Shopper insight but not as we know it
We all have a dirty secret. Mine is watching really bad TV just before I go to sleep, usually pretty late. I caught Channel 4’s The Secret of the Shoplifters last week. It was fascinating. Both for an insight into the strategies the light fingered use to get away with their loot and into the mindset and determination of the professionals who are employed by the stores to track and hunt them down.
Several of the latter profiled in the programme took their role as a true vocation, almost a public duty. We saw how they spent hours and hours observing suspects via CCTV in real time. They explained how through experience they were able to interpret how people moved through the store, how they touched and examined goods and therefore what their intent might be. They explained how in time they become true experts in understanding shopper behaviour. Some of those shoppers they followed via CCTV in store had evil intentions, others did not or simply didn’t go through with their plans on that particular occasion.
Suddenly the penny dropped. How familiar the language used by these store professionals sounded. How often do specialist shopper marketing agencies, and others, talk about understanding shopper behaviours and motives? Agencies put a great deal of time and effort into understanding how consumers navigate the store environment, how they shop the category and interact with fixtures, packaging and the product itself. Admittedly in-store security staff will be looking out for criminal behaviour, but because the nature of their role involves an almost full-time observation of a broad range of store customers, criminal and non-criminal, they are placed better than most agency professionals to answer these kinds of questions about shopper behaviour in-store.
It got me thinking to those legendary ad industry stories from the 60s and 70s, apocryphal or not – who knows – of the local wino or pub regular who was recruited by a risk-taking agency head on a whim and who became a legendary creative. Who’s to say there isn’t a role for a former in-store security professional within the agency world? Whichever agency is the first to announce an audacious appointment of this kind, you can be sure they will stir up a few headlines.