Have you ever tried to make something cool that wasn’t actually cool?
Let’s be clear Shopper Management is not cool. In fact it may be the least cool thing I have ever worked on, but it is VERY important. In today’s economic environment understanding your shoppers and their behavior has never been more important.
We at The Nielsen Company have been very busy reorganizing ourselves to bring our clients value added solutions and deep insight through expert consulting in key solution areas. Shopper Management is one such area. Shopper Management is the art and science of deriving and acting on insights about shoppers and the shopping process. That is a simple (19 words) and broad statement and involves many capabilities, data sets, tools, frameworks and functional areas. The Shopper space is wide and deep. Together we’ll make sense of it and build your business in the process. The Experiment Given that this is an emerging space for both The Nielsen Company and our clients and that we feel that some of the best learning and understanding is achieved through dialogue we wanted to test a series of propositions. Can we enable a transparent and rich dialogue based on a strong stream of content in an emerging space? And further will that stream of content encourage dialogue to mutually further learning of all participants? And are free social media tools an appropriate medium for that dialogue? We think so! And we think it’s cool. You can link us via RSS to our blog, or follow us on twitter @theshopperwonk or join our group TheShopperWonk on Linked in. In short there are many ways to follow the Wonks and stay engaged. This is a two way street and you will be a part of it. So please join my colleagues and fellow founding members (The Wonks-see bios under the Meet the Wonks link on the home page) Todd Hale, Janice Linnane, Tom Pirovano and Nigel Paice as we embark on this journey. We know not where it will lead us, but we hope to learn in the process and engage clients and other interested parties and advance the cause of an emerging discipline in the marketing arena: Shopper Management. I am not sure if Shopper Management is a cool discipline yet. But it is clearly cooler than just before this posting. - Jay Stockwell, Founder TheShopperWonk email: jay.stockwell@nielsen.com
