FMOT, SMOT, ZMOT…WTF? The first three acronyms are from the lexicon of ‘shopper marketing’, the last one a humble retailer’s exasperated “what the?” response. What does it all mean? And to use another truncation, is shopper marketing just so much BS from a bunch of (likely) MBA’s? I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of years pondering that question. And this is the conclusion I’ve come to. While ‘shopper’ (as the discipline is popularly known), is
certainly full of snake oil salesmen, it does have some genuine remedies for retail.
So let’s start with the impenetrable jargon at the opening of this column. FMOT, SMOT and ZMOT are all ‘moments of truth’ – first, second, and zero.
The idea of moments of truth is at the heart of the shopper marketing movement. P&G boss, A.G. Lafley, popularised the FMOT (commonly called ‘eff-mot’) to describe that first critical three to seven second moment when shoppers decide to purchase an item.
The SMOT is the second moment of truth, which is the experience of the product.
And ZMOT? Well, that’s the zero moment of truth, a phrase coined by Google to describe the time after an ad is seen, but before a decision to purchase is made. It’s the research phase that takes place online, and often via smartphones in store.
All these moments of truth are incorporated into another shopper marketing buzz phrase – the ‘path to purchase’. The idea is to first map out and then intersect and interact with shoppers at different points as they make their way to a buying decision.
After the purchase, marketers need to turn the journey into a virtuous circle where buyers keep coming back. These days, the notion of a path to purchase has further evolved, into a ‘digital path to purchase’.
Ken Barnett, Global CEO of Mars Advertising, a US shopper agency, says that “there are only three objectives for path to purchase marketing: (to get) on the list, in the cart, and in the heart”.
To expand upon that quote, how do you ensure that your brand is front of mind in the first place, that the customer is directed to the right point of purchase, that they actually put your product in their basket (whether that is instore or online) and finally feel good about the experience afterwards?
Shopper marketing can take many forms – from store layout, navigation, and ambience, enhancing the presence of a product on a shelf; to good old fashioned sales promotion.
The genesis is widely regarded to be the late 1990s, when P&G and Walmart worked together to cluster baby products together into one aisle.
Shopper marketing started with P&G and Walmart creating a ‘baby’ destination. That category is still a big area for shopper marketing around the world, as these images from a supermarket in Buenos Aires show.
In doing so, they created a destination that balanced out low margin essential purchases such as nappies with more profitable items such as baby clothes. Beyond the buzzwords, really effective shopper marketing is simply about understanding and influencing a shopper’s behaviour in order to make a sale.
And it’s applying some process and science to what many retailers (certainly the great merchants) have always done intuitively.
So while it’s worth approaching shopper with a healthy amount of skepticism, it doesn’t hurt to bolster instinct with facts and framework, particularly at a time when the way shoppers behave is less predictable than ever.
Jon Bird is chairman of specialist retail marketing agency IdeaWorks (www.ideaworks.com.au) and Octomedia, publisher of Inside Retail. Email: jon.bird@ideaworks.com.au, Blog: www.newretailblog.com, Twitter: @thetweetailer