Draftfcb's Lucas: Shopper Marketing Is More Than Just Shelf Talkers


Over the course of his career, Jim Lucas has worked with Frito-Lay, Kellogg, Kroger, Procter & Gamble and others and has watched shopper marketing evolve. Now evp/director of Draftfcb’s shopper marketing division, Lucas sees the industry at a crucial point and compares shopper marketing to digital because it is a vortex of change as more packaged goods companies realize the importance of in-store marketing and retailers become aware of their power. Lucas spoke with Brandweek editor Todd Wasserman about the changing nature of shopper marketing. Some excerpts are below:

Brandweek: You maintain that shopper marketing is undergoing a lot of change right now, similar to what we’re seeing in digital. What do you mean by that?
Jim Lucas: A good way to start off is if you think about how this has come about, the packaged goods folks or it could be anyone from Nokia to Motorola, what they’ve come to realize is the power of the retail environment in order to sell their product. What we’re seeing is everyone is realizing the importance of it now.

BW: But wasn’t that always the case? In the 50s or 60s even?
JL: Not so much. What happened was the store was seen as a point of distribution and then if you took it to the 90s the retailers began to look at it as a profit center, they would almost make more money selling circular space than anything else. What happened in the last few years is the retailer have really started to step up and talk about building their brands and what’s happened in the last say 12 to 24 months is they’ve become even more serious about that and the CPGs have woken up to this and said we’re going to even devote less space to having people merchandise and display and message about their products because we want to control our environments for our brands. What’s happened is the CPG folks and the retailers are not exactly on the right page right now. And those that are the leaders in marketing like P&G or Unilever they have become really good at understanding how to align their goals with the retailers’ goals. What that could mean is if you have a message, you’re going to develop your brand message to work through the voice of the retailer…the retailer has become the trusted shopper advocate.

BW: So how do you get your message across if you’re P&G or someone like that?
JL: I think there are a couple of things. One is what do we know? Most retailers now know their shoppers extremely well so we’re not going to have better knowledge than they do, but we will know how shoppers shop a particular category like household cleaners. As a CPG company I should be coming to them with some notion of how we can better sell to them in these categories.

Continue to next page →