The Retail Media Revolution : Online Panel Discussion Hot Takes
28th November 2024
Vanessa Henry
Retail media has been a passion of mine for quite a while. In particular exploring shoppers’ perspectives and the impact on their behaviour. So much of the current conversation leaves out one of the most important stakeholders in the retail media debate – shoppers! It’s my firm belief that to strive for a successful retail media strategy, we need to consider shoppers more as ultimately this group is the best judge of performance!
So it was fantastic that last week I got the opportunity to really immerse myself in the topic and spend some time with my behavioural and neuroscience colleagues to really unpick the shopper point of view. Also, it was a really exciting personal opportunity to practice my hosting skills and use the fantastic recording studio through our new partnership with Accenture Song!
Over the years, we’ve built up a really good understanding of how and why shoppers engage with different types of media, shopper marketing and POS by working with some great clients, so it was great to be able to share some of this knowledge and, some new research we’d run ahead of our discussion.
Chatting to Thaltia, Nick and Martha and getting their perspectives on the really hot topic, I took away three big things from the discussion:
- Location, location, location! We’ve run a lot of eye-tracking, in-store observations and intercepts in-store to try to identify the key hot spots for shopper engagement in-store (and online!). In our panel discussion [watch here], we share a retail media engagement hierarchy which shows some of these key hot spots. But what we’ve found from all this work is that location is the number one driver of retail media engagement (or not). No matter how well designed your creative is for a display, sign or online banner, it’s not in the right location, you miss out on engaging shoppers.
- Bring in the emotion! My colleague Nick Saxby has some really interesting perspective from a neuroscience and brand & comms perspective. One thing we have seen over and over again within his areas of work is that stimulating emotion is a great way to drive consumer and shopper engagement. From all the different store and online visits we do regularly to see what are the latest developments in retail media, we can see a massive opportunity for brands and retailers to collaborate more and bring more emotion into retail media.
- The ‘mere exposure’ effect – you might be wondering what this is! Our behavioural science expert Martha really brought this to life in our discussion. This is basically the brain’s increasingly positive response to something, by merely being exposed to it. This is good news for brands and retailers – the more you’ve been exposed to something the more you’re liking of it, the more open you are to it at purchase in future. Now we don’t agree this is a ticket to introduce as much retail media as possible, but it does mean that there is a role for well designed and executed shopper marketing.
We also spent a good bit of time talking about digital retail media in-store. This is key for lots of brands and retailers as screens will definitely feature in the future of retail media. However, we did discuss some examples which could definitely be optimised to ensure they are getting better shopper engagement and therefore a better return on investment.
One great example I’ve seen in Tesco stores over the last few months is this full length screen just at the top of the power aisle as shoppers are funnelled through the front-of-store seasonal aisle. This is a brilliant example of a great location for any retail media – in the majority of shoppers’ footfall and eye-line as they make their way to the power aisle.
The forecasts for the growth of retail media in the future are big and get a lot of attention. I don’t disagree that we should get excited about the growth, but personally for me I get more excited when we talk about how retail media can play a more relevant role to shoppers. Ultimately this will support both brands and retailers driving better engagement and hopefully greater conversion on the back of investment.
All the work we do with clients on retail media will include an element of how to optimise in the future.
This is what gets us really excited.
Last week Thalita, Nick and Martha shared their top tips on how to optimise retail media in the future – I’ve put together a summary of these:
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Have Shoppers
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Invest in Understanding Your Shoppers |
Retail Media Should Guide and Clarify |
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The foundation of every successful retail media strategy starts with the shopper – nudging their behaviour is key to better retail media performance. |
Deep insights into shopper behaviours and preferences are crucial – this can help you understand what role media plays for your sector and category. |
Retail media isn’t just about exposure – it’s about helping shoppers navigate and drive ease of purchase. |
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Make Your Brand Stand Out |
Find an Emotional
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Future opportunities to optimise |
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To standout, consistency and simplicity in messaging are key to get shopper cut-through. |
Emotions drive decisions. Tying retail media efforts to emotional triggers helps create memorable, impactful connections with audiences. |
Retail Media has made great strides in cutting through the noise, but there’s still work to be done. |
Investing understanding in how your shoppers engage with retail media will be key to understand where to focus improvements for the future. This research combined with retailer sales data will give you a much better picture of performance as you can explore the why behind the data.
At Walnut we focus on empathy-driven insight and behavioural expertise which we feel is key to supporting both brands and retailer understand how to better engage shoppers. Drop me a note to find out more and continue this exciting conversation on the future of retail media.
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