Why You Should Track Your Shopper Behavior

Retailers shoulder a heavy responsibility of truly and authentically understanding their target customers, delivering on their brand promise, and creating continued moments of meaningful connection and curated shopping experiences.

Successful retailers and CPGs stand out by their dedication to comprehend and fulfill the constantly evolving desires and requirements of their customers.  

By staying attuned to the ever-changing preferences and desires of their target audience, retailers can adapt and innovate, ensuring they remain relevant and valued by their customers. In this way, retailers can foster a sense of connection and purpose among their customer base, creating shopping experiences that are not just about buying products, but about creating moments of connection and joy.

Building meaningful shopper loyalty will forever be a moving target, and the most successful retailers keep an ever-present pulse on building empathy and continuing to learn from their shoppers.  One essential source of intel that retailers should look to to keep a fresh perspective on their growth spots and blind spots through the eyes of their shoppers is behavioral insights.

Here are the 3 key reasons retailers should track, and continually learn from, their shopper behavior data:

Walking in Your Shoppers Shoes Reveals Some Surprising Insights

Some market research companies, like VideoMining, focusing on observational research and shopper behavior science, offer retailers a distinctive chance to see things from their customers' perspective and walk in the shoes of their shoppers. Observational research, often regarded as the gold standard in quantitative market research methods, enables marketers to gather real-world evidence and gain an authentic insight into shopper behavior.  Having unprompted, uninterrupted, simple fact-based insights at your fingertips can help remove speculation and assumptions, replacing conjecture with cause-and-effect results.  There is a steady source of empirical insights that are waiting to be uncovered, and every shopper who steps foot in your store has a story to tell.

Hidden Macro Trends Are Unlocked

Observational research provides top-notch insights that are highly reliable and rooted firmly in facts.  That said, observational research traditionally included rather small sample sizes and rather concentrated areas.  After all, how many shopper trips can a single market researcher reasonably observe and track over time?  AI technologies, such as VideoMining’s patented data decoding tools, enable large-scale observational research to be conducted across hundreds of thousands of store trips.  By decoding shopper behaviors through the lens of every single piece of stimuli they encounter in the store – from signage, to product placement, to store design and more – AI technologies can connect the dots that are hidden to the human eye.  This allows retailers to capture a compelling, factual, and actionable story from every micro-moment of the shopper experience in your stores.

Innovation and Collaboration Are Transformed

Retailers who analyze their shoppers' behavioral data to guide their innovation strategy and retail execution tactics can determine the most suitable approach based on evidence that indicates how their shoppers will respond. By continually capturing shopper behavior data from your stores, retailers can quickly and efficiently propose hypotheses and experiment with new ideas in real-time and on a large scale – with mitigated risk.

With VideoMining’s Behavior Labs™, retailers have a turnkey program in their hands to test and learn in their stores, and uncover new actionable insights from their shoppers’ behavioral data with ease.  Retailer clients routinely leverage behavioral insights from their stores to build informed strategies on things like store design, category growth strategies, and merchandising design planning.  When questions emerge about the proper placement of the foodservice counter, or why a particular category performance dropping, retail marketing and insights teams with access to behavioral insights can quickly present a factual response, along with a measured approach to adjusting and refining.

Retailers can also leverage their shopper behavior data to revolutionize their approach to CPG supplier collaborations.   By utilizing Behavior Labs™, retailer partners can create joint business plans and category growth strategies with a flexible and inventive approach that will accelerate future success and shared knowledge. Lab Stores™ can be utilized by retailers to experiment and gain insights from their shopper insights, and supplier collaborative testing partnerships allow for better insights and more shared knowledge.  This collaborative approach is lucrative for retail teams, and collectively helps support industry growth and evolution to build ultimate future shopping experience and retail strategy.

By consistently upholding their brand promise and crafting distinctive and captivating shopping experiences, retailers can establish strong bonds with their customers that will stand up to the changing tides of the shopping landscape. Where shopping experiences were once analyzed at a transaction level, now are analyzed through the lens of behavioral science.  This responsive and agile approach to learning and testing new ideas is at the cornerstone of VideoMining’s Retailer Partner Program, which provides retail partners with unparalleled visibility to shopper behavior intelligence and channel benchmarking...and much, much more.  To learn more about Retailer Partnerships, click here.