Shopper marketing blog

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

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.

In the second month of their online grocery shopping tracker, CheckoutSmart continues to bring fresh insights into this fast-growing, fast-changing market.

NB The numbers below are deliberately obscured, if you would like to know the answers please contact us.

As a leading digital shopper marketing agency, we are always looking to extend our understanding of the ever-changing grocery shopping environment. Recently we undertook a survey of regular grocery shoppers to understand how they shop on Tesco online and what they think about their experience.

The feedback tells us that there is opportunity for Tesco.com to grow faster but also some significant threats in the wings. Everything we asked has been collated into a comprehensive 20-page report which is available to download. We have pulled the highlights together into a summary SWOT analysis below, together with a few examples of the charts in the download.

If you would like the full report it is available to download here.

We surveyed members of CheckoutSmart to understand their experiences of shopping during Covid-19 and their views on how their behaviour will change when things "more or less return to normal". In total 4,324 members responded, over 3,100 of whom are also online grocery shoppers. 

The survey focused on how their grocery shopping experience had changed pre and during Covid-19 restrictions and their personal expectations on how their behaviour will change going forward. This blog article contains a summary of the most relevant results. More detail on specific topics may be available, please contact us to hear more.

The most significant finding is that online shopping could still grow even faster post Covid if retailers can address the two major concerns shoppers have of slot availability (which is surely just a matter of time) and the cost of delivery which must surely come down with scale and the the recent move by Amazon. 

With all the pressure from retailers and the fact that many brands have postponed their FMCG NPD launches until the second half of the year, we thought it would be helpful to review the shopper marketing options available to support NPD in supermarkets.

For those new to working with the major supermarket retailers in the UK, navigating your way through the variety of shopper marketing options can seem like the proverbial minefield. We've spent the best many years working for FMCG suppliers and supporting them as an agency. With our collective experience, we have broken down the pros and cons of each option in the hopes it will help you identify the best course for your product's unique marketing challenge.

We've grouped our thoughts under the kinds of questions you should be asking yourself when you are planning a shopper marketing campaign:

It's obvious when you think about it, that for online grocery shoppers selecting products to put in their basket, product Rating out of 5 is always more important than the number of Reviews, right?

Well, wrong actually and not just wrong occasionally, wrong most of the time. From our research of 3,710 online supermarket shoppers we know that when the average Ratings for two similar products are different by as much as 0.3 eg 4.2 vs 4.5, then the number of Reviews is much more important in product choice. Let me give you an example:

Q. What happens when the government says "stay at home"?

A. People get up early and go to the supermarket!

Kantar* have just said that grocery sales were up 20.6% in March to their highest ever level, peaking 16th - 19th March. From our analysis of shopper's receipts submitted to us as part of cashback claims, we can see that they were up much earlier than usual that week, probably to "avoid the crowds" or just get there when items are in stock. This happened again the week after, when the restrictions were increased as the chart below illustrates:

As we go through a surge in online shopping, now is the perfect time to ensure your brands get their fair share of sales both now and in the future. Of course you should ensure you have the right images and descriptions, as these form "the basics" of eCommerce. It is also fundamental to your success to offer the undecided a perspective from their fellow shoppers through Ratings & Reviews. Genuine shopper product reviews delivered from validated buyers directly to the retailer sites, without any moderation on a specific sku are the best way of doing this and will make an immediate impact to sales.

Delivering Ratings & Reviews

After our Sainsburys Ratings and Reviews blog last month we've been digging around the other main UK supermarket websites.  We know that Tesco don't currently show Ratings & Reviews on their website, so when we popped the hood on their site and had a look around we were surprised to discover that their ratings & reviews were actually there but hidden from the public.

To save you the time finding and collating for yourselves, we’ve pulled it together into some nice summary charts below. For your free brand report for your category, just get in touch and we’ll happily send you one over.  

Figure 1: Infographic summary of Tesco.com ratings & reviews