From street market stalls, country stores and local shops to modern hypermarkets, giant shopping centres and exclusive boutiques; from various forms of direct sales, travelling sales, and sales over the Internet wherever producers and salespeople try to win the favour of potential customers.
A flood of new goods, dozens of product versions, hundreds of brands, billions of advertising GRPs and promotions at every corner. Such a quantity of messages and stimuli is overwhelming, disorientating, paralysing decisions and making them entirely random, routine, or even putting one off of buying anything at all.
Studies into distribution channels, Storemind and Catman, conducted in real shopping situations, help one mark out clear paths in this thicket. They help one understand how a consumer functions in such a complex reality, what a consumer really thinks about a producer and a vendor, whether a specific purchase was the result of deeper reflection, inspired by a specific situation at the shop shelf, or whether it was brought about by a completely chance and inexplicable impulse.
Catman is a multi-stage and multi-element process covering a set of proven techniques for gathering and analysing data, supporting category management. In the preliminary phase it covers the definition and identification of the product categorys role by its users, and the description of purchase habits in this category. Individual in-depth interviews, assisted shopping, observation and interviews at the shop shelf and/or after leaving the shop are then used.
Many issues in this area can also be investigated using virtual reality experiments by applying the 4D Shopper technique.
This all serves to provide a detailed picture of types of behaviour before and during the shopping process, to understand the motives and goals behind them, and to define the accompanying emotions, buying plans, and factors behind sudden changes of decision. Thus descriptions of models of behaviour emerge, while the technique Purchase Pulse also gives rise to the typology of buyers attitudes (e.g. those oriented towards price, brand, promotions and pack size) as well as decision trees and maps showing the relations between brands or sub-categories in the context of consumer behaviour.
We thus obtain knowledge regarding how customers do their shopping in a specific product category, what they pay attention to, what they are guided by, what puts them off and thus we learn how to influence the decision taken at the shelf.
Products used in managing distribution channels are:
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Experts in.....
