Simplify the Shopper Journey

In this webcast, special guest Phil Burroughes, commercial director of retail and shopper marketing agency rmi, will tackle the often confounding topic of understanding the journey shoppers take as they move along the path to purchase.

Challenging the current thinking in the industry, Phil will demonstrate how a change in planning principles can drive sales and awareness for a brand in retail channels. He will describe a simple model that can help marketers isolate the frequently-missed key moments in shopper journey planning, as well as a two-stage approach to engaging retail partners and shoppers to optimized sales.

Retailers and manufacturers are aligned in their quest for improved foot traffic and increased market baskets. To this end, it pays for marketers to dive deeper into the reasons shoppers have for visiting a (physical or online) store.

This "trip mission" greatly influences the choice of channel, and the types of marketing and promotional tactics that are effective in driving sales. By fully understanding the different types of shopping occasions, marketers can deliver retailer- and channel-specific planning guidance to improve sales.

In this webcast, Jeff Maloy will describe an approach marketers can use to classify consumer buying occasions and develop a richly-descriptive typology for the channels and “media” they use.

More and more brands that primarily sell through retail also use their websites to sell direct to customers. A brand’s ecommerce shoppers, however, not only differ in important ways from their retail targets, but also from each other.

Understanding these distinctions is critical to optimizing site effectiveness.

In this webcast, Eric Paquette will describe tools to identify, size, and profile a brand’s ecommerce shoppers and develop strategies to drive increased sales.

He will demonstrate how to:

- Identify the most valuable ecommerce shoppers for your brand
- Understand their needs from the brand’s ecommerce site
- Measure how your site delivers against those needs.

In the digital age, capitalizing on the biggest opportunities to move shoppers towards your brand and drive sales in different channels requires relevant, executable knowledge of how to most effectively reach and engage target shoppers.

In this webcast, Peter Krieg will discuss an innovative approach to shopper marketing strategy development that drives sales, profits, and brand equity. He will demonstrate how you can apply profit-driven insights to enable highly effective digital programs and improve integration with overall brand strategy.

Learn how to:
• Identify the most profitable group(s) of shoppers to target for your brand
• Determine the touchpoints along the target shopper’s path to purchase that have the greatest effect on sales, loyalty, and advocacy
• Understand consumer buying occasions and the channels they use

To more effectively use digital communications channels and integrate online and offline marketing efforts, marketers often do research to better understand the habits, behaviors, and activities of their most profitable targets. The big challenge comes not from getting good, comprehensive information, but taking it the next step and using it to guide strategy and planning.


In this webcast, Kevin Clancy will describe how to study these targets in terms of their digital behavior, investigating the extent to which they use the web to better inform their buying decisions and to communicate with like-minded people everywhere.

He will focus in particular on guidelines marketers can follow to ensure digital insights will not only drive strategy, but also the successful execution of that strategy.

While most marketers agree that social media listening can provide important real-time insights about trends, unmet needs, and campaign and new product performance, they continue to wrestle with the best way to sift through the volumes of consumer-driven conversation in order to find the truly valuable information that can guide marketing decisions.

In this webcast, special guest Rolf Olsen, Marketing Sciences Director at communications planning powerhouse Carat US, will offer some key questions to ask and answer to help you formulate your own social media listening plans.

Rolf Olsen has over a decade of experience in the data and insight industry and built the social listening capabilities of Carat’s parent company Aegis Group from the ground up. Drawing from his experiences from the client- and agency-side, he will give his front-line perspective on:

•The importance of establishing a formal social listening program
•Taking a balanced approach to filtering the data coming from social sources
•Best practices for selecting a listening partner

Throughout his talk, he will weave in examples and case studies to illustrate what other brands are doing with data and insights gathered from listening efforts.

“Ultimately the brand resides in the minds of its stakeholders,” branding guru Kevin Lane Keller once wrote. Yet in today’s “cluttered” world, it is difficult to occupy any place in customers’ minds, let alone a differentiated and superior position. The challenge for B2B and B2C marketers is to develop and execute a unique, ownable, and consistent brand strategy that will take hold and endure.

In this webcast, Jeff Maloy will describe how you can ensure the brand strategy you develop will reach your target customers and be reinforced in their hearts and minds. He will present a framework for aligning the 7 critical components of a brand strategy, as well as offer a process for translating this strategy into execution.

You will learn:

• The framework and key components of a compelling, cohesive, and powerful brand strategy.
• How to successfully manage the transition from development to implementation.
• Criteria to use to evaluate different executional elements–from logos, to new products, to ad campaigns.

With all eyes on marketing’s ROI, marketers need to figure out not just what they get for what they spend, but also what to do in order to continuously improve the rate of return.

In this webcast, Kevin Clancy will present brand new statistics on the ROI of different kinds of advertising, from traditional to search. He will highlight the biggest areas of opportunity for improvement and discuss ways B2C and B2B marketers can go about improving the effectiveness of communications programs.

Many marketers refer to customers who love their brand and want to tell others about it as their "brand advocates."

Long prized by marketers because they spread positive messages about brands through word-of-mouth, brand advocates have received increasing attention because of the digital tools now available to spread those messages more broadly, quickly, and creatively.

In this presentation, Eric Paquette will describe approaches you can use to assess advocacy and identify your brand advocates. He will also discuss how to understand what you want to communicate about your brand to them--often not the same messages that you would typically share with your broader target audience.

He will also discuss case studies showing how other marketers have effectively identified, reached, and impacted brand advocates.

While every marketer on the planet may share the same goal to grow sales, market share, and profitability this year, they each have to map out the most effective way for their brand to get there.

You could start at the top of the marketing funnel, for instance, and focus on increasing awareness and distribution. But do you expand brand penetration with a stronger positioning or a lower price? Or do you step up purchase frequency and dollars per purchase with a more satisfying product or service, enhanced promotional activity, loyalty programs, etc. Or work on both?

In this webcast, Peter Krieg, President & CEO of research-driven marketing consulting firm Copernicus, will describe a process for setting aggressive objectives for your brand and demonstrate the steps to take and analyses to do during the marketing planning process in order to achieve them.

You will learn how to:

• Create a simple, but effective “model” of how your marketing works.

• Pinpoint if the drag on your brand’s performance comes from your targeting strategy, advertising creative, brand positioning, or the product itself.

• Realistically estimate how many people will ever even become aware of your campaign.

• Concentrate your attention and marketing resources on those activities which will have the greatest ROI.

With over three decades of experience consulting to leading B2C and B2B companies around the world, Peter will give you clear and practical guidance to eliminate the expense of real-world trial-and-error and move your brand more quickly along the right path to growth.

It’s that time of year again, when anyone and everyone puts out their prognostications about trends and predictions of what will hold the focus of marketers’ attention in the year ahead like holiday cookies on a platter.

Marketers are all hungry for direction on how to translate information about trends into actions they can take to grow their brand or business, and Kevin Clancy has some practical how-to suggestions.

In this webcast, Kevin will present case studies of companies who were looking to get ahead of the curve on current trends. He will focus on the insights, approaches, and methods they used to adapt their organization and strategies such as:

• Creating a motivational brand vision that both rallies and focuses the entire company.
• Discovering how long-term demographic trends will impact the performance of their brand or company.
• Learning how to typologize both buyer segments and channels of distribution in order to maximize the power of marketing programs.

Tune in to learn about what you can do in January to take advantage of new opportunities in 2011 and beyond.

Some in the industry have started to suggest that in the digital age it's just not necessary for brands to offer a clear, compelling positioning anymore.

In this complimentary webcast, Kevin Clancy will offer a mix of case histories, examples, and approaches to demonstrate why having a strong positioning these days is more—not less—important than ever.

He will make the business case for positioning and show you:

• How most brands today lack a positioning.
• How positioning is related to the classic definition of marketing—solving customers’ problems.
• Why you should consider both tangible and intangible reasons to believe in your brand.
• How to use the perceptions of your brand and those of competitors’ to help you identify areas of opportunity.

This talk will provide you with a solid understanding of how to identify unique positioning opportunities that your company or brand can use to breakthrough all the competitive clutter.

Too often, the end results of market segmentation research end up collecting dust on a marketing manager’s bookshelf. Why? Because he or she cannot use the results to identify the segments and bring them to life in the real world.

In this webcast, Copernicus’ in-house market segmentation guru Henry Gamse will help you turn this situation around.

In this presentation, you will learn about:

• Ways to identify and leverage your segments in real world situations.
• A variety of databases where your segments can be accurately classified, profiled, and reached through targeted marketing efforts.
• Techniques to accurately recruit the segment members you want for more profitable sales or future research.
• Understanding your options and prioritizing your goals for fully leveraging the segments in the real world.

It’s one of the most basic decisions you have to make—who to target with sales and marketing efforts? Sounds simple enough, but finding the “best customers”—the ones most open and profitable to your brand—and motivating them to buy is a pretty complex operation.

In this webcast, Jeff Maloy will give you seven questions to ask about the buyers in your category or industry to ensure you grab the attention and share of wallet of the cream of the crop.

A former brand manager at some of the leading CPG companies in the world, Jeff will focus on the information and insights you can collect with good marketing research that will give you a comprehensive sense of:

• The sales potential of different customer groups
• Their interest in new products and services from your brand
• Their likelihood to advocate for your brand

Smart marketers regularly seek out “super-influentials,” the people who tell friends and neighbors what and where to buy and have an impact on an increasing number of purchase decisions. According to a brand new study, blogs are an important social media tool for impacting this key communications target.

In this presentation, Kevin Clancy will present the findings of an in-depth Copernicus investigation that for the first time confirms a strong relationship between blogging behavior and personal influence across a broad range of categories.

Get insights into:

• The blogging behavior of Americans in general.
• The relationship between blogging and cross-category personal influence.
• How to identify super-influentials in your category or industry.
• Demographics and personal characteristics of cross-category super influencers.
• The product/service categories where the relationship between blogging behavior and influence is particularly strong.
• Integrating information about the digital and social behaviors of key targets into marketing plans.