Unilever is flipping the way it monitors shoppers to focus on their behaviours whereas before those insights would’ve prioritised demographics and left it ill-prepared for how the “cardboard box is changing shopping”.
That’s not to say that demographics don’t matter, it’s just that the ubiquity of mobile could give advertisers a more complete view of faceless shoppers should they successfully unravel the data.
And there lies the rub; Unilever is all too aware it doesn’t own rich shopper data and has subsequently broadened the remit of its insights team so that they’re trying to unpick the behaviour behind the data it does get. Keith Sleight, global shopping insight director, summed it up as a move from “answering questions by providing data [to marketers] to being thought provoking”.
Core to this shift is successfully grounding strategies in knowing the emotions, cultural context, reasons for purchase that drive the same person to shop at different times, at different retailers and with different budgets.