There are at least a dozen important life/humanity lessons embedded in the Covid-19 story.
This is not about any of those – it’s a look at Covid-19 through the eyes of an opportunistic marketer and human behavior capitalist … who watches for trends that CPG clients can harness to grow their brands.
For many years, we’ve known a day was coming where digital CPG consumers would outnumber those in stores. While the rate of change to digital shopping has actually been faster in CPG than other categories (because it was behind to start with), it has sometimes still felt like a snail’s pace to marketers living in 6-week campaign cycles.
All of that changed this week. Your parents just used Instacart for the first time, and your grandparents have a Walmart Grocery account that they used for Click and Collect yesterday. They aren’t going to give up that convenience when the social limits are lifted – they’re going to embrace the convenience and time savings. As a result of one tiny mutation, behavioral change that was supposed to take 3-4 more years is about to happen this month.
So what does it mean to a CPG brand, when 40, 50, or 60% of CPG shopping moves online? Well first, think about how going into a store is fundamentally different from online shopping:
- When you go to a grocery/drug/mass store, you walk in knowing you need 5-6 things, expect to walk out with 15+, and actually walk out with 25. Stores are perfectly set up to remind you of things you’d forgotten you wanted, and to introduce you to new things you want to try. With your cart right there in front of you, it’s so simple to just drop a few more things
- Online, conversely, you actually only go “into the store” when you already know what you need – and then you tend to search for it and drop only that in your cart. You may cart- build over time, but you are still only buying things you already knew you needed.
As a result, half of the in-store shopping cart is likely to go missing – overnight – now and potentially forever – for CPG brands.
That is – unless we change how we market – and meet shoppers where they are, not where they used to be.
The good news is that you already have what you need in order to succeed with online consumers. With Click2Cart, you essentially turn the whole internet into a store – where your ads, your websites, your social media pages, your emails, etc. become “shelves” where consumers can easily discover and choose your brand … easily being the operative word, because one thing we know about CPG consumers is that they won’t do it if it’s not easy.
Remember – your subscription is for unlimited usage – and now is the time to be using it. We will be reaching out to every one of you this week to review your Click2Cart implementations and talk about how to optimize what you’re doing to support and grow your brands over the coming months in this unusual environment and to ask about other ways we can be a better partner in this challenging time (if we’re not a good partner in the hard times, we don’t deserve to be one in the easier times).
I look forward to connecting personally with you all – now I’m off to wash my hands.
– Jennifer Silverberg, CEO
