In its simplest form, the role of advertising is to shape behaviors. Any marketing action, or advertising, seeks to increase the probability that a customer will pick the brand in the future.
THE KPI TO CARE ABOUT
Our objective in advertising is to keep, with sights to grow, market share—if there was no advertising, consumers would, over time, forget the brand and that brand would lose sales within its category. In our business as marketers, we know penetration is key to driving market share. Penetration is a more meaningful and accountable KPI (vs. sales), as it is not influenced by the state or fluctuations of the market.
How do we drive penetration? The construct for doing so at the highest level is super-simple: attract new customers and retain existing customers. Now—obviously, driving penetration becomes far more complicated than its basic definition, or marketing teams and agencies would be obsolete.
To be successful in constantly acquiring new customers and making it easy to retain our current customers, accredited marketer Bryon Sharp introduced (yet another simple) structure of increasing both mental availability and physical availability. Mental availability is when a buyer will notice, recognize, and/or think of a brand when considering a purchase. Physical availability is how present, stand-out, and pertinent your brand is (relative to the alternatives) in those buying situations. These two elements combined can create magic.
MAKE THE MOST OF COMMERCE EVERYWHERE
There is a huge convergence occurring in the media landscape right now that is changing the way we think about mental and physical availability. With advancements in tech and retail media, plus evolving consumer behaviors, commerce now happens everywhere. We highlighted this movement in a blog post covering top trends from Shoptalk, noting that discovery, search, and shopping processes are changing dramatically. Now and on the go-forward, marketers should use every touchpoint as an opportunity to build brand and create a shopping experience. Brands can now—more than ever—create more physical availability by leaning into shoppability and retail connections in advertising.
At Stella Rising, we have aligned our own business around the fast-moving impact of “Commerce Everywhere.” One way we’ve done this is by breaking down any barriers between the historically siloed Retail Media and Consumer Media teams—and acting as a connective tissue for our clients in those areas, as they work through these changes internally themselves.
WHY LOOK AT CONSUMER AND RETAIL HOLISTICALLY?
By merging Consumer and Retail investments and planning them holistically, our team can focus on reaching the right consumers at scale—a job we need to do in consumer media—while also considering every consumer connection moment as a potential shopping moment. We can root our go-to-market plan in how, and where, the consumer might shop. We now think about channels like CTV and Display (historically Awareness channels) through strategic placements in Retailer Media networks, to both fuel the backend delivery and allow more moments for frictionless shoppability. By planning as a team holistically, we can purposefully plan how our larger advertising investment contributes to a brand’s retailer Joint Business Plan. This strategy allows smaller and more mid-sized brands to make their budget work harder for them.
A steadfast POV at Stella is to think, plan, and be consumer centric—and this approach applies to planning for how consumers shop. Marketing levers that support a consumer-shopping approach include retail Media networks for mass reach, QR codes, Shoppable placements in upper funnel, connectivity and attribution partners like AMP’d and MikMak, expansion in TikTok Shop, and more. Several of these levers are even free and easy!
Essentially, give your consumer every opportunity to buy your brand in a frictionless way (even if they aren’t yet in market). Physical availability is a key component for fueling market share, and now that consumers essentially have a store in their pocket (their phone!), brands can create physical availability in a bigger way.
Connect with us to ensure your brand has a best-in-class strategy for driving market share, outshining competition, and maximizing advertising investment.
Comments