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Millward Brown: Point of View

For brand marketers, influencing a retailer is not an easy thing to do. It feels like inviting

yourself to someone else’s party. So, as it becomes more and more difficult to get a good

return on investments in brand communications, what other options do brands have to

influence people as they shop?

The good news is that there are indeed many options available. It is a simple matter of

making the most of the very meaning of the word “commerce,” which Webster’s definesas “social intercourse: interchange of ideas, opinions, or sentiments.” Trading goods, then, is

about human interaction. To succeed, marketers should focus on leveraging opportunities

to directly interact with people.

“The Clue Train Manifesto” made the same point when it

was published online in April 1999. Written by four experts

on the then-nascent Internet, the Manifesto described

the new reality of online communication. “Markets are

conversations,” reads the first of the 95 theses. The

beauty of that observation resided not only in the wayit predicted the extraordinary rise of social media and

renewed interest in word of mouth, but also in its ability

to remind us of a simple human truth that we had somehow forgotten on this side of the

globe: At its core, shopping is a deal between two people. From ancient bazaars to today’s

street markets, shopping malls, and online marketplaces, people like to interact.

It’s All About Real and Genuine Human Needs

In the thousands of daily face-to-face conversations that our qualitative community has

around the world, we get an understanding of the needs, wants, and motivations of shoppers.

Across the globe, we have noticed similar forceful trends. As the world becomes more

Shopping: Not About Product or Place,

but InteractionMarketers want people to get closer to their brands, but retailers have always owned

the direct relationship with shoppers. Retailers diligently research shopper needs,

motivations, and behaviors to find ways to improve the experiences of people

visiting their stores, but they do this more for their own benefit than for any

individual brand (save their own private labels).

From ancient bazaars

to today’s street

markets, shopping

malls, and online

marketplaces, peoplelike to interact.

Cécile ConaréEuropean Qualitative ManagerMillward Browncecile.conare@millwardbrown.com

www.mb-blog.com

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Millward Brown: Point of View Shopping: Not About Product or Place, but Interaction

©2010 Millward Brown

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Create Your Own Store

By creating its own store, a brand builds its own ecosystem.

But more importantly it fully leverages human contact at

every stage of the shopper’s experience: hospitality, care,

engagement, reassurance, confidence, involvement, and

local proximity. Examples of brands that started trading their

goods via intermediaries and then created their own stores

are numerous, including Sony, Apple, Lego, Nike, Nespresso,

Hershey, and Microsoft.

Sometimes only one flagship store is sufficient. The main

objective is to create memories. The store has to alter a guest’s

sense of reality through its effect on his or her experience of

space, time, and matter. It must transform the act of buying

into something much more interesting, thus demonstrating

the real generosity of the brand.

If you think that only big brands can afford such a privilege,

there are many alternatives to it, including corners in

department stores and mobile kiosks smartly located. These

“micro-stores” can create a unique brand environment on

a small scale, but more importantly they will make direct

interaction possible. The famous Ladurée French brand of

macaroons recently decided to sell its products in Orly Airport

in Paris. Designed with the brand’s tone and style in mind,

the kiosk actually looks like an 18th century cart, from which

travelers can select a last-minute gift or a treat to transformtheir dining experience up in the air.

globalized, people long to feel at home. As products continue

to be produced on an ever-more-massive scale, people

yearn for personalization. As our environment becomes more

digital and complex, people appreciate personal warmth and

engagement.

Brands can capitalize on these trends by offering shoppers

products and experiences that are personally relevant in an

environment that’s warm and hospitable.

Beware of the Turbulence Zone

In their book  Creating Passion Brands, Helen Edwards and

Derek Day define three zones of brand perception: the zones

of mediation, discovery, and intimacy. The Zone of Intimacy is

the place where people are physically interacting with brands:

holding the packages, reading the labels, sniffing, tasting, or

touching the product. This is the zone where brand perceptions

and images are most intensely felt, experienced, and built.

The authors say that “here brand contact is voluntary, sensory,

and direct. The brand is there because the consumer wants

it to be, and its sensorial qualities — taste, colour, fragrance,

feel, sound, weight, atmosphere — are strongly perceived and

noted.”

Of course a brand has control over the sensory qualities of

the product, but if it is sold through retail intermediaries, it

does not have direct interaction with shoppers. Consequently,

a big opportunity to make a real and memorable differenceis lost. But there’s a solution that has proven to be extremely

successful: Create a unique shopping environment around

your brand. This can facilitate the direct interaction that can

build the virtuous circle of trust that leads to shopper loyalty

and profit.

This shopping environment may be a store in which you

deliver your brand directly to your customers, but for many

brands that’s not feasible. Even so, there may be overlooked

opportunities to draw shoppers into your brand’s space,whether that’s a section of a store, an aisle, or a shelf.

There may be overlooked opportunities to draw

shoppers into your brand’s space, whether that’s a

section of a store, an aisle or a shelf.

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3Millward Brown: Point of View Shopping: Not About Product or Place, but Interaction

©2010 Millward Brown

Add Services

Another successful proposition is to add services on top

of your current business model — that is, provide someadditional benefit in a customized way. Product delivery is one

option, and here we have another example from France. In

Paris, Evian now offers a home delivery service, smartly called

“Evian Chez Vous”1 or “Evian at your home.”

Home delivery may not be an innovation per se, but when

it comes to bottled water, it’s a perfect match. Who likes to

purchase bottles of water from the supermarket? They’re

heavy to load in your cart, onto the counter, and then into

the car (if you’re lucky enough to have one). Besides, water isoften located in the most unattractive place within the store

(i.e., close to the storage area). Home delivery may not stop

people from switching to tap water, but it does add a more

personal touch to the water-shopping experience.

Many other forms of valued-added innovation are possible.In 2006, Nike teamed up with Apple to launch their Nike+

initiative, which was made up of the Nike+iPod sports kit, the

nikeplus.com training Web site, Nike Sports Music on iTunes,

as well as apparel and accessories. The kit not only enables

users to track their running statistics but, in combination with

the training site, allows users to upload their stats and engage

with a vast community of runners online.

Launching other types of services can be as simple as adding a

toll-free number to a package. At Thanksgiving and Christmas

time in the United States, Butterball operates the Butterball

Turkey Talk-Line, which helps close to 100,000 cooks each

year with their turkey preparations. The UK company Dyson

prints the telephone number of its helpdesk on every one of

its vacuum cleaners to make it easy for customers to call for

help when they need it.

Personalization

Consumer help lines are an example of a personalized service,

but brands can also offer their customers opportunities topersonalize their products. Some brands have succeeded in

making this a point of difference. On its Web site My M&M’s,

the M&M Mars company allows people to not only choose

the color of their candies, but also to create their own tiny

messages on them. Other examples include Apple, which

gives people the chance to engrave a message on their iPods,

and the U.S. Postal Service, where individuals can design and

print their own customized postage stamps.

Use Your “Voice” Carefully

Under ideal circumstances, you are taking great personal care

of your valuable customers and enriching their experience

in a memorable way. But what happens when something

goes wrong with your product? Often that is the only time

people will have personal interaction with your brand. Dealing

with problems effectively is critical to maintaining high levels

of customer satisfaction, and that task can be especially

challenging when it must be handled over the phone.

We’ve all experienced those maddening moments when you

have to make one menu selection after another, hold for “the

next available agent,” and listen to a message stating that your

call “may be recorded for quality assurance purposes” before

It’s time to reinvent the way we sell by reinstating

the indispensable human touch at every corner of

our brands.

 1http://www.evianchezvous.com/

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Millward Brown: Point of View Shopping: Not About Product or Place, but Interaction

©2010 Millward Brown

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ever getting to speak to a live person. And when the answer

that person provides sounds too pat and rehearsed and ends

with “we’re sorry…, ” a moment of truth has been transformed

into a moment of pain. Crisis hotlines offer a lesson here: With

a tone of voice that is firm and empathetic, they offer people

assurance that they will be listened to.

Tone of voice adds a great deal to a message. “It takes a humanvoice to infuse [words] with deeper meaning,” said the poet

Maya Angelou. So shouldn’t voice be the first hiring criteria

for helpline staff, as it is for any presenter on a radio station?

If you think that’s foolish, let me take it one step further. Peter

Simpson, founder of First Direct, the first online bank in the

UK, puts prospective call center operators through an unusual

test. “Banking is easy,” he says, “but talking isn’t.” So he asks

the applicants, “What would you say to a lemon?” and hires

the ones who are most convincing at appearing to engage in

conversation with a piece of fruit.

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Last Call for Reinvention

The call for human touch and interaction is indisputable, and

it will deeply redefine the way products are sold. We seeit already, and as paradoxical as it may seem, the trend is

apparent even in technology.2 Take Amazon, for example. In

comparison with physical bookstores, it has a disincarnated

relationship with its clients. Yet from the very start, Amazon

creatively integrated readers’ expert comments and peer

recommendations into its system, and recontacts customers

with new releases or products that may be of interest to

them.

So what are we waiting for? It’s time to reinvent the way wesell by reinstating the indispensable human touch at every

corner of our brands — delivering the promise, dealing

with problems, establishing personal contact, and genuinely

looking after people.

To read more about shopping and human inter-

action, visit www.mb-blog.com.

If you liked “Shopping: Not About Product or Place,but Interaction,” you might also be interested in:

 Putting the Shopper Back Into Marketing 

 Making the Most of the Moment of Truth

 Make Friends, Don’t Pitch Them

 Are 70 Percent of Brand Decisions Really Taken

 In-store? 

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 2 See BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands 2010