Thursday, February 16, 2012

Shopper Intimacy: A Practical Guide To Leveraging Marketing Intelligence To Drive Retail Success (Pearson Custom Business Resources) By Rick Deherder, Dick Blatt

Shopper Intimacy: A Practical Guide to Leveraging Marketing Intelligence to Drive Retail Success (Pearson Custom Business Resources)

Shopper Intimacy: A Practical Guide To Leveraging Marketing Intelligence To Drive Retail Success (Pearson Custom Business Resources) By Rick Deherder, Dick Blatt

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Product Description

Retail marketing is undergoing cataclysmic change, driven by upheavals in media, consumer attitudes, and the retail industry itself. Retailers know they must invest more heavily in marketing, both to build brands and to drive sales. But how? In Shopper Intimacy, two leading experts offer the first comprehensive, research-based guide to building winning retail marketing programs. Drawing on a decade of customer research, the authors introduce: 

  • A start-to-finish system for planning and executing effective campaigns. 
  • Powerful new tools for influencing shopper behavior and driving better results.
  • Practical, workable techniques for measuring performance – including a breakthrough approach for measuring ROI from the standpoint of all stakeholders. 
  • Best practices models for integrating internal and syndicated research.
  • Trend analysis to help retailers chart the future trajectory of marketing, and position themselves appropriately.

Shopper Intimacy contains extensive case studies, charts, pictures, and illustrations designed to deepen marketers' understanding. Above all, it presents practical learnings that cut across all retail segments, with data to support the authors' conclusions, and techniques for successfully applying them.

 
Product Details
  • Amazon Sales Rank: #511701 in Books
  • Published on: 2010-09-23
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 1.07" h x 6.36" w x 9.26" l, 1.05 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 256 pages
Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

"Two scarred, but well-decorated veterans deconstruct in-store marketing. Rick DeHerder and Dick Blatt give us a tour of where the rubber meets the road in modern consumption. Comprehensive, exhaustive, and complete, this is a volume for both marketer and merchant."

Paco Underhill, Founder, CEO, and President, Envirosell and Author of What Women Want, Why We Buy and Call of the Mall

 

"Enhancing our in-store environment with relevant products, promotions, and innovations will win shopper loyalty. That loyalty will drive more shoppers, greater baskets, and more trips, leading to incremental revenue and market share for Walgreens. Shopper Intimacy is a fantastic resource for time-poor marketing professionals seeking insights, interpretations, and implications of the vast library of research and studies in the field of in-store marketing. Additionally, this guide will help us make better decisions on our marketing spending by providing a structured approach and the necessary metrics for calculating a return on that spending."

Don Whetsone, Senior Director of Merchandising Strategy and Development, Walgreens

 

Retail marketing is undergoing cataclysmic change, driven by upheavals in media, consumer attitudes, and the retail industry itself. To build brands and drive sales, retailers must invest more heavily in marketing. But how? With Shopper Intimacy, you will understand the customer more deeply than ever before–and be able to act on that knowledge.

 

Drawing on years of industry research, Rick DeHerder and Dick Blatt introduce a start-to-finish system for achieving true shopper intimacy. You'll master powerful new tools for influencing shopper behavior–supported by extensive case studies, charts, and real-world examples. You'll also find indispensable performance metrics–including new ways to measure return on investment (ROI) from the standpoint of key stakeholders.

 

Shopper Intimacy brings together breakthrough insights for all retail segments, detailed data to support them, and practical techniques for applying and profiting from them.

 

Outstanding Retail Results in Five Steps

1. Understand shopper behavior more deeply.

2. Unlock the psychology driving shopper behavior.

3. Integrate this data to achieve shopper intimacy.

4. Identify and implement intimacy-driven strategies.

5. Measure and track your success.

 

About the Author

The authors have a deep involvement in the industry with complementary backgrounds. They collaborated to lead a great deal of the primary industry research and together have worked with the leaders of every industry segment. They are uniquely positioned to use their familiarity with the industry and the research to apply their personal experience to create a comprehensive review of marketing at retail with a guide for driving retail success.

 

Rick DeHerder was the founder of Array, a leading designer and manufacturer of fixtures and displays, with operations in North America and China and a network of strategic partners around the world. Prior to founding Array in 1999, Rick spent 24 years in both brand marketing as Executive Vice President at Mattel, and in the retail industry at Sears, working in the stores, regional offices, and headquarters. This broadbased experience gives him unique insight into the challenges of retail marketing at all levels.

 

Dick Blatt is the president of Planar World Consulting. He served as the CEO of POPAI–The Global Association for Marketing at Retail, for 17 years. In this role, he was called upon to author articles and deliver presentations around the world on the subject of marketing at retail, its future, and its trends. He was also selected to provide The Center for Association Leadership with two case studies of excellence for going global and reinventing the association. During his tenure, one of the association's primary strategic goals was to integrate the marketing at retail medium in the strategic marketing mix. The association also expanded to include 20 country chapters, with an organizational presence on every populated continent.


Customer Reviews

Most helpful customer reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
4Good Substance but too much Jargon (3.5 Stars)
By Robert Brooks
Shopper Intimacy is one of the better business books for Kindle that I have seen FT Press release in the past month or so. The authors of the book are extremely talented in their field and have a lot of real-world experience that is demonstrated throughout: Dick Blatt has worked specifically within the area of retail marketing for numerous years, and that experience helps to illustrate many of the books points.

The authors provide a wealth of information to anyone interested in the subject of marketing within the retail sphere. First the authors discuss the use of data in targeting a specific segment of society that you either: (a) know is your target audience (as an aside: the authors argue persuasively that you must know your target audience before any of their practical solutions can be used, which while general knowledge, is not always well heeded) or (b) learn which target audience actually purchases the most in your store. Retail stores are now able to comb through a phenomenal amount of data obtained via credit cards, user surveys, and VIP cards that track every purchase, demographic, location, etc. Using this data, the authors discuss the segmentation process itself, and outline the different types of shoppers. The second portion of the book was the most interesting to me: it covers a plethora of information about the psychology of shopping, and how that relates to marketing. The last three sections of the book roughly attempt to put together the learning from the first two sections practically: now that you know your segmentation and the way shoppers in your segment buy, how do you apply that to your marketing? How do you integrate all of your different forms of marketing: agencies, in-store, circulars, etc, to have one consistent plan? And last, how do you measure the effects of your marketing to make sure you are on the correct track?

As you can tell, there is an almost overwhelming amount of information contained in this book. If you are a marketing professional or a decision maker with a retail store, this is a fantastic book for you. There is one significant draw-back, however: unless you are intimately familiar with industry buzz words and jargon, you may often miss the author's points because they use an unending litany of jargon. The caption itself provides an example of this: "A Practical Guide to Leveraging Marketing Intelligence to Drive Retail Success" instead of, say "How to use common data to increase sales." Here are some more examples from the book:

"The rapid adoption of transformative technologies amplifies the demographic trends..."
"The inter-related strands of shopper diversification and empowerment, mass media implosion, and retail maturation converging at a time of great economic distress creates a major inflection point..."

While each of these sentences is not confusing on its own, sentence after sentence with jargon and unnecessarily large/ambiguous words easily distract the reader. This is truly a shame because the authors have provided some extremely useful information and insights. If you are able to get past the distracting verbage and word-choice, this book will help you think critically through your retail marketing strategy and effectiveness.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
1Lacks Intimacy or a practical guide
By D. Greenbaum
If this is about Shopper Intimacy, then pornography to these researchers must include scattergrams, pie charts and bar graphs. This book read more like a research paper or masters thesis rather than a practical guide for business and provided few conclusions and practically (pardon the pun) no concrete takeaways for a retail business. Intimacy was the last thing that came to mind after reading this book.

While justifying your conclusions and suggestions is important, most books do this in footnotes and endnotes rather than include their extensive and exhaustive research in the context of the book. Roughly 80% of the book is a discussion of the research methods and raw data the researches used to make their modest conclusions about traffic flows in retail stores as well as displays.

Instead of focusing on what retailers can do to increase sales inside their stores, the book focuses on the perspective of the brand's individual presence in the store and how display methods and promotions can influence sales. For a retail business owner, such suggestions are simply not applicable. The business owner is more interested in making the sale and having the consumer ideally choose the product that provides the greatest margin.

The book does cover some suggestions business owners can use in the "planogram," which involves the layout of product on the shelf. For example, the researchers found putting the brand leader in the middle of the shelf and prominently displaying higher margin brands next to it actually increases sales of the non-brand leader. Consumers use the brand leader as an anchor for the category. This great suggestion doesn't come until you've suffered through half the book's statistical justification for that conclusion.

Chapter 8, Decision Drivers, was the true guide portion of the book and covered extremely helpful ideas for decision a retail space and placing product to encourage purchases of not just their intended target, but similar items. Business owners that don't want to know how these Decision Drivers were determined can simply skip to this section. The fifty or so pages of this chapter may spark some great ideas for you, but I'm not sure I'd recommend a book that only had 50 pages of useful information.

Overall, I'd suggest skipping this book if you are looking for "a practical guide" or how to become more intimate with your customers and understand their buying habits. If you want to learn about how researchers develop a process of analyzing customer purchases, then this is the book for you!

Pros: A few practical suggestions
Cons: Too many statistics and justification and not enough "intimacy" nor a "practical guide" as the title states

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
4Marketing on hunches alone? Here's a guide to get you back on track.
By Jared Castle
If you don't know your target audience, how will you know if and when you reach them? Authors Rick DeHerder and Dick Blatt provide data-driven improvements to marketing plans too often built on hunches and previous experience alone.

DeHerder and Blatt introduce REAP, an acronym for the Retail Ecosystem Analytics Program, described as "a rigorous, complete methodology for transforming this knowledge into winning campaigns, products, and formats." I won't endorse the process as the sole solution to retail marketing challenges but I am encouraged by their assertions that data and metrics are the cornerstones of a successful retail marketing plan.

My interest in retail marketing took off after reading Paco Underhill's book Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping. I regularly read trade periodicals and other magazines that feature the latest and greatest approaches to motivating consumers. It was with this background and enthusiasm that I reached for Shopper Intimacy.

In summary, if you are working for a manager who leaps from one marketing fad to another and eschews data collection then this book is for you. Consider buying an extra copy for your manager if his/her idea of performance measures is to count Facebook friends. Your next discussion about the need to measure return on investment (ROI) will be more successful if everyone on your team takes the time to read this (and many other industry books).

One caveat is that DeHerder and Blatt wrote the book for people already well versed in the field. Shopper Intimacy isn't Retail Marketing 101. Newbies may need to keep a glossary handy.

Rating: Four stars.

http://astore.amazon.com/amazon-book-books-20/detail/013707543X

 
 
 
 

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