Nothing, really. It’s a good idea. The real problem is with some of the marketers who’ve fallen in love with it. As ethical marketers, they’re opposed to practices that deceive the customer. If only they’d be equally opposed to practices that deceive themselves. For example – look at these recent headlines from the marketing press and blogs:

“Mediabrands Launches Shopper Marketing Agency”

“Integer Expands Shopper Marketing Expertise with New VP”

“Birdsong Gregory Appoints Jared Meisel to Head Shopper Marketing Team”

“Coca-Cola India Appoints OgilvyAction To Oversee Shopper Marketing Business”

“New Report On Shopper Marketing Illustrates Need For Mobile Channel Focus”

You’d think from all the attention it gets and so-called news it generates, that “shopper marketing” was some newly created discipline that was about to reorganize all agencies and revolutionize all marketing practice. There’s even a trade journal and a trade show dedicated to shopper marketing.

But you’d be wrong. Once again, the marketing business has demonstrated its almost limitless talent for deceiving itself. Shopper marketing is just a new name for something that our agency and many others have been doing for years.

A Deloitte report defines shopper marketing as “all marketing stimuli, developed based on understanding shopper behavior, and designed to build brand equity, engage the shopper (i.e., person in ‘shopping mode’), and lead him/her to make a
purchase.”

Hmmm, sounds vaguely familiar. Been there, done that. It seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same. My colleague Steve Smith touched on this before, when he wrote a post about P&G’s (supposedly) new Store Back marketing concept.

Shopper marketing is what sales promotion and merchandising agencies started doing 1960s and 70s: Using marketing tactics to take advantage of shopper preferences and behavior. For example, in a bricks and mortar store:
•    The best display position, all things being equal, is to the right of the front door, because that’s how shoppers tend to turn when they enter.
•    Shoppers are more likely to take advantage of savings if you give them a piece of paper to carry around and remind them (a coupon) than if you just hope they remember the savings they read about a week ago.

Now shopper marketing extends that kind of thinking beyond bricks and mortar to all kinds of purchase behavior. For example:
•    To online shoppers, and their behavior when they fill and then abandon, their virtual shopping carts.
•    To B2B shoppers, and the role of the gatekeeper, and the decision making differences between the small business shopper and the large corporation network of purchase decision makers and influencers.

Now the shopper isn’t just Mom in the supermarket, deciding which brand of toilet paper to buy. The shopper can also be a C-level executive, deciding on purchases that will determine the company’s strategic direction.

But the name “shopper marketing” is not just a harmless piece of marketing puffery, directed at us. There are some real risks to believing that it’s something entirely new. True believers may end up:
•    Reinventing the wheel, recreating techniques and ideas that behavior-oriented marketers have always practiced.
•    Failing to create the new insights and techniques that clients need, because they’re too busy recycling old ones.
•    Deceiving themselves into thinking they’re making a major contribution to marketing thought.
•    Wasting time and effort, patting themselves on the back.

So go ahead and call it “shopper marketing,” if you like. But beware of persuading yourself that you’re doing something new and better than before, just because it’s got a new name. Remember the famous George Santayana saying about history:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

You can find marketing innovation in the oddest places: A construction site along a main road in the western suburbs of Chicago.  And in oddest forms: a giant inflatable cat squeezing a hard-hatted worker in its fist. I had to stop and get out of the car and take this picture.

It made me forget about innovations like social media, segmented direct marketing and search engine optimization for a while, and give some thought to one of the dinosaurs (literally, in some cases) of marketing: the giant inflatable display.

They get attention by blowing up (excuse the pun please) a brand message, like the giant Firehawk inflatable does for Firestone tire stores. But I’ve always wondered what auto dealers were thinking, when they blew up those giant inflatable gorillas, Godzillas and so forth. The only message they deliver is “big.” Kind of redundant, in an auto dealership half a block long, with row upon row of shiny new cars, bright lights, string of colorful pennants and big, big signs. Local visibility and awareness is not a problem. Passers-by do not suddenly see a giant blue gorilla and say “Gosh! I was going to buy some paint at the hardware store. But that big gorilla makes me think I’ll stop and buy a Buick instead!”

The giant inflatable gorillas and Godzillas are an aberration; auto dealers’ usual attitude is that if it doesn’t work, it’s gone. But the giant inflatable cat is an innovation. It doesn’t support a brand (like the Firehawk inflatable), but it does deliver a very specific message. The fat cat inflatable is designed and built to support unions’ picketing of employers at job sites.

A marketing menagerie
It turns out that the fat cat is not alone.  A little Googling revealed there’s a wide selection of giant inflatables manufactured specifically to support labor vs. management messages: A rat, a pig, a cockroach, even a skunk.

They’ve been used in management vs. labor disputes all over the U.S., including baristas vs. Starbucks corporate at the annual meeting, and for striking movie and TV writers. There’s even a flickr photo posting site for fans of the giant inflatable rat.

Leave aside labor vs. management preferences and opinions about negative advertising for a minute.  Imagine the giant (inflatable?) light bulb appearing over the head of the innovative marketer at Big Sky Balloons or Inflatable Images, when he or she first thought “How can I expand my customer base beyond the business segment? What if…I created a product to satisfy the needs of the ‘other side’”?

The next time you take a colleague or a client to lunch, take a closer look at the marketing communication that’s right in front of your face: the menu.

When most of us read that a restaurant chain is redesigning its menu, we think “Ho hum. Maybe they need more low-cal dishes on the menu, or they got tired of the Helvetica type.” Then we turn the page or scroll down to look for the latest movie tie-in program or the next big thing in digital media.

We tend to take menus for granted. They seem pretty mundane, functional and necessary, like matchbooks or door-to-door delivered flyers – certainly not deserving of a great deal of planning and design effort beyond what’s needed for clear communication and pleasant design.

Not news in the restaurant business
But a recent New York Times article reveals what restaurant marketers already know: A well-designed menu is the result of careful, concentrated and creative thinking by the best minds in the business. The effort is worth it, because a menu targets only proven qualified prospects – people who are already sitting down, ready to make a buying decision.

Menus are the mythical “subliminal advertising” come to life. Restaurant marketers know that “some magic combination of prices, adjectives, fonts, type sizes, ink colors and placement on the page can coax diners into spending a little more money.”
•    Ever wonder why the menu says “10” instead of “$10” or “$10.00” or even “10 dollars” for the entrée you want? It’s because (at some kinds of restaurants) customers spend more when the prices have no dollar sign before them, or cents written after them.
•    Is the expensive lobster dish at the top of  the column because that’s the most visible position, stimulating impulse purchases? Maybe just the opposite. It may be there because high-priced dishes high on the menu make other dishes further down look like better values.
•    Was it just a copywriter being cute, naming dishes after Grandma Marge, Uncle Bob and so forth? It could be because dishes named for people sell better. (Especially true when the names are ones like Jack Daniels and Minute Maid – but that’s no surprise.)

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Menu = merchandising
Think of menu development not as advertising, but as retail merchandising practice applied to pages, rather than to fixtures, displays and signs. In fact, there may be a far more comprehensive set of rules and best practices for effective menu design, than there are for the typical story display, direct mail package or banner ad campaign.

Of course, when there are rules, there are those who succeed by breaking them. At Alinea, the Chicago restaurant that some call the best in the country, they’re turning menu design upside down by minimizing descriptions to one or two words like “one bite” and by giving customers their menus only after they’ve finished dining.