Understanding Shopping Journey:An Effectual method for FMCGs to solve their operational challenges

Every customer enters a store with a goal or mission in mind. They visit stores to satisfy multiple need states, such as getting a bottle of milk and a box of cereals for their daily breakfast or purchasing ingredients for a healthy lunch meal the same day or to stock up their monthly groceries.

This difference in customer shopping behavior can be studied by shopping mission analysis which enables innovative methods to be implemented to communicate with the shopper and influence purchase decisions prior to their next visit.

Objective: To understand the shopping journey of customer to drive new marketing and operational opportunities for a leading retail chain of hypermarkets and grocery stores.

Approach: Shopping Journey is classified based on two qualitative inputs: Basket mission and Dominant department in a basket.

Basket mission refers to the study of significant purpose for which the customer visited the store, for eg: some may be daily shoppers who purchase few items for their daily needs,some might come only for grocery shopping or to stock up their monthly groceries.

Dominant department: The products in a departmental store are categorized and placed as per their department names like Food&Groceries, Meat, Beverages etc. In a transaction,if majority of the products belong from a particular dept then that it can be ascertain that the customer came to purchase majorly from that dept.

Steps involved in this study:

Findings:

Conclusions: Investigating the popular basket missions and dominant department for a customer, Category Managers and Retail owners can easily make better in-store strategic and operational decisions.

What next?

The steps are to build a predictive model based on the findings of shopping journey analysis.The products which a customer is going to purchase in his next visit can be predicted from the model. These details can be easily used for personalized campaigns to enhance the customer experience as well as to up sell and cross sell the products.