Shopper marketing blog

New Year, New Products? Get off to the best start by utilising reviews

Posted by Paul on Dec 13, 2023 8:00:00 AM

Launching new products in the New Year can be quite an adventure, it's no secret that the road to success for any NPD is filled with many bumps and mostly arrives at a dead end. As reported by Harvard Business Review, a staggering 90% of new products face failure within their first year, despite the substantial investments by FMCG manufacturers in R&D, marketing, and advertising.

To help your new products have the best possible start in the New Year, we'll explain the crucial role of consumer reviews. Here are four compelling reasons why securing a good number of consumer reviews as early as possible is essential for the success of your new offerings.

PS For even more on why reviews are critical for NPD, see our post 10 Reasons why Shopper Reviews are vital for Successful New Products.

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Topics: Supermarket, Grocery, FMCG, NPD, Shopper Marketing

Category Retailer Insights Report: Biscuits in Ocado

Posted by Paul on Aug 7, 2023 5:04:50 PM

This is a summary of the work we have done using hybrid AI/Human analysis of shopper reviews of the sweet biscuit category in Ocado. This analysis uses AI to understand what is new and different across huge volumes of text while the experienced human sifts the output looking for category relevance and actionability.

Highlights

  • Ocado has 875k (11.4%) of the 7.7m reviews across all categories in the Top 6 online grocery retailers*.

  • The Category has 4k (1%) of the 421k reviews across all brands in Ocado over 2021-23. 

  • 85 Biscuit brands have reviews on Ocado with an average of 47.8 reviews per brand

  • There is a big opportunity for all brands to improve their review presence in Ocado by getting at least 30 reviews per SKU and the important area to shoppers of the most recent 3 reviews.

  • Looking at individual SKUs in the category (see the Appendix for the full category list) 277 of the 308 listed need new reviews to optimise their sales online and in-store (see “How to get more reviews” below).

*Reports are available for the Top 6 grocery retailers (Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Ocado and Waitrose plus Boots and Superdrug)

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Topics: Grocery, Rating and Reviews, Shopper Research, Ocado, Insights

Consumer insights into Coffee brands from Morrisons reviews

Posted by Paul on Jul 11, 2023 6:20:52 AM

At CheckoutSmart, we are passionate about consumer product reviews. We not only provide up-to-date reviews for brands nationwide, but we also take the time to analyse and learn from them. Reviews offer valuable insights from shoppers, giving us a glimpse into the latest trends and category-specific information. With over half a million reviews from the top 6 supermarkets in the UK alone at our disposal, we have a wealth of information to explore.

Whether it is the latest trends, such as we bring alive in our Moaning March post or category specific insights from the Haircare category, there is always plenty to hear and learn. As we have all the up to date reviews for the Top 6 supermarkets in the UK in our database (over half a million) we have plenty to delve into.

We also use the review data to run our Always On SmartReputation solution, delivering reviews with precision where they are needed by SKU and retailer. This ensures that our clients can have complete confidence in the freshness and impact of the reviews on their brands, alleviating any concerns they may have. This frees up resource to get on with more added value activity as well as reducing the anxiety of surprises when someone in the team spots a series of poor reviews on one of your key packs.

In this blog post, we will be delving into the fascinating world of coffee reviews in Morrisons. Morrisons stands out as an intriguing space for reviews, as they do not participate in syndication like some other retailers. This means that not all products have a significant number of reviews for analysis, potentially causing them to be overlooked. However, in the coffee category alone, we have gathered over 100 reviews for each brand we are examining from the past 2 years. This wealth of reviews provides us with a solid foundation for uncovering valuable insights.

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Topics: Grocery, Rating and Reviews, Shopper Insights, Shopper Research, Morrisons

Food & Drink Trends & Innovations event write up

Posted by Paul on Jun 15, 2023 7:53:58 AM

The event held in London was an intimate and relaxed gathering, featuring a knowledgeable group of industry experts who weren't there to push products, but rather, to share their thoughts and ideas. The audience consisted of a diverse mix of food and beverage manufacturers, food service providers and operators, and a handful of retailers, contributing to a well-rounded and informative day filled with lively conversations and shared insights.

Rather than rehashing the entire agenda, my intention is to provide a condensed summary of the relevant topics, with a focus on novel and significant areas. However, summarising is not an exact science, so my apologies if I missed any insightful comments made by presenters.

The Food industry challenges

My overall summary of the themes for the day:

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Topics: Grocery, marketing, Shopper Insights, Shopper Research

Health and Beauty reviews insights

Posted by Paul on Jun 12, 2023 7:30:00 AM

You can learn a lot from spiders

ML Measures for reviews insight

We believe that there is lots more to understand about ratings and reviews than just "How many do I have?" and "What's my average rating"?

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Topics: Grocery, Rating and Reviews, Shopper Insights, Shopper Research

What makes the best consumer product reviews?

Posted by Paul on May 5, 2023 9:00:00 AM

Simply having 30 product reviews with an average rating of +4 is not enough to guarantee success. In fact, it's less than half the job. To truly convert shoppers, you need to have at least 30 high-quality reviews on every retailer site, and they need to be "fresh" - less than 6 months old. But it's more than this, it's about the ones that get read, the latest ones or the "Top 3" as we call them. These reviews must be positive and have influential text to maximize your conversion rate.  To achieve this, you need to work with a partner who can deliver high-quality reviews across all retailers.

After analyzing the Top 3 visible reviews for all products on Ocado's website, our data revealed that 52% of the reviews are 5-star, but only 18.3% are less than six months old. However, even those recent reviews may not be the most influential ones. To create the best reviews, they must not only be 5-star and fresh but also contain the right components. So, what makes a review text more influential?1

1 From Quality in Product Reviews: What Technical Communicators Should Know Jo Mackiewicz - 2015

In this post we look at all 6 components of influential reviews and provide examples of "the best" of each. We will then go on to answer two vital questions:

- How do you know if you have the best reviews?

- How do you get and maintain the best reviews?


NB All example data and reviews for this post are from Ocado data collected at the end of April 2023. All reviews are from the Top 3 latest reviews available on each item ie those most likely to be read by the shopper.

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Topics: Online, Grocery, FMCG, Rating and Reviews, Shopper Insights, Ocado

10 Reasons why shopper reviews are vital for successful new products

Posted by Paul on Apr 27, 2023 8:30:01 AM

Are you preparing to launch new products? Harvard Business Review reports that 90% of new products fail within the first year, despite significant investments in research, development, marketing, and advertising.

To improve your chances of success, it's important to obtain consumer reviews as soon as possible. Here are ten reasons why consumer reviews are crucial for all new grocery products:


 Reasons why shopper reviews are critical to new products are:

  1. Answering for shoppers: "Will I like it?"
  2. For instant shopper credibility
  3. You look like a bestseller
  4. Shopper read reviews for products they don't know
  5. The in-store opportunity
  6. Reap long term benefits
  7. Increasing popularity of reviews with shoppers
  8. Your competitors are growing reviews
  9. Actionable insights
  10. Avoid early delists
 
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Topics: Supermarket, Grocery, FMCG, NPD, Shopper Marketing

Moaning March – What shoppers' reviews are saying?

Posted by Paul on Apr 13, 2023 7:55:40 AM

When grocery shoppers don't get what they want, they complain. When they complain online, they write 1-star reviews. In March, they wrote over 6,500 new 1-star reviews across Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury's, Morrisons, Waitrose, and Ocado.

As the leader in ratings and reviews reporting and understanding, we wanted to know what shoppers had to say and what issues were topical. So, we delved deep into the data to come up with some fresh insights and observations.

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Topics: Online, Grocery, Rating and Reviews, Shopper Insights, digital shelf

Are your Top 3 reviews hurting your sales?

Posted by Paul on Feb 7, 2023 7:30:00 AM

Online reviews have become increasingly important to shoppers, with a recent survey conducted in April 2021 finding that 94% of consumers indicated online reviews as the most important factor in their online purchase decisions.

However, a 2022 study by professors from The University of Massachusetts & South Florida, titled "Swayed by the reviews: Disentangling the effects of average ratings and individual reviews in online word-of-mouth", challenges the commonly held view that a product's average rating plays a greater role than individual reviews in consumers' purchase decisions in increasing product sales.

The study found that while a product's average rating is all-encompassing and a comprehensive measure of product quality, "...most consumers who have high purchase intention also consult individual reviews before making up their minds". This shows that consumers are not as "rational" as received wisdom assumed and that consumers’ purchase decisions highly influenced by a few top-ranked reviews.

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Topics: Online, Grocery, Rating and Reviews, Shopper Insights

How shoppers find grocery product reviews

Posted by Paul on Oct 3, 2022 7:48:46 AM

There is general agreement amongst members of the FMCG / CPG eCommerce community that grocery ratings and reviews are an important factor driving the rate of sale on retailer sites. However, many believe this is only when a shopper is actually doing their online shop.

Our research across nearly 3,000 regular grocery shoppers says this is not correct. These days, shoppers are looking for grocery product reviews both when they are in or near a store, at home, at work, and even walking down the street.

The key findings are:

  • Online and Offline grocery shoppers regularly seek out and read product reviews. They can be at home, in-store or frankly anywhere when this happens.
  • Google is the friend of the shopper seeking grocery reviews, so brand owners need to have enough good quality reviews in all relevant online stores.
  • Shoppers are prompted most often to discover product reviews by seeing a product in-store, ads / social posts or when looking for a new product in a familiar category. Therefore it is critical if you are marketing to shoppers your products are supported with reviews.
  • Research Online and Purchase Offline (ROPO) is a common grocery shopper behaviour but this is taking place at the fixture in an Omnichannel way. Many shoppers see a product they are curious about in the store, and their first instinct is to read the reviews wherever they find them, and then choose to buy it right away.

This research shows that grocery product ratings & reviews are used far more widely than just when shopping online and are a key driver of the purchase decisions online & in-store.

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Topics: Online, Supermarket, Grocery, Rating and Reviews, ecommerce, Shopper Insights, digital shelf

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  • Actively manage your shopper reputation in all online retailers
  • Create instant shopper action in any retailer, on any sku in the way you want
  • Start a genuine dialogue with shoppers about your products
  • Launch more successful NPD faster and use immediate feedback to improve your mix
  • Excite shoppers with easy to execute, effective virtual on-pack activities
  • Upgrade your understanding of the retail execution within all retailers
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