As I’ve mentioned before, if you wait to influence the first moment of truth, you may be too late. Phil McGee, Director Shopper Insights for Campbell Soup Company, shared their landmark path to purchase study today and clearly they feel the same way.
Six principles guided the structure of the study: focus on motivations and drivers, find linkage, study in context, code everything, avoid bias, and look multi-channel. Makes good sense. And the study yielded some very important shopper highlights for them.
First, getting on shoppers’ lists means getting in their lives; understanding their needs across meal domains and six consumer segments. This led Campbell’s to realize there were numerous moments of influence along the path to purchase. They also found that 80% of the decisions were made before entering the store, almost the exact opposite of the prevailing theory that 70% are made in store. And though mobile is a going technology, the internet is still king for getting on the lists of Campbell’s shoppers.
Campbell’s also found that the benefits that are relevant to shoppers change based on time and situational context, flaws in mainstream technology create barriers for shoppers (e.g., website glitches) and importantly, shoppers make their own meaning of the messages they receive (fixations are short, 100-400 milliseconds).
But Campbell’s path to purchase study not only generated interesting findings for them, they are actively taking the key learning and changing the way they do things to create positive influence on their consumers. Phil McGee and Campbell Soup are good examples of turning Insights into Action!
