Article
Breaking our bad habits
The monkey on our backs
Trust me on this: nothing gets a group of people buzzing like sharing your favourite market research story.
Mine is when strategists at AMV BBDO
sent in a guy in a gorilla suit
to walk around a supermarket on a Saturday morning. They wanted to prove to Sainsbury’s that consumers were shopping on autopilot, and paying so little attention that they wouldn’t even notice a giant monkey doing his weekly shop.
No one noticed the gorilla. The evidence led to Sainsbury's “Try Something New Today” strap-line, which
increased revenue by £2.5 billion
.
Everyone won a lot of awards.
This story (and an
overwhelming
amount of
data
available to
anyone
with Google) is great evidence of just how hard it is to crack a habitual purchase cycle.
Progressive challenger brands (especially in FMCG) know this all too well.
Even when a challenger product is objectively better, more ethical, or offers greater value than big-brand competitors, shoppers will overlook them in favour of a simpler purchase decision.
There are levers to change this behaviour, and at Finn we spend our days pulling them.
But now a once-a-decade opportunity arises.
A scary opportunity
As we head into an era of increasing inflation and economic disarray, it might seem like the deck is stacked ever more against challenger brands. Big brands have deeper pockets, more established distribution, and more mental availability .
But economic downturns represent a huge opportunity for challenger brands to break the habit cycle.
We know that in times of recession, consumers tend to
reevaluate what constitutes an essential purchase
, and what constitutes a treat.
“Treat” purchases such as electronics are pushed back to a time when money isn’t as tight. Whereas “essentials” (food and drink for example) are reevaluated, to either reduce cost or find smaller, lower-cost treats.
The opportunity for challenger brands is to interrupt a portion of these freshly-awoken sleep shoppers as they consider their transition options, and show them the value that they offer as an “treat” upgrade.
If they can divert just a fraction of these transitory shoppers into their buyer base, it can mean huge proportional growth.
Three steps out of sleepwalking
FMCG challenger brands that succeed will do three things.
Firstly they will ensure that their messaging clearly targets their benefits when compared to the established brands they want to steal from.
Many challenger brands make the mistake of seeing other challengers as their key competitors, and invest too much energy trying to win against them.
But if multiple small brands are growing in a category at once, this should be seen as a good thing not a threat. It will increase overall consumer interest in the category - pushing more shoppers out of autopilot.
Secondly, they will bring retail partners on board as collaborators.
Retailers will see a shift to own-label as an opportunity. They won’t be thrilled at the prospect of listing brands that are actively trying to compete with this shift.
But progressive brands will be able to show retailers that they have tightly targeted audience segments, and that their products can sit alongside a mass shift to own-label, making a retailer’s offering more diverse and appealing without stealing profit.
Finally, they will cement distinction and begin to grow their own habitual buyers.
Those of us who have made a New Year's resolution knows that forming a new habit is as hard as breaking an old one. Progressive brands can fast-forward this process by targeting their consumers from multiple angles to embed their brand as rapidly as possible during this window of opportunity.
This can be achieved through tactics such as loyalty and CRM programmes, content that offers real (yes, real) value to the consumer, and partnerships with brands in tangential categories.
The end-game for progressive FMCG challenger brands is to come out of the next few years with a base of consumers who are both genuinely engaged in the brand, and also habitually buying their products.
If successful, they will have achieved what a man in a gorilla suit couldn’t: breaking shoppers out of their habits and helping them make an informed choice.
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