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02.03.2005

“HartBeat” is The Hartman Group's FREE online newsletter, providing insight, analysis, information and strategy to give business leaders the knowledge and vision to build sustainable brands.

For more Hartman Group articles on SHOPPER INSIGHTS, click here...

January 06, 2005 "5 Myths in Consumer Shopping Behavior"

October 14, 2004 "8 Common Blunders in Consumer Insights"

March 15, 2004 "Luxury Consumption"- Part I

March 19, 2002 "Luxury Consumption"- Part II

December 27, 2002 "Re-Thinking Our Traditional Notion of the Mass Marketplace: The Emergence of a New Paradigm"

December 20, 2002 "Re-Thinking Our Traditional Notion of the Mass Marketplace: What Happened to the Mass Market?"

June 28, 2002 "Experience, Expectation & the Shopping Trip"

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A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Store - OR - What Is "home Experience"?

Common sense has made quite a comeback in recent years. The lowest common denominator reductionism favored by the likes of Dr. Phil or Bill O'Reilly appears a welcomed tonic in times of increasing chaos and confusion - where even our most basic values, beliefs and knowledge are subject to endless debate. Yet as the initial results from our Shopper Insights study remind us, our "comfortable ally" often proves more of a distraction than a help.

Briefly, we approached our recent Shopper Insights study like most others before us. Our "common sense understanding" suggested that we could probably explain shopping behavior by a set of factors including: 1) consumer demographics, 2) retail experience (in-store stimuli), 3) marketing tactics (out-of-store stimuli), and 4) trip motivations (need states). And while we implicitly acknowledged background factors such as consumer demographics or household needs, most of our research initially focused on things happening in the store. This was a study on shopper insights after all.

Yet, as we followed our consumers intensely over a several week period - interviewing them at home and then tagging along on multiple shopping trips - a curious thing happened. We quickly realized that a considerable amount of the explainable variation in shopping behavior actually had more to do with things happening in the household than it did with things happening in the store. When a consumer tosses a pack of Gordon's fish sticks in the cart, she may tell you, "I needed fish sticks and these were on sale," as if efficiently satisfying a need. The reality is this action is shaped by a dynamic set of cultural practices that intersect in the contemporary American household. Why was this consumer shopping? Why Gordon's? Why fish? Why does "on sale" matter? For whom is the product intended? As we quickly found out, answers to these questions go further toward explaining shopping behavior than any model based on the in-store experience. That's the danger with common sense thinking - it's not so much that our common sense explanations are wrong as they are proximate explanations, accounts whose further clarification require considerable more effort and elaboration.

To better understand the significance of the household with regard to shopping behavior, we turn to an example from our recent syndicated research on shopper insights.

Appeasing the Picky Child

Heather is a young mother with an infant and a 3-year-old son named Samuel. We recently followed along during her weekly shopping trip to Safeway, with her son Sam sitting impatiently in the cart. Although armed with a substantial list of 30-some items, Heather was very open to in-store stimuli, as we noticed when she rounded the corner of one aisle, emerging onto the perimeter of the store. As she turned right, a frozen foods perimeter end-cap caught her eye. She grabbed some Gordon's fish sticks (not on her list) and threw them into her cart, quickly adding to us that she is in "an ongoing effort to find things [Samuel] might like." She knew Samuel liked this brand of fish sticks and so into the cart went the fish sticks, even though they weren't on her list. Heather mentioned in our earlier in-home interview that she has had to find very special foods to satisfy Samuel's increasingly picky cravings. Fish sticks are just one of a small list of things she has isolated to accomplish this ongoing task.

And yet, we find Heather isn't alone in her endless search for products to satisfy picky, young eaters. In fact, we find Heather's behavior is but one example of a broader cultural approach to dealing with picky children through strategic forms of appeasement that minimize conflict in the home. For these parents, harmony is more important than enforcing dietary discipline and dealing with the rebellion this causes. For many of these households, parents often develop a stock group of foods that they will use to quiet and feed the child, before moving on with their day. Examples of these appeasement foods include fish sticks, hot dogs, chicken nuggets, Cheerios, Hot Pockets, etc. All of these products are easy for young mouths to chew on, very tasty and don't require utensils. Mothers use these foods to appease young children between meals, or, more importantly, instead of the parents' meal. Mothers who select foods to appease picky children often keep a stock set of these foods on hand, referring to them as their children's food. Kids sometimes grow up fondly remembering these foods (and the brands associated with them) as the ultimate in "comfort food."

Emerging Lessons from the Home Experience

The Genesis of True Brand Loyalty is Often the Home
What Heather randomly grabbed off a Safeway end-cap may, if she repeatedly buys it, become a life-long brand preference for Samuel - a preference whose origin will forever be as hazy for him as his own birth, and yet potentially quite strong. This is how many of us have come to orient ourselves toward CPG brands such as Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nabisco. Our mother purchased something for us, which we seemed to like, so she kept buying it. The brand descended from the maternal heavens, so to speak, and we grew up thinking it was simply the brand all right-thinking people purchase and use. In this, what begins as the expression of a simple taste preference (Mom buys Oreos because, as far as she can tell, we seem to prefer them to Vanilla Wafers), is imbued with a moral character (we purchase Oreos because that's what Mom did - it's simply the way things are done). Although many new grocery brands have entered the scene since our birth, the enduring power of these traditional brands still maintains a compelling - and often moralistic - grip.

Home Experiences Generate Cultural Tasks, NOT Need States
Appeasing a picky child does not fit neatly into a model of need states. After all, there are many ways to deal with a picky child (a combination of discipline and/or tough love was in vogue 30 years ago); appeasing them with their preferred food is merely one strategy that appears to have achieved some measure of current cultural legitimacy. Moreover, appeasing the child is not a shopper need; it is an arbitrary task consumers have assigned to themselves based on the combined influence of their at-home experience and larger cultural trends from beyond the home.
For example, one of many approaches to dealing with the "picky eater" is to hunt for pre-approved food categories that head off confrontation in the kitchen. Mothers who opt for this approach (and there are millions of them out there) participate in a culturally shaped approach to parenting young children, one reinforced within their own social networks (where they share knowledge about what kinds of foods and products work in appeasing their own children). These parents are often those who allow their children to develop their own taste preferences early on in life. They often, for example, ask their children while in the store, "Would you like this?" In fact, this approach to feeding young children is so common now that most people find it difficult to remember an alternate past. And it is an approach to parenting that finds constant support within social networks (i.e., at the coffee shop, at the gym, at the PTA meeting and at the book club).

To summarize, then, experiences in the home are constantly generating new tasks to be accomplished. These tasks aren't "needs" so much as shifting orientations that simply feel necessary. It is these tasks that then send people out to shop. In other words, it is the at-home experience that, in large part, fuels the dynamic engine of cultural orientations to products, brands and the overall shopping experience. Rather than shopping robotically for brand x or product y, even loyal purchase decisions derive their power from positively reinforced at-home consumption experiences.

Heather and Samuel's shopping trip highlight just two of the important ways in which the experiences in the home mediate shopping behavior with significant effect. And this framework of thinking has far-reaching implications beyond the food arena, as it is not limited to any category, retailer or manufacturer. We are currently investigating the potential drivers of shopping behavior that appear to reside within the household to understand where and how measurable brand-building occurs in the at-home experience. Additionally, we will be investigating the role of:

Household social structures on shopping behavior
Social networks external to the home in influencing consumption habits within the home
Consumption occasions within the home
Taste/preference formation within the home on future shopping behavior
Product design with regard to storage and consumption within the household
Household orientations to household finance on consumption
Orientations (however fragmented) toward food, personal care and health

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