Influencing Shopper Decisions
Unleash the Power of Your Brand to Win Customers
Authors: Rebecca Brooks and Devora Rogers
Shopping plays a central role in our culture nowadays and with technological advances, constant changes, and innovation, shoppers have new expectations. They're now more knowledgeable and demanding than ever, using this experience as a way of self-expression.
While consumers learned at a fast pace how to approach shopping in the digital age, the advertising industry was slow to adapt. Marketers need new methodologies to understand how decision-making is changing in a digitally empowered world. Rebecca Brooks and Devora Rogers are market researchers and the authors of the upcoming book Influencing Shopper Decisions: Unleash the Power of Your Brand to Win Customers, published by Kogan Page in April 2022. In its 12 chapters, they are both committed to help us better understand consumer decision-making with evidence-based information and to guide us in building stronger brands for a rapidly changing world.
As Lisa Bodell mentions in the foreword, this book is going to disrupt the practice of market research in a way similar to how social media changed the meaning of "friend". According to Influencing Shopper Decisions, it is necessary to analyze the information source usage, the path the customers take before the purchase and the research performed before this step. The authors highlight the need to redefine brand tracking to gain insights, with a focus that should not be on the questions that brands want answered, but on how people are actually engaging with it.
Rebecca Brooks and Devora Rogers offer a quick primer on the neuroscience tools sometimes used in market research and propose their approach to unlocking hidden shopper insights. They also dedicated a chapter to analyzing how the Covid-19 pandemic changed everything and reshaped our world. The reader will find this interesting and topical, understanding why remote workers are the most demanding and discerning shoppers and have now become a valuable target market that is more likely to refract or promote a good brand experience, but on the other hand, also most likely to choose a competitor.
The writing style makes this book easy to read and understand. Each chapter ends with key takeaways for us to use and valuable references from up-to-date sources and research. To be able to adjust to the new landscape, in the last chapter the authors offer a series of strategies for change for marketers and for researchers, focusing afterwards on the decisions executives need to make. If you are a market researcher, a CEO, or you are interested in understanding consumer decision-making, you should read this book as soon as you can - you will love it!
The book is the result of a decade of the writers’ experience around shopper decision-making and targets modern marketers that want to better understand the shopper journey, what they do and how influential this is from the moment they decide to enter a category until the moment of buying. The authors guide marketers to a new era of consumer experience research.
Reviewer: Monica Diana Olteanu