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Do You Really Know Your Shopper? Understanding Missions,Mindsets & Messaging

xhuljana.halili@rmi.co (Xhuljana Halili) — Tue, 20 May 2025 17:33:37 GMT

Shopping is complex. The supermarket is one of the most visually overwhelming environments, packed with thousands of products, promotions, and point-of-sale (POS) materials—all competing for shoppers’ attention and, ultimately, their wallets.

Yet, effective shopper marketing isn’t about adding to the noise. It’s about cutting through it. To do this, we need to truly understand the shopper: their missions, their mindset, and what influences their purchasing decisions.

The Power of Shopper Missions

According to retail expert Paco Underhill, understanding the shopper is the key to effective selling. For marketers, this means recognizing the triggers and barriers to purchase and identifying how to meet or exceed shopper expectations.

A crucial part of this is understanding the shopper mission—the core reason for their visit. Missions dictate in-store behaviour, from which aisles they navigate to how much time and money they spend. Every shopper has a goal, whether it’s a planned stock-up trip or a quick top-up shop. But the reality is often more nuanced.

Even the most structured shopping trips can include unplanned moments: a shopper picking up a greeting card for a birthday, grabbing snacks for a game night, or being enticed by an impulse purchase. Over-simplifying shopper missions can lead to marketing plans that miss these real-life behaviours, reducing their effectiveness.

How Shopper Missions Influence Marketing Success

So, how do we ensure our shopper marketing efforts align with these missions? It starts with strategic planning:

Location Matters: Shoppers develop mental maps of stores, navigating them based on their needs. If your promotion or POS materials aren’t positioned along their path, they’ll be ignored. For example, a shopper looking for meal inspiration is likely to visit fresh produce or the meat aisle first. Placing secondary product displays with recipe ideas nearby can spark inspiration and increase basket size.
Mission-Based Messaging: Understanding why a shopper is in-store helps tailor messaging that resonates. A campaign targeting a weekly stock-up shopper should emphasize value and bulk savings, while a convenience-driven shopper may respond better to speed and ease.
Touchpoint Selection: With numerous shopper media options available, marketers must choose the right mix of touchpoints to engage shoppers effectively. This requires a deep understanding of media performance along the shopper journey to maximize ROI.

The Science of Persuasion: The Power of the Call to Action

Finally, one of the most critical elements of any shopper marketing campaign is the call to action. This is the last, and sometimes only, opportunity to convince a shopper to choose one brand over another. With just a second to capture attention, the message must be clear, compelling, and relevant to the shopper’s mindset in that moment.

Turning Insights into Action

By understanding shopper missions, retailers and brands can create targeted campaigns that not only capture attention but also drive real engagement and sales. The right placement, the right message, and the right call to action—when executed effectively—can make all the difference between being seen or being overlooked.

At BASE , we help brands decode shopper behaviour, optimize touchpoints, and maximize marketing ROI. Get in touch to discover how we can elevate your shopper marketing strategy and drive impactful results.

The Expansion of Digital Media Networks: A Game-Changing Opportunity for Shopper Engagement

xhuljana.halili@rmi.co (Xhuljana Halili) — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 13:09:39 GMT

In May 2002, the Financial Times declared, “Supermarkets Get The Message,” recognizing the growing synergy between retailers and advertisers targeting the same consumers. The article highlighted a simple but powerful idea—the best time to influence shoppers is while they shop. Fast forward to today, and retail media has evolved into a central pillar of marketing strategy, with a particular focus on digital media networks .

With retail media spend expected to reach £121 billion by the end of 2024 and forecasts predicting that retail media will surpass broadcast TV by 2025, it’s no surprise that retailers are heavily investing in media networks. The rapid expansion of digital media networks presents both opportunities and challenges for shopper marketers tasked with stretching limited budgets across countless touchpoints. The good news? Behavioural science and shopper psychology offer clear guidance on how to cut through the noise and make the most of these investments.

Behavioural Science: Understanding Shopper Attention

Research shows that shoppers encounter a flood of messages on a typical shopping trip. Many of these messages go unnoticed, as shoppers are focused on their tasks and have limited attention to spare. Digital media networks offer a way to break through the clutter, but success depends on understanding how shoppers process information.

Shopper psychology, including insights from Paco Underhill’s work, emphasizes the importance of seeing the world from the shopper’s perspective. At every point in the shopper journey, marketers must ask: What is the shopper thinking or feeling? and What do we want them to think or feel? Carefully planned touchpoints aligned with the shopper’s journey can transform moments of distraction into moments of engagement.

Screen Placement: Why Visibility Matters

A key rule in digital media: if it’s not seen, it’s wasted investment. Humans cannot read with their peripheral vision, so screen placement is critical. Screens must be positioned within the shopper’s direct line of sight to maximize visibility. Research shows that shoppers viewpoint-of-sale materials for just a second or two—barely enough time to register a message. Poorly positioned screens risk delivering blurred, ineffective impressions.

When screens are well-placed, they can drive familiarity through the mere exposure effect, priming shoppers to recognize and recall messages. However, if the message appears too early in the shopper journey, it may be forgotten by the time they reach the relevant category—unless the product is immediately within reach when the screen captures their attention.

Motion and Simplicity: Keys to Capturing Attention

Digital media has one major advantage over static displays: motion . Our brains are wired to prioritize moving objects, triggering the fight-or-flight response and capturing attention. But grabbing attention is only half the battle. The message must be:

Simple and clear enough to understand within 1-2 seconds .
Designed with a compelling call to action that aligns with the shopper’s current position in their journey.

Unlike television, digital screens in-store are fleeting touchpoints. The content must focus on minimal text, bold visuals, and a shopper-centric message that drives action.

Test, Learn, and Evolve

As digital media networks continue to grow, brands should treat them as valuable, long-term shopper touchpoints. Testing and learning what works—and what doesn’t—is essential for optimizing future investments. Digital screens can amplify brand presence, inspire shoppers, and enhance engagement in an increasingly competitive retail environment.

Want to drive better engagement with your shopper marketing investment? Contact BASE to see how we can help you manage, measure, and maximise the impact of your digital media strategy.

Top 5 tips for Marketers preparing for the HFSS Regulations (plus one bonus tip)

paul.brook@basetechnologies.co (Paul Brook) — Fri, 22 Apr 2022 13:32:47 GMT

Top tips to prepare for the HFSS Regs

New regulations surrounding the marketing of High Fat, Sugar & Salt (HFSS) products come into force in October of this year. The rationale behind the public health initiative is to reduce the consumption of foods that contain High Fat, Sugar & salt , particularly by younger consumers. As well as restrictions on advertising, the regulations will also target in-store advertising and merchandising, in a move which is likely to have an impact on existing sales patterns, particularly impulse purchasing. BASE’s data, across a number of clients has shown that Shopper Marketing within HFSS can increase sales uplifts in the Desserts category by 39%, Confectionery and biscuits by 28% and Soft Drinks by 23% with many of these activations also increasing brand awareness and delivering a positive return on investment.

Nick Widdowson, shopper marketing and psychology consultant comments, ‘The Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) sector has had a lot of challenges to deal with - recovery from a global pandemic, a supply crisis, major conflict in Europe, soaring living costs and 30-year-high inflation, record fuel and food prices and the largest decline in consumer confidence in a generation; so the timing of the HFSS legislation has presented challenges to CPG companies in terms of preparation.”

Some retailers are already making changes to their estates, particularly around promotional fixtures. Even ‘symbol groups’ may be affected if an individual store is over 2000 sq ft. So if you’re involved in shopper marketing, what implications do these changes have for you and how can you address them?

Not a level playing field

The changes are unlikely to affect all CPG suppliers equally. If the balance of your portfolio lies in HFSS categories, then it’s inevitable that you’re going to face some severe challenges; on the other hand, if your products are unaffected, then you may find that your promotional budgets will stretch a little further if the large manufacturers divert their promotional budgets to other marketing initiatives, not in the scope of these changes. The laundry products marketers are probably rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of HFSS brands being reduced. Ironically, it could also mean that food & beverage products that are not even classed as ‘healthy’, such as alcohol, could find themselves able to grab more store real estate; out with pallets of chocolates at the store entrance at Christmas and in with crates of beer & lager.

Even if CPG suppliers rely on shelf-sales, rather than FSUs and gondola-end promotions, it is likely that the larger brands, with a higher customer-recall will take a larger share of the market, even if overall sales are down. They may also have more power to leverage ‘power aisles’, with smaller brands having to fight even harder for share of shelf.

Top 5 things HFSS marketers and shopper marketers can do

As with any threat, there is usually an opportunity, so what can HFSS shopper marketers do to try and mitigate lost sales? As the saying goes, ‘Failing to plan is planning to fail’.

1. Talk NOW to impacted retailers - the changes are going to impact them, just as much as they are you. Discuss what opportunities they are putting in place to support brands, whilst remaining compliant with the regulations. Will they be increasing mid-aisle category features and what impact will that have on SKU levels?

2. Review your range - Will there be a move towards larger packs, rather than multi-pack buys? The supermarkets have been undergoing range rationalisation for years and this will increase. They will be allocating more shelf-space for healthy foods. Will you be considering range rationalisation. The more you can be fully-prepared on how the regs will impact your brand(s), the more productive your trading arrangements with the retailer(s) will be.

3. Review your budgets - you will most likely need to reallocate your shopper marketing budget with a huge cut in mechanisms such as gondola-end promotions, pallet displays and BOGOF type promotions. Consider activities such as shelf-barkers, mid-aisle floor/ceiling adverts. Re-evaluate the type of cost promotions you offer, for example re-directing incentives designed around increasing consumption, such as multi-buys towards EDLP promotions.

4. Analyse your historical performance - although ‘ceteris paribus’ won’t strictly apply, past performance of campaigns may provide an insight into customer motivations and purchase patterns. Will the fact that treats are harder to find mean that determined customers, seeking their favourite brands will be prepared to hunt a little harder? How can you signpost them to your products?

5. Review the creative - collaborate with other members of the brand, digital, marketing, account management and field-sales teams to ensure your multi-channel marketing campaigns are consistent. With impulse purchasing largely being removed, it’s more important than ever that existing and new customers are being guided through the AIDA (Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action) process to pick your product from the shelf and into their basket. The power of ‘visual disruption’ will be more important than ever.

Plus a bonus tip:

6. Use a dedicated system to plan and gain deeper insight - shopper marketing systems allow you to plan and measure your campaigns. Systems like BASE even offer complementary support such as benchmarking and sophisticated evaluation metrics to truly help you understand the ROI on campaigns and activations, so that you can do more of what does work and spend less on resource-sapping activities.

What changes are you making to address the regulations?

Shopper Journey Based Marketing – how to deliver integrated Go-To-Market plans

Wed, 19 May 2021 08:43:36 GMT

When integrated plans are executed with excellence across the omnichannel landscape, there is a direct correlation to sales and share growth.

Whether the objective is launching NPD, activating partnerships, creating new consumption occasions or seeking to articulate your brand’s unique benefits, delivering integrated Go-To-Market execution is the long-sought for, but rarely fully achieved, objective of commercial leaders across FMCG.

Barriers to delivering integrated go-to-market execution for our research:

Functional Expertise: each function within the sales and marketing machines of major brand owners are typically tasked and organised to deliver different elements of the plan, with different metrics and no consistent comparative measures
Plethora of Choices: there has been an explosion in the number of touchpoints and investment choices available to influence consumers and shoppers and it’s extraordinarily hard for teams to know where best to invest
Legacy systems and ways of working: there is no shortage of systems and data, but this is typically held in disparate legacy systems and not easily accessible to inform decision making. The recent pandemic has compounded the situation with remote working making it harder than ever for teams to share, collaborate and align, with no one place to access, assess and adjust the plan.

It takes an enormous effort to deliver high quality, fully aligned plans that work for the consumer, the shopper, the trade and your brand.

We believe the answer to the questions about where best to invest and how best to help the FMCG organisation construct integrated plans across functions that deliver both brand objectives and optimise ROI lies in an evolution of the way we think about Shopper Journey Based Marketing .

Whatever the objective; Awareness, Consideration, Trial or Repeat; understanding consumers, their needs, drivers, shopping missions and consumption occasions from the lens of the shopper journey gives us the ability to target communications effectively.

Whether broadcast or personal, brand or shopper marketing, price or equity message, the shopper doesn’t care who creates it or how it is organised. When the right message is delivered at the right time and in the right way, this communication has been proven to move the shopper further down the path to purchase.

Shopper Journey Based Marketing calls for connected thinking across functional modalities with the development of strategy and integrated plans that deliver complementary messaging across the right combination of touchpoints targeted to each stage of the shopper journey. For example, awareness and equity building communication may be delivered best by broadcast media aimed at a certain location-driven target demographic profile. This could then be backed up with trial and conversion driving activity executed with those customers that have a higher proportion of the brand's target audience and executed at retail with tactics differentiated to the purchase channel, in-store vs a retailer’s e-commerce site.

Our BASE platform creates the conditions for FMCG commercial teams to generate, align and execute insight-driven integrated sales, category and marketing plans.

Our planning and AI-driven analytics platform provides an enterprise-wide, approach for laying down and surfacing all elements of the go-to-market plan in one place, under the unifying principle of Shopper Journey Based Marketing .
This enables the consistent measurement of the impact of these plans with a comparative and predictive ROI across investment choices.
Teams can identify what works, coordinate activities and easily adjust plans based on competitive, market and macro-economic changes.

Imagine what it would be like if you could surface the on-shelf dates for new products, alongside the launch promotion and shopper marketing plans for your key customers, overlaid with targeted digital and national brand plans, all at the touch of a button.

Imagine if you had the insight available to answer the following questions:

Which areas of the shopper journey should I invest in to reach my target audience?
Which touchpoints should I choose and what message should I seek to deliver at each stage of the shopper journey?
How can I determine what combination of activities will deliver the best ROI for my brand?

Please contact us for a free consultation and discussion on how we can help you create and deliver more integrated go-to-market plans, improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your teams and deliver return for your marketing spend.

Driving profitable sales by activating your brand at the point of purchase

Fri, 19 Mar 2021 18:45:27 GMT

Recent history has seen huge disruption in our media landscape with the advent of new advertising mediums and new media channels making it increasingly difficult to reach consumers in an effective manner.

The explosion of digital marketing has disrupted traditional media formats and whilst it has increased our ability to target, it has made it increasingly hard to generate cut through. When and where consumers receive and digest media has also changed dramatically with an increasing number of touch points all the way along the path to purchase. Shopping channels and missions are also evolving rapidly with e-Commerce, and convenience expanding exponentially offering new opportunities but also even more complexity.

Navigating these choppy, ever changing waters is challenging, but exciting, as it is forcing us to learn new approaches and skills to drive both consumer and shopper penetration and loyalty.

Effective planning and investment choices are critical to winning in this new media landscape. Increasingly the effective use of data, and subsequent targeting, is key to building a winning strategy. At Heineken we have increasingly seen shopper and trade marketing as a critical aspect of the marketing mix that can drive both ours and our customers business. We see this discipline as an essential investment choice as not only does it drive brand equity but it ultimately can result in a direct sale at Point of Purchase. Delivering effective shopper marketing, can really drive cut through, accelerate trial and conversion when it matters most – at the moment of the purchase decision.

We spend a lot of time at Heineken building strategies around the right pack, price and promotion architecture to deliver category value, but we also recognise that this strategy has to be bought to life in retail through excellent shopper marketing. Our Beer and Cider category is facing into a significant amount of legislative change in the coming years with Minimum Unit Pricing and Deposit Return Schemes etc. all having an impact on price and promotion. It will therefore be even more critical to build world class shopper marketing campaigns to deliver cut through and drive consumer loyalty when other pillars of the marketing mix have been removed (eg price promotion).

Heineken have been working with BASE Technologies for over 4 years now, collaborating on; planning, building and evaluating our shopper marketing investment across the Off-trade channel. Leveraging BASE's expertise, software and evaluation tools has helped us deliver increasingly effective shopper marketing campaigns that are more targeted by occasions and media channel. BASE helps us select the right consumer and shopper touch points for each brand, campaign, channel and customer. Each year the Return on Investment (ROI) for our shopper marketing spend is increasing as we generate more insight, make better choices and target more effectively.

It amazes me that more businesses have not engaged as deeply in Shopper Marketing as a discipline given the benefit it can drive for brands. Millions of consumers make trips every week to different channels and stores. Our ability to influence these consumers along their path to purchase has never been more important given the cluttered media landscape and the need to drive cut through. For me Shopper is an essential part of the marketing mix and businesses like BASE are fantastic partners to help educate, plan, create and evaluate our investments across our campaigns. I am personally excited by how Shopper Marketing will grow over the coming years as the priority focus it deserves.

Toby Lancaster is the Category and Commercial Strategy Director at Heineken UK. Toby has been with Heineken for 4 years, after a variety of UK and International roles over 17 years with Nestle.

Step-change your Shopper Marketing Capability

david.harker@basetechnologies.co (David Harker) — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 18:12:02 GMT

BASE ^{^®} Technologies, a leading Shopper Marketing solution provider for FMCG companies, is delighted to announce the launch of BASE ^{^®} Training and Consultancy, a best-in-class service aimed specifically at developing Shopper Marketing capabilities to enable growth.

Launching BASE ^® Training and Consultancy, specifically aimed at developing Shopper Marketing capabilities for FMCG companies to deliver effective, executable plans and drive growth.

The world has changed

Shopper behaviour and the way we shop has changed dramatically over the last 10 years, trends that have accelerated in the last year during the pandemic. The UK now has up to 30% of retail sales coming from online, and the convenience channel has seen a fantastic resurgence in both shopper numbers and sales.

This move to an omni-channel world, combined with other global macro trends such as sustainability, an increasing health agenda and convenience has driven enormous change. We have also seen a huge shift in media consumption driven by technology and more significantly by smartphone usage and digital communication.

In response, brands have innovated heavily in developing new products, with nimble new entrants and major brand extensions creating and exploding new categories. Innovation has also taken the form of new ways to reach and influence target consumers, with a plethora of new media channels, a whole host of data driven digital audience/engagement platforms and literally thousands more ways to spend valuable marketing budgets.

There has never been a more exciting time for Shopper Marketing . Embracing these new challenges requires the right skills and the right organisational mind-set to put this commercial marketing function at the centre of any FMCG organisation.

The challenges keeping CPG leaders awake at night

How do I ensure my target audience become aware of my brand and that it stands out from the crowd?
How do I win at the physical and digital shelf?
How do I leverage the full power of my organisation to deliver my brand and share objectives?
Which touchpoints, executed when, with what message will encourage shoppers to try, buy and repeat?
How do I engage more effectively and sell more with less?
How do I organise with fewer people and tighter budgets?
Which channels and customers do I target and partner with and at what time of year?
How do I remain agile and responsive from a planning and budgeting perspective?

The Solution … build capability in Shopper / Trade Marketing

We at BASE ^{^®} Technologies firmly believe that today’s challenges can be addressed by building increased capability in Shopper and Trade Marketing.

This is where the rubber hits the road, where brands come alive during the shopper journey and at the digital or physical point of purchase – it’s where new launches and innovation live or die.

This Shopper or Trade Marketing space is complex and multifaceted … drawing on key disciplines of Brand, Digital and Category Marketing as well as Brand Activation, Revenue Management, Sales and Insights. It combines up-front shopper strategy work, platform and creative development, multi-channel planning and buying, customer engagement, effective activation and insights.

Understanding how to create and execute effective integrated, multi-channel commercial marketing plans is not easy, but it is pivotal to delivering the organisation’s go-to-market strategy.

BASE ^{^{^{^®}}} Training and Consulting for Shopper Marketers

BASE ^{^®} Training & Consulting will be led by one of the most experienced and widely regarded experts in this field, Jeannine Ferguson , who previously led Shopper Marketing across Europe for the Coca Cola Company, after playing leading roles for Coca Cola European Partners in the UK. Following this, Jeannine set up and embedded the Commercial Marketing function in Johnson & Johnson across EMEA and more recently has been consulting with a range of businesses to help them embed the function and principles in their organisations.

Jeannine has combined her expertise and real-world knowledge with proprietary insights and technology from BASE ^{^®} to develop two uniquely powerful training courses and a proven consulting model to deliver transformational change and build Commercial Marketing capability. We are thrilled to have Jeannine on board.

What do we do in BASE ^{^{^{^®}}} Training?

The training courses are aimed at helping organisations to build simple yet effective ways to do Shopper Marketing - injecting passion, putting in place and embedding processes and structure, and evaluating as standard - so your teams increase their skills and do the best job possible. One course is focused on activating brands in a bricks and mortar world and the other is built on the omni-channel world – connecting the dots up between digital and physical to deliver the best shopper experience.

We focus the training on the practical areas that matter; how to ensure the shopper is put at the heart of the brand and business planning cycle; how to build compelling campaigns that are executable at retail; how to generate and deliver a clear look of success; how to align your sales colleagues; and how to sell and deliver compelling plans with customers. All of the material is built on insight and extensive industry knowledge.

What do we do in BASE ^{^{^{^®}}} Consulting?

We offer two forms of consulting:

Advisory: If you have a known business challenge that you are seeking to address, e.g. a new channel you want to move into, we help you to assess what you’re doing then work with you and your teams to devise the most effective strategy and execution plan.

Outsourcing: We offer an outsourced / interim shopper and commercial marketing solution to support permanent headcount with strategic initiatives such as creating specific brand and channel campaigns using our extensive insight and experience or supporting the launch of a specific piece of innovation.

Real world capability development from world class practitioners

Jeannine is supported at BASE ^{^®} Training and Consulting by experienced industry practitioners, who bring best practice, knowledge and proven methodologies for success in winning at retail from a whole host of leading companies, countries, channels and categories.

If you’d like to take advantage of our introductory offer of free consultancy and gap analysis on your Shopper Marketing capability, please contact hello@basetechnologies.co or visit our BASE ^® Training and Consulting page to learn more.

Is your go-to-market organisation working effectively to drive growth?

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 15:10:22 GMT

BASE ^{^®} Brands was born out of the insight that major brand owners and organisations of scale struggle to efficiently pull together, surface, activate and measure all the elements of their go-to-market plan in one place.

The problem facing large organisations

Many organisations of scale struggle to leverage the power of the whole enterprise, especially when working remotely, to act in a co-ordinated and aligned manner. They are often characterised by disconnected legacy systems, disparate information stored in personal eco-systems and, at best, multiple (slightly different) spreadsheets. Plans tend to be stored within different departments such as Sales, Shopper Marketing, E-commerce, Category Management and Marketing and are typically not easily accessible, in a format that can be combined easily to support agile decision making.

The reality is frustration, inefficiency, delayed decision-making and often a lack of corporate history. More time is spent pulling data together than working on it, there’s a whole heap of re-work, the information is out of date the moment it is collated and there are often inconsistences in the data limiting its usefulness in planning and subsequent measurement.

The effect of the COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated the trend of regular budget revision, zero-based budgeting, cost cutting and refocused pressure on operational efficiencies. Whilst there may well be pockets of best practice, digital transformation is proven to enable teams to work together in new ways to address problems like these. More than ever before, there is a need for greater alignment, better choices and more accountability for performance.

Are you aligning your plans effectively?

Consider the advantages of aligning your go to market plan for a new product launch
Do you know when a new product is due to land on-shelf?
Is the NPD aligned to the implementation of a range review or range update?
When does the above-the-line plan break, before or after distribution targets have been achieved?
When does the promotion start?
When is the shopper activation going live, is it supporting a promotion to drive trial?
Does the shopper activation plan complement and enhance the TV, Digital and Print activity, to drive conversion?

If you don’t have that alignment, then you could be missing out.

What’s the alternative?

Imagine if you had:

a single place to access plans, budgets and spend … what’s planned, what’s committed, what’s left unspent and what could be pulled back or reallocated elsewhere – by investment choice, by channel, by customer, by category and brand.
data always up to date and accessible to the right people (based on permissions) at the touch of a button
historical activity stored securely to enable subsequent analytics and power better choices
each activity measured to enable continuous learning
results aggregated to drive insight to inform future investment choices

The Single Source of Truth

BASE ^® Brands creates a single source of truth for all internal or agency partners to lay down, align and maintain all the sales, category, shopper and marketing activation plans in one place, surfaced and updated at the touch of button. This enables better decision making, powers consistent and robust measurement, supports best practice sharing and drives significant efficiency as well as ROI improvements.

Using BASE ^® Brands has led to significant improvements in overall ROI as clients have reduced investment in inefficient touchpoints, invested in the right ones to support their brand and customer objectives and better aligned their whole go-to-market execution across previously disconnected departments.

Organisations leverage our solution to simplify for effectiveness and efficiency, delivering digital transformation by learning and sharing what works, driving consistency of operation across the enterprise and growing capability as well as ROI.

How can we help you?

Our experienced Team of Senior FMCG Sales and Marketing professionals at BASE ^® Technologies would be delighted to help in any way we can. Our solution suite includes Consultancy, Training, Planning software and Analytics. If you’re thinking about embarking on tackling this area … or feel your company could benefit from learning more, we’d be happy to explore how we can help.

BASE® Technologies Shortlisted for the Think Global Awards

mat@green19.co.uk (Mat Durham) — Tue, 16 Feb 2021 15:24:17 GMT

BASE ^{^®} Technologies has been shortlisted for the Think Global Awards under the Digital Transformation Category

BASE ^{^®} Technologies used BASE ^{^®} Brands to create a data-led, multi-channel planning and analytics platform for Heineken. This platform was supported by expert consultancy to provide transparency for Heineken's marketing spend, and post-campaign management to figure out how to prove and improve ROI, resulting in a ROI increase of 100% in the last three years.

SITUATION

For many brands, shopper marketing is one of the most important channels available to them, as it offers a direct route to influence the shopper; while at home, on the move and in digital and physical stores on the path to purchase. The retail landscape is increasingly complex and fragmented, and has been made even harder to navigate in 2020 by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Heineken were seeking to make effective planning and investment choices through insight and data driven decisions, retiring multiple spreadsheets, in order to manage budgets, plan activations and detailed campaigns, to create one version of the truth, accessible across the entire organization. They required a system to provide visibility of shopper, category, price promotion and media plans for alignment, analysis and better decision making.

SOLUTION

BASE ^{^{^®}} Technologies provided the BASE ^{^{^®}} Brands Platform and dedicated resource to scope, develop and deliver the solution to Heineken’s specification, including organisational readiness, alignment, configuration of category, brand and retailer hierarchies and user training.

Governance and project management requirements were set up to align, plan, execute and monitor progress across all stakeholders across the organisation, with clear goals and timelines.

ACTION

BASE ^{^{^®}} Technologies implemented the BASE ^{^{^®}} Brands tailored web-based commercial planning application in Heineken with a simple and intuitive user interface that provides a single source of truth for all user to lay down, align and maintain their budget, activations and campaigns enabling better decision making and driving efficiencies across the organisation.

The data-led, multi-channel planning and analytics platform, supported by expert consu ltancy provides transparency, control and enables measurement at scale to drive increased commercial effectiveness and optimise Marketing ROI. The dashboard of key performance indicators informs Heineken investment choices for integrated commercial plans across all customers, channels, media and markets.

Specifically, BASE ^{^{^®}} Brands provides Heineken with post campaign measurement to prove and improve ROI, with integrated outlet level analytics, enabling fast and cost effective modelling of sales impact from activities leveraging a powerful database of retail data, media touchpoints and historical ROI to inform better decisions.

Our team of industry experts and field practitioners from leading blue chip organisations provide support to Heineken through consultancy in strategy, process, capability and training and drive value creation from the adoption of the software across the organisation.

We helped develop organisational readiness and implementation for Heineken, configured the solution to Heineken context, brands, categories and retailers and integrated with existing Trade Promotion Management systems (via API) to surface valuable information to key stakeholders across the organisation.

RESULTS

BASE ^{^{^®}} Brands now provides transparency of marketing spend, as well as rigour to the planning, budgeting and evaluation process, notably enabling Heineken to manage budget at scale, drive zero based budgeting approach, review plans to maximise returns and react with speed and agility to market changes.

BASE ^{^{^®}} Brands has delivered both efficiency and effectiveness benefits to Heineken, as well building operational capability and enabling teams to work effectively in a remote working world:

Better decisions driven through insight-led touchpoint planning, achieved through visibility of plans in once place, together with tracking and measurement of ROI. In three years Heineken has realised an increase in ROI by over 100%.

Faster response through automation, simplification, visibility and control of budgets and consistency of planning; delivering 12% time saving from automated activity reporting.

Cheaper cost through planning as one team, with transparency of spend across the shopper journey, granular campaign evaluation and identifying inefficient spend to unlock better investment choices: 15% wasted spend identified in one year and re-allocated to more productive touchpoints.

Our expert team has also led strategic consultation projects and deep dive analysis into brand performance to inform future planning. Evaluating campaigns against a number of key campaign metrics have helped develop insights and recommendations, which resulted in Heineken securing the annual shopper marketing budget against proven ROI delivery.

In summary, BASE ^{^{^®}} provides a consistent way for Heineken to simplify for effectiveness and efficiency, enable transformation and drive ROI, providing a single source of truth for the go to market plan.

Is it possible to measure shopper and ecommerce campaign ROI?

Fri, 29 Jan 2021 15:06:49 GMT

The massive changes in media consumption and shopping behaviour, driven by on demand TV, the proliferation of smartphone usage, the explosion of digital communication channels and recent pandemic related lockdowns has created new challenges and opportunities for marketers seeking to engage effectively with their audience.

I n a world where TV and other “traditional” broadcast media is getting less and less cut-through, brands are looking for more effective ways to engage with shoppers along their path-to-purchase. Engaging with the “shopper” at retail and through geo-targeted activity is one such big opportunity. Investment in this sector (known by the industry as Shopper Marketing) continues to grow year on year as brand owners seek a better and more clearly attributable return on investment for their marketing spend.

Investing along the path-to-purchase comes with challenges

• Where do I invest?

• What do I invest in?

• What do I say at which touchpoints?

• How do I know if I am getting a good return for my money?

• How many consumers do I reach and influence?

• What’s the impact of this activity on my sales relative to other more traditional methods such as promotions or investment in broadcast media?

There’s so many options for investment - which work and how would I know?

Retail Media and location specific media executed at the right place(s) along the shopper journey has been proven to demonstrate a more attributable link between activation and purchase – sales growth.

To find the answer to the question “what works” and identify where best to invest to encourage a shopper, either in-store or online, to add a product to their basket requires a number of conditions to be in place:

Conditions to enable effective measurement of shopper / e-commerce ROI

Understanding at the most granular level – what activity has been executed against which target audience, in which media channel, over what time period, on which brands and specific products, against which objective, and in which location (be it region, town, store).
The ability to look at results at the most granular level – item, store, day EPOS sales data
The ability to match campaign data at scale with the EPOS data and be able to discern the differences.

If you can ascertain what combination of what activity was executed uniquely in which environment (eg store, digital shelf) and match this with sales data then you are able to attribute which activities changed consumer behaviour and measure the impact. To do this sounds easy, but in reality requires complex data science; factoring for multiple activation investments, all handled at the same time and in the same way; and deep contextual knowledge of the media and retail industry to ensure the validity of the analytics.

P owering Commercial Effectiveness – through insight

At BASE ^{^{^®}} Technologies, we have taken all these factors into account and created an end-to-end platform we call BASE ^{^{^®}} Brands. This allows our clients to easily lay-down their plans at the right level of detail and match this with the most granular EPOS data to enable measurement of complex e-commerce, in-store and digital campaigns at scale. The solution also allows them to align their plans across their organisation with ease, bring clarity and control to budget management, and easily leverage the insights from the measurement to inform their future investment choices.

Our marketing planning and analytics platform, BASE ^{^{^®}} Brands , is the integrated solution used by leading brand owners including Heineken and Birds Eye to drive consistent improvement in Shopper Marketing ROI as well as more efficient operations, not just in Shopper, but across the whole “Go-To-Market” operation.

If you’d like to find out more, then please do get in touch as we’d love to have a chat with you.

BASE® Technologies Achieves ISO 27001 Certification

mat@green19.co.uk (Mat Durham) — Wed, 20 Jan 2021 17:00:02 GMT

BASE ^{^{^®}} Technologies has been awarded the highest international standard for managing information security.

London, UK: 14th January 2021 – BASE ^{^{^®}} Technologies Ltd is proud to announce that it has met industry best practice standards in line with ISO/IEC 27001.

At BASE ^{^{^®}} Technologies the security of client data is at the heart of everything we do. Therefore, it is imperative that we work to the highest standards and be recognised as meeting the global standard for information security. This certification means that our clients can continue to expect the highest of standards of security and management from BASE ^{^{^®}} and be assured their data is in safe hands.

David Harker, Managing Director, BASE Technologies “This is an important step for our company. We have always operated with the highest standards of security and process management and to be certified with this international standard demonstrates our commitment to providing a service built on confidentiality, security and integrity.”

ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (also known as ISO27001) is the international standard that sets out the specification for an information security management system (ISMS). Its best-practice approach helps organisations manage their information security by addressing people and processes as well as technology. The certification was validated following an assessment carried out by the independent certification body British Assessment Bureau.

About BASE ^{^{^®}} Technologies

BASE ^{^{^®}} Technologies is a software, analytics and consulting organisation based in London, UK providing enterprise marketing planning and analytics solutions to help retailers and consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs) to maximise the revenue and ROI from shopper marketing.

The BASE ^{^{^®}} platform is used by leading retailers such as Sainsbury’s, Iceland and BP to manage their complex omni-channel retail media operation and by CPG companies like Heineken and Birds Eye to help plan, manage, measure and ultimately, maximise the returns on their Shopper Marketing Investments.

www.base.website

hello@basetechnologies.co

What every brand should focus on to optimise their shopper activations

Wed, 23 Dec 2020 11:46:23 GMT

In today’s world, we believe successful marketing is about being able to activate your brands to their target audience with a consistent and engaging message at the right place along the shopper journey.

The importance of marketing to shoppers

To encourage the shopper to become aware, to consider and to buy your product requires new approaches to align activities and optimise investments in the best place.

For many brands, shopper marketing is one of the most important channels available to them, as it offers a direct route to influence the shopper on their path to purchase. However, retail is an increasingly complex and fragmented landscape, supporting multiple shopping missions and occasions, which has been made even harder to navigate by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The good news is that well-executed shopper marketing can make an immediate impact, directly influence shopper behaviour, increase sales and build long-term brand equity.

The shopper journey is no longer linear

In reality, it is an expanding collection of potential decision points, any one of which could prompt a shopper to make a final choice about what they will buy.

Insight into shopping missions and drivers of behaviour, combined with measurement of results by brand and channel, is key to being able to target investment in the right touchpoints to optimise return on investment.

Brand owners need to align shopper marketing initiatives with other conversion-driving activities such as promotions, and demand-generating activities such as advertising, as well as customer initiatives and category objectives. Alignment leads to connected marketing messages, efficient investment choices, and opportunities to drive the purchase of individual brands and to grow categories.

Understanding shopper response and how to market in a Covid-19 recession

Grocery shopping has dramatically changed in just a few months. Before the Covid-19 pandemic, shoppers would regularly visit their preferred supermarket, shopping mostly on autopilot. Suddenly, much of what we had learned about grocery shopping was taken away.

Much has changed since the initial lockdown and habits have been broken in an instant, and as the industry reflects on changes in shopping patterns it's important to develop strategies to regain or retain loyalty by creating platforms to engage shoppers at an emotional level.

Now thoughts are turning to what shopping might look like as and when we emerge from the Covid-19 pandemic. The challenge and opportunity for brands is to embrace this reality and focus on targeting shoppers and refining investment towards influencing them, to get better results from in-store activity and trade investment.

How to market successfully to your shoppers

In a post-Covid-19 environment, shopper marketing success will be defined by:

• TARGETING: Leveraging the growing channels that enable targeting to specific segments, supported by mass touchpoints that communicate your proposition and give standout versus the competition, will drive increasing returns.

• ALIGNMENT: Aligning shopper marketing initiatives with other activities to drive transparency and alignment of plans, efficiency of operations and effectiveness of marketing investments.

• PLATFORMS: Consumer platforms such as on-pack competitions, sporting and film sponsorships have the potential to elevate the brand beyond the functional, creating emotional connections.

• LEARN & RE-APPLY: Effective integration and utilisation of analytics to embed best practice and insight into the planning, execution, and measurement of individual events.

• MEASUREMENT: Brands that plan in a consistent way and capture the details of all their integrated activity are able to develop repeatable models, informing future investment choices.

Emotions, shoppers and shopping

One of the most fundamental building blocks of shopper-oriented retail - past, present and future - is human emotion. Engaging with shoppers at an emotional level is the key lever to attracting new potential customers.

With so much POS in-store, much of which goes unseen, it is very important that you get it right and convey the correct message to the shopper.

It is now more important than ever to be creative and engage with shoppers at the point of purchase to create emotional connection by optimising your shopper marketing assets:

• ATTRACT ATTENTION: Simple messages, images, clear fonts, highly familiar words, colour, shape and contrast as persuasive generators of attention in-store and online.

• HUMANISATION: Images of people are social cues, and we are hard-wired to pay attention to other people - faces activate specific brain regions and attract attention.

• EMOTIONS: Tapping into shoppers’ emotions offers a fantastic advantage of being able to better engage with shoppers and capture attention.

• HOLD ATTENTION: Shoppers are more likely to choose an option if they spend more time looking at it - you not only have to grab attention, but you need to hold it too.

Prove and improve your shopper marketing ROI

Recessionary pressures that will remain after the pandemic recedes will leave companies facing some fundamental constraints on what their marketing can achieve, and as pressure on budgets increases, there is a requirement to prove and improve return on investment on every area of spend.

Rigorous planning enables the process of zero-based budgeting, defining needs and costs of every function and allocating funds accordingly, starting from a “zero base” rather than just doing what you have done before.

In the future, cost efficiencies will be more important than ever but not at the expense of agency quality and service. An endless pursuit of cost savings focused on price alone will inevitably lead to a race to the bottom and no one will win.

This approach will require brands to understand what works and what doesn’t work in-store, which touchpoints optimise return on investment versus those which don’t, then plan upwards from there, becoming more cost effective and in control of their sales and marketing activities.

Continuous learning and evaluation of shopper, customer, category and brand metrics will drive marginal incremental gains and improve return on investment.

Shopper marketing opportunity

The brands that will excel in the future are those which can use shopper marketing to become integral parts of new shopper habits. More than ever, brands will need to engage with shoppers emotionally at the point of purchase.

So what are you doing to ensure your shopper marketing makes an immediate impact, influences shopper behaviour, increases sales and builds long-term brand equity?

What are you doing to make better, faster and more cost-effective decisions to drive growth?

What are you doing to drive alignment and effective execution of plans across functions and modernise how you operate in today’s complex marketing world?

How you can go-to-market Profitably and Effectively post-Coronavirus?

Thu, 05 Nov 2020 14:08:34 GMT

The world has witnessed a unique transformation in the last few months – one which it has probably not witnessed in centuries.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created mass turmoil not only across entire societies but also business sectors, one of which happens to be FMCG manufacturers, who are particularly hit hard and face a number of commercial operational challenges.

They’ve had to scrap a good portion of their marketing plans as retailers are now focusing only on core service, product availability and the safety of their customers as well as employees.

How FMCG manufacturers can effectively go to market amid the COVID-19 recession

COVID-19 pandemic and shoppers’ responses to this, both pragmatic and emotional, has created a drastic shift in shopper behaviour. Many shoppers have moved to online shopping as part of their repertoire, others have moved from omni-channel to online exclusively (especially those shielding). Some shoppers have increased their trips to local convenience stores, and others still have moved “back” to “weekly big shops” as shopping has become a more planned purchase occasion. This is before the radical changes in the food-to-go and food service market are accounted for, as consumers are commuting less, working from home and navigating their own personal journeys through the pandemic.

In this context, FMCG suppliers have had to literally take stock, focus on supply and re-plan their marketing activity and spend in line with the new changed world. Key events such as Euros and Olympics have been pushed back to next year, new product launches postponed and activations of seasonal activity radically modified on the fly as circumstances change daily.

As we emerge from major lockdown, and face an uncertain future of increasing “R” rates and regional lockdowns, brand owners find themselves evaluating their structures, processes and capabilities to be “set fair” to survive and thrive in our ‘new world’.

BASE Brands can help in a HUGE way

There’s no denying the fact that success in today’s world must be a combination of focusing exclusively on the shoppers’ needs, understanding their motivations and underlying goals, as well as their emotional state and attitudes – so that businesses understand how to plan their spending in the new normal.

They need to target investments towards places and times that have an immensely positive impact on the shoppers’ journey, and encourage them to add that extra product to their basket or make that extra shopping trip.

BASE offers a unique marketing, planning and management platform which many retailers and FMCG suppliers are benefitting from today. Major players in the industry like Heineken, Birds Eye, Sainsbury’s, Iceland and Morrisons, to name a few, have benefitted from our suite of go-to-market software and management solutions – in order to plan out, deliver and measure their integrated marketing activities swiftly, profitably and effectively.

We are on a mission to help retailers and brands become more agile and digitise their go-to-market operations through a simple and intuitive suite of online applications.

Our modular software platform for CPG brands is designed so all commercial functions can work on one system, remotely, giving you full visibility and control of your plans, spend and impact of this activity on results … driving efficiency, effectiveness and ROI.

In the post-COVID19 environment, a single marketing planning, management and measurement platform like BASE gives you full operational control for unparalleled commercial success.