n Brand usage

n Custom brand perceptions/equity (likability, “brand for me” gauges, imagery)

n Channel/retailer preferences

n Tangible product strengths/weaknesses

n Social media preferences

n Selection/de-selection criteria

n Promotional preferences

n Perception of competing brands

Sources: Various

across retailers, during program execution. An emerging technique employs a panel of

shoppers armed with software on their smart-phones who record their purchases and self-administer questionnaires. This methodology eliminates the expense of hiring researchers to conduct interviews in-aisle. It also captures attitudes and behavior across channels and throughout the purchase cycle. (MESH Plan-ning, headquartered in London, is a leader in this area.) However, the shoppers themselves are responsible for quality assurance, which may result in uneven levels of reporting and could affect results.

In a similar vein, Modiv Media and Ahold USA’s Stop & Shop are bringing the capabili-ties of a handheld scanner to the shopper’s smartphone. Users of the retailer’s Scan It! app must first register their loyalty cards, which means that full, historical shopper information is captured. The app can deliver promotional offers, as well as record the shopper’s in-aisle location, thereby adding behavioral data to shopper card data. It also allows for a limited number of closed-end survey questions to be self-administered during the shop, permitting some brand equity measures to be taken. The app also can tie pre-shop lists to a specific retailer’s shopper card data, and to attitude data, for a participating retailer, functioning like a self-administered shopalong.

If these kinds of apps proliferate, the result-ing data could become very valuable. How-ever, retailers will own the data, potentially limiting its availability to brand marketers, and the same quality assurance issues noted above might apply.

Incorporating Digital ComponentsWhile the pre/post-shop interview approach offers robust brand insight, elements can be left out. What about digital shopper market-ing? Increasingly, digital communication is overlapping with in-store marketing because both deliver shopper interaction. Digital and especially mobile media are proving to be a natural companion to shopping. But the use of new media in-store adds an interesting wrinkle to measuring impact.

One company that measures this impact is Dynamic Logic, New York, whose AdIndex ties together qualitative and quantitative program results while incorporating the effect of digital messaging. Here’s how it works: Online ex-posure to a campaign is tracked using cookie technology, and a survey is administered. This information is then tied to shopper card data at a specific retailer. Control and exposed test cells are used. The output provides branding and ROI metrics in one deliverable. This tech-nique could be used to measure the brand impact of banner ads or a product showcase on a retailer’s site.

Deeper Issues and DisconnectsMost researchers use the term “brand equity” fairly loosely, especially in the context of shop-per marketing studies. One analytics profes-sional explained that, “We deliberately call these ‘brand perception’ measures, rather than brand equity,” and with good reason: most pre/post interviews do not tie back to an es-tablished set of brand equity questions (as Diet Pepsi’s study did). This creates an interesting disconnect. Why wouldn’t every pre/post in-terview have the same brand equity questions asked in the annual benchmarked tracker?

Part of the reason is that marketers sim-ply want other questions answered during a necessarily short interview window. What’s more, “Buyers can be promiscuous in-store, regardless of their brand affiliation. So the brand equity measure for any given shopper may or may not indicate their inclination at the point of sale,” according to Ken Feather-ston, vice president-planning for OgilvyAction, Chicago. “Perhaps a more relevant question is, ‘How can we plan and account for shop-pers who make decisions against their brand affinities?’ ”

Featherston’s group is beginning to develop brand preference benchmarks to help bridge this gap for clients. OglivyAction’s core ques-tions focus on share of mind and category decision sets, pre- and post-shop.

There is another, little discussed reason to avoid asking brand equity questions during pre/post-shop interviews: Historically, many

brand marketers have viewed in-store pro-grams as potentially eroding brand equity. More enlightened marketers, however, con-sider this only true in the case of straightfor-ward price reductions.

Ultimately, the future should bring addi-tional ways to more easily measure the im-pact of shopper programs on brand equity. The demand for these measures is rising, as shopper programming becomes increasingly entrenched and sophisticated. At the same time, technology is opening newer, faster and cheaper avenues to track individual shoppers.

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Series Schedule

Part 1: Rationalizing the Investment

Part 2: Measurement of Shopper Behavior

Part 3: Measurement of Brand Impact

Part 4: Effective Integration Practices

Part 5: Retail Collaboration

Part 6: Directions for the Future

Liz Crawford has more than 20 years of brand management and consulting experience with a concentration in strategic innovation. Over the last few years, Crawford has focused on developing integrated shopper marketing strategies for Fortune 500 clients. Currently, Crawford is an analyst and contributing writer for the Path to Purchase Institute. McGraw-Hill released her book, “The Shopper Economy,” in March.

About the Author

JWT/OgilvyAction Inc., conducting busi-ness under the OgilvyAction and JWT Ac-tion brands, is a fully integrated, end-to-end shopper marketing and experiential marketing agency with main offices in New York, Chicago and Akron, Ohio. It is part of the WPP Group.

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