We all know one thing: shopping has been disrupted significantly over the past year and a half. Now, more than ever, advertisers and marketers need to keep up. Marketing Communications Manager Clayton Southerly wrote about a few aspects of this reality in his latest piece for AdvertisingWeek, titled “All Shoppers Do Research – Even The Impulsive Ones.”

Looking for information everywhere

In the article, he cites data from the launch of our Shopper Influence Research program. One key conclusion that he calls out is that “shoppers always want more information in more places, and advertisers need to rush to keep up.” They want more and more information, from all manner of sources, when making a purchase decision.

People are finding the information they need in a variety of places, just as they are shopping in a variety of places. From pre-purchase online research to collect data on a product or service, to researching on a phone while standing in a physical store, people want to be met in their preferred environment with the information they need. Even so-called “impulse” buyers are more self-aware than their name might suggest, as our research found that “64% of impulsive shoppers consider their purchases to be planned.”

Complicated Shoppers

Clayton expands on this topic, as it illustrates just how complicated today’s shoppers can be. He writes: “There’s very little difference between the average number of sources used by shoppers who often do so spontaneously (they use an average of 17 sources across all shopping) and shoppers who say they carefully consider their purchases (with an average of 19 sources used).” This means that marketers and advertisers must conduct business under the assumption that every purchase is heavily researched and ensure that desired information is widely available.

He concludes the article with the statement that brands and advertisers need to be intimately aware of their audience’s “continuously changing shopping method” while understanding  “exactly who their customers are, where they go for their information, and where they shop.”

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