Latest / Retail Media Breakfast Club / POV: Your Mum Always Buys the Same Brand
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- POV: your Mum always buys the same brand === [00:00:00] Kiri Masters: Your mom has her go-to brand. She always has. But if you ask why, the explanation doesn't always seem entirely relevant. But it makes sense to her. And if you point out that the store brand is [00:00:15] cheaper, Mom just won't be moved. That is the premise of a recent comedy skit that I shared on LinkedIn. [00:00:24] Maybe you've seen it. Um, I put on a wig and play a [00:00:30] exaggerated mom character. Um, we'll link up to it in the show notes. It's pretty funny. [00:00:37] But really, Mom would make a perfectly normal survey respondent. In some recent research that I [00:00:45] co-authored with Bazaarvoice called What's a Brand Worth When AI Does the Shopping?, [00:00:50] we asked shoppers why they stick with a brand that they buy repeatedly, and the top answer was performance. Forty-five percent of people said that [00:01:00] they stay because the product performs better than competitors. [00:01:04] Only 8% of people said that it was habit, that it was the household name that they've been using for years. I believe that they believe it, and [00:01:15] performance of a product surely matters. A product that stops delivering won't get bought a second time, but it's not usually what made you choose it in the first place. [00:01:23] [00:01:24] Kiri Masters: Because truly optimizing every purchase based [00:01:30] on performance would include finding, reading, weighing objective information about performance in every product category, and that would turn a 30-minute grocery run into a day-long [00:01:45] event. And that assumes that objective information about product performance actually exists in the first place [00:01:52] So in the absence of being able to do that, we take a lot of shortcuts as consumers. We rely on [00:02:00] habit. We rely on recognizable brands. We rely on what is the product that is sitting at eye level, and that's before we even think of things like impulse buys and the upsell at checkout The reality is most of the [00:02:15] decisions that we make happen before the shopping mission begins. [00:02:21] I found some fascinating research from WPP Media and Oxford University's Saïd Business School, who put [00:02:30] numbers on those shortcuts in this white paper called How Humans Decide, and definitely worth a read. We'll link up to it in the show notes. And it draws on a decade of WPP's purchase journey studies, that is one point two million journeys [00:02:45] across more than two hundred categories in forty-seven countries. [00:02:49] And what they found in terms of a, a mental model here with the consumer purchase journey is splitting the journey into two stages. There's the priming stage [00:03:00] and the active stage. In the priming stage, this is your everyday life. You're not shopping, but you're picking up experiences of brands and categories as you go about your [00:03:15] life, and those experiences and touchpoints build a bias towards some brands over others. [00:03:24] The second stage, the active stage, begins when a need or want [00:03:30] kicks in. It can last seconds or months depending on the category. And from a brand-building standpoint, most of the work happens in that first stage, in that completely passive priming stage. According to the [00:03:45] paper, most shoppers already know which brands they'll consider before they start shopping. [00:03:50] They typically consider fewer than three brands and usually end up with the one they were already biased toward. [00:03:58] But [00:03:58] WPB says that [00:04:00] that scenario unfolds across 84% of purchases, and in the report they've split it out by product or product and services category as well, so you can go take a look at that. [00:04:12] Now, the obvious concern for brands [00:04:15] these days is that AI assistants will undo all of that, all the decades of brand building and brand advertising that national brands have invested in and enjoy the fruits of their [00:04:30] labor many, many years after investing in all of that brand equity. [00:04:34] A shopper today is asking its AI assistant for the best option, and the assistant answers with attributes and specs, and the brand gets reduced to a spec [00:04:45] sheet. And in the research that I did with Bazaar Voice, when AI presents shoppers with product recommendations, 64% of respondents said that they would click on the brand that they already knew and trusted That's [00:05:00] compared with 24% who click on whatever the AI marked as the best match, and only 11% of people in the survey would click through on price alone. [00:05:11] So the same shoppers who told us that they stay [00:05:15] loyal for performance mostly passed over the option that AI said would suit them the best, and they went for the brand name that they knew. Now, brands shouldn't read that as permissions to rest on their laurels or just [00:05:30] coast along because the priming stage, that passive pre-purchasing stage, is getting more crowded [00:05:38] Research from NP Digital last year combined the touch points that consumers recalled [00:05:45] themselves with objective analytics data and found that shoppers went from needing a relatively low number of touch points to a much higher number of touch points recently. It went in twenty twenty one from eight [00:06:00] and a half touch points to eleven point one touch points in twenty twenty-five And that just shows us the consumer journey touch points over time is expanding. [00:06:12] We have all these new social media networks [00:06:15] and influencers and retailers and, media touchpoints that we're considering during our purchase journey. It's becoming more and more crowded [00:06:24] and another interesting piece of research I came across recently was [00:06:30] Kantar's Media Reactions 2026 study based on around 23,000 interviews of consumers across 33 markets, and they found that 32% of consumers now use social media to browse or shop for products. [00:06:45] Kantar's warning to marketers is that the path to purchase now runs through channels you may not be measuring as commerce. your advertisers [00:07:00] can't wait weeks for audiences. GrowthLoop's Composable Commerce Media solution helps media teams turn first-party data into high-value audiences, launch campaigns faster, and [00:07:15] prove what's working across every channel. Learn how retail media leaders at Costco, Fanatics, and Gopuff use GrowthLoop to create highly segmented audiences and deliver [00:07:30] stronger results for their brand partners. [00:07:33] Visit go.growthloop.com/breakfast. That is go.growthloop.com/breakfast [00:07:45] [00:07:45] So that's the challenge from the brand perspective. It's crowded. There is more objective information out there than ever before. We're worried about what this does to brand. But what about the retailer? The retailer's problem is in the active [00:08:00] stage, In the active shopping moment. The priming decides what brand a customer wants to buy. [00:08:07] The question for the retailer is where the shopper goes to act on it, and that part is moving, too. Google [00:08:15] says that the average search in AI mode, its conversational search experience, is three times as long as a traditional search query, and that people are asking it longer, more conversational questions. [00:08:29] And we're all [00:08:30] starting to do this now, right? Instead of like best keyboard Bluetooth, we are giving our context. "I have a Mac, and I'm looking for a, a keyboard with particularly low latency, and I need it to [00:08:45] be under $100." So we're all s- we're starting to change our behavior, and I've been arguing for more than a year now that agentic shopping poses an existential threat to retail media, and that is the [00:09:00] core retail media ad unit today, the sponsored product ad on a retailer search results page, and that is what is particularly exposed to this changing behavior. [00:09:09] If the active stage of shopping moves to a third-party assistant, the search results [00:09:15] page where that ad lives gets skipped over. Now, some RMN leaders are starting to see that same risk and agree that it's a, a real issue. Yesterday, I shared a snapshot of the recent RMN [00:09:30] leader survey from eMarketer and Bain that was covering 61 US sell-side retail media leaders, and 44% of respondents in that survey named AI platforms disintermediating retailer-owned [00:09:45] purchase journeys as one of the most disruptive forces they expect over the next one to three years. [00:09:50] That was pretty similar to last year. But the difference with this year's, um, survey is that eMarketer and Bain included on-site [00:10:00] native AI ads as an ad format. Um, and RMN leaders got to say which are the top three ad formats that we're gonna see the most growth in. As I wrote about yesterday, a lot of the [00:10:15] expected growth is coming from on-site product ads, like the birthplace of retail media. [00:10:21] And, um, so that's particularly interesting. But native AI ads, as in like ads within chat assistants on-site on a [00:10:30] retailer.com, that is the second-biggest expected source of revenue growth in the next 12 months. They didn't ask that question last year, but it is now in the options for this year, and it's a pretty high on the list of where the growth is expecting to come [00:10:45] from. [00:10:45] Now, that bet only pays off if shoppers actually do their asking inside the retailer's assistant rather than someone else's. Kantar found that 17% of [00:11:00] consumers would trust an AI assistant to shop for them in the future. Now, that is a minority, and it's a stated intention, the same kind of answer this piece opened by doubting and also doesn't tell us [00:11:15] whose assistant they have in mind [00:11:16] But this is the concern. If mom let an AI agent do her shopping, she'd still end up with her go-to brand, like most of the shoppers in my research with Bazaarvoice. But for retailers, the worry [00:11:30] is that mom is asking ChatGPT and not them. Well, that's it for today. [00:11:36] I have all of the charts and data in the blog companion piece to this episode [00:11:45] today. We'll link up to everything in the show notes if you wanna read along. Go to retailmediabreakfastclub.com or the conversation that inevitably unfolds on LinkedIn in the comment section. Thank you for listening, and I'll catch you tomorrow [00:11:59]