Kraft Leverages Shopper Insights to Develop Ocasion-Based Marketing

For a generation, Americans have been pushing their food-shopping trips closer to when they actually consume their purchases rather than going like clockwork simply to re-stock their shelves. But CPG companies and supermarkets have been slow to figure out how to address this cultural shift in their marketing and merchandising practices.



Until now, that is. Leveraging shopper insights gained from a massive new research study,
Kraft has begun emphasizing “occasion-based marketing” aimed at tapping into the real-time interests and passions that consumers demonstrate during trips with different purposes to various food retailers. And they’re beginning to work with retailer customers to put occasion-based marketing to work for both parties, utilizing customized programs and promotions.

“The key is to trigger the passion for the eating experience during the shopping trip,”
Diane Tielbur, senior director of shopper engagement for Kraft Foods told CPGmatters.
“Today, most stores are designed to help shoppers fill their pantry, not to elicit the joy of the eating experience.”

So the “magic” of occasion-based marketing “is to create a tighter link between a shopper’s anticipated eating experience and the actual in-store shopping experience.” Tapping into the “passion shoppers have for eating,” Tielbur said, can be accomplished through in-store displays, sampling, retail design, messaging, visuals and meaningful product offerings.

“The power of occasion-based marketing is that it can unlock the potential of the everyday eating occasions we all experience.”

Tielbur said that the CPG industry still tends to think of shopping trips in the traditional fashion. Kraft has recently broken out of that funk in large part due to two developments: its recent combination of its shopper-insights group and its consumer-insights group, and its new research with 15,000 consumers. As a result, Kraft has formed a “call to action” to include retailers in exploiting what the company has learned.

As part of the research, Kraft examined the variety of occasions that motivate consumers to shop beyond the axiomatic weekly trek to the supermarket where they spend $150 or $200
to re-stock. That doesn’t happen nearly as much as it used to. Contributing factors include
not only the increasingly frenetic pace of life, especially in households that depend on two incomes, as well as economic strains that prompt shoppers to focus on value as well
as convenience.

As a result, consumers more often are spreading out the shopping occasions as they browse for that evening’s dinner, for a family birthday party the upcoming weekend, for a lunchtime snack, or perhaps fulfilling the grocery list of an elderly parent. They also are frequenting the growing number and type of grocery retailers as they address these occasions, Kraft’s research found.

“Not all of these occasions are created equal,” Tielbur said. “The afternoon snacking occasion is very different from the after-dinner snack occasion, and both occasions vary based on who was present and the in-going expectations or needs for that occasion.”

Shoppers also may vary in what they’re seeking for weekday breakfast goods when they’re shopping on Sundays through Wednesdays, for instance, compared with what Tielbur called “more savoring family- and couple-oriented breakfast solutions that consumers try to supply with shopping trips from Thursdays through Saturdays.

Kraft set out to define these occasions in more meaningful ways, to quantify them, and to understand the occasions that are most important to its various retail partners. That is
making it much easier to design marketing programs, retail-layout recommendations, and
new products.”

For example, Kraft has been working with a retailer that Tielbur declined to identify, on snacking occasions that are important to their particular shoppers, helping differentiate them from other retailers in their trading area. Stand-alone displays are one tool because they can prove very effective with a focused occasion as their central theme.

“But even something as simple as rolling fresh bread out to the registers between 4 p.m.
and 6 p.m. is occasion-based marketing that good retailers already do with great success,” Tielbur said.

As effectively as some retailers already tap into the occasion-based motives brought by consumers into their stores – even if they don’t use the terminology – Tielbur said that “there is certainly an upside” to be gained by Kraft and its customers in using the occasion-based lens even more.

That includes the idea of finding ways to get shoppers to focus on upcoming occasions as well as the primary one that has motivated a particular trip.

“While consumers are shopping for dinner,” Tielbur said, “we’d love to get them thinking about tomorrow’s breakfast or lunch – and capture another occasion.”

That's where partnerships with retailers -- based on in-store marketing, promotion and merchandising -- can really optimize the occasion-based marketing philosophy. Kraft is counting on them to take to heart the truism of retailing that one good return deserves another.