Shopping Habits Have Changed - Has Your Shopper Marketing?

Is your shopper marketing ready for the 'retail tomorrow'? Because 'retail yesterday' isn't coming back any time soon!

Shopping for groceries is essential for most of us, but it's surprisingly hard work. We know from our own research, involving having shoppers shop for grocery items whilst in an fMRI scanner, that it takes considerable mental effort to do a ‘big shop’.

As shoppers, we have developed mental shortcuts to deal with the cognitive effort required for regular trips to the supermarket or .com grocery site. These mental shortcuts are better known as habits. In other words, supermarket shopping, either in bricks and mortar or online has become a habit: Something we need to assign a minimal mental resource to and that our brains ‘automatically’ handle for us. Incidentally, that’s partly why most people have a preferred supermarket: Because they find it more familiar and less mentally taxing to shop.

Understanding shopping habits should be a key aspect of?your?shopper marketing. So let’s explore habits a bit more. It’s been widely accepted that it takes around a month, or 28 days to develop a new habit. But a new study by the University College London quantified that on average, people who were trying to learn new habits such as eating fruit daily or going jogging took a depressing?66 days?before reporting that the behaviour had become unchangingly automatic.

When it comes to changing habits, it is necessary to understand something about our own brains: Firstly, changing habits is hard because our brains are lazy; we're all ‘cognitive misers’, our brains are designed to take short cuts, making as many behaviours as possible, automatic. As psychologist Ian Newby-Clark says: "What would be the point of having a habit that didn't free up your mind to focus on more pressing matters?" Habits are meant to be difficult to change.

But first, the Covid-19 crisis and more recently, the cost of living crisis have changed shopping habits right now. Shoppers now prefer more physical 'personal' space in-store. More choose online simply because it reduces their risk of infection coming from coming into physical contact with others. And there is now more of a shift to getting in and out of the supermarket as quickly as possible.

The cost of living crisis has led more shoppers to take greater care over each purchase decision, in essence, shopping less by habit and more by energy sapping System 2 mental effort.

For many of us, the weekly trawl round the supermarket or visit to the online store had become somewhat habitual. 60% of supermarket purchases were typically ‘Grab & Go’: That means they were habitual repeat purchases, mentally processed by system 1 which operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control.

Reportedly, more than 90% of online grocery purchases were selected from the favourites list and so qualify again as being repeat purchases (habitual).

Quite often, the aim of shopper marketing has been to tap into habitual shopping behaviour in order to change it.

Habits are based on mentally easy responses to needs. “The chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken," Dr Samuel Johnson observed gloomily.

But today, we think differently when we shop. We are now shopping much more using System 2, which allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of rational choice and concentration. System 2 focussed shopper marketing should promote the aspects that make your brand easier to like and buy. An underlying concept has to do with how our brains process information. For example, when it comes to reading, repeated words are easier to process. Don't expect System 2 to read 10 facts in-store, but instead, present the same fact 10 times.

All those hard-won and hard-wired systems 1 driven habits of shoppers instinctively buying Andrex, Nescafe, Persil, Kellogg’s, etc. are dissolving by the day. As we anxiously worry and think our way through the supermarkets, mentally we are working very hard: And it hurts our brains to do this. So, they will be actively devising cunning ways to lazily shop in this new world.

As I mentioned earlier, it takes 66 days for a habit to effectively form/change or break. 66 Days is just over 2-months from now. Some say that we will be seeing light at the end of the Covid-19 tunnel by then. Whether or not that is true, in just a few months from now, many brands will have lost some or all of their habitual, emotional pull on shoppers and consumers.

Retailers and brands alike can benefit from understanding habits, emotions and brand loyalty, (from a System1 and System 2 perspective). We need to start looking at how we can use shopper marketing to form new habits that benefit not just shoppers, but also our brands, categories, and stores. Waiting for the end of the crisis and then assuming shoppers will be the same as they used to be, risks not being part of the new habits of shopping.

We need to understand that habits form by making things easier for our brains and taking away any friction from the purchase process. Simply put, you are much more likely to become the preferred, habitual repeat purchase if you are the mentally easiest to buy. When our human brains find something that is easy to process, they tend to like it more than something less easily processed or unknown

Not for a very long time have we had the opportunity to develop and nurture new and better shopping habits: Better for shoppers, better for brands and better for retailers too.

Every shopper, consumer touchpoint and aspect of shopper marketing needs to be looked at from a cognitive load perspective to understand just how likely you are to be part of these new habits. Because according to science, one thing is for certain: Old habits are changing, probably dramatically. You can not rely on old shopping habits anymore.

Adcock Solutions?have been improving the marketing communications of leading brands and retailers for more than 25 years.

We explain how your customers really think and make decisions, so that you can engage with them more effectively. Come to us for Behavioural Science insights and expertise that improves the visibility, appeal, engagement, and sales of your brand.