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March 29, 2006 Is the store a medium? In this week’s Advertising Age, Jack Neff argues that retail is not a medium. After mentioning media fragmentation and retail consolidation as driving thinking in that direction, he says: Such analysis has turned once-lowly in-store marketing into 'the first moment of truth' at Procter & Gamble Co. and beyond. But there's a big lie at the first moment of truth. Retail is mass, but it's not really media. After making that flat statement, however, Neff never offers any argument as to why retail is not media. He does point out that retail doesn’t provide content or entertainment (at least in the sense that TV or radio entertains): It may be entertainment, but it's usually not where people go to watch, read or play, akin to TV, magazines, radio, Web sites or game consoles. "People are there to buy their stuff and get the hell out," as one veteran retail marketer has put it, more than once. All of which may be true, but saying that retail is not an entertainment medium is irrelevant -- it doesn’t address the question of whether it is a marketing medium, and more importantly, whether it is an effective one. I addressed this question in TPM Update almost a year ago (by coincidence, in reference to another Ad Age article, on media fragmentation). If I may be excused for quoting myself, I wrote then: If you need to reach a mass audience, which is a more effective way to do it -- a thirty-second spot on CBS or an endcap at Wal-Mart? And the principle doesn't merely apply to broadcast TV and mass markets. If you want to segment somewhat, you could ask the question like this: what's a more effective medium for men -- ESPN or Sports Authority (or Best Buy)? Where can you reach women more effectively -- on Lifetime or at Kroger? The most effective marketing medium today is the store -- it can be as mass or as targeted as you like. You can target by age, demographic, psychographic, or geography. To say nothing of the fact that it's more measurable than TV. It may be the last sentence that accounts for Ad Age’s unease with in-store. An in-store ad or promotion in instantly measurable -- you put up the endcap today and you can tell tomorrow (ideally) whether it's working. But the national ad biz, which Ad Age serves, is another story entirely -- they hate the thought of being accountable for results. This is not to say that the rise of in-store as the last mass medium is good news for marketers. Far from it – and this is a point where Neff and I strongly agree. As he puts it: And you're buying space from folks who buy your products and determine their merchandising. So guess who has an edge? There’s no question that marketers have to be skittish about turning their branding message over to retailers, who have no particular reason to be concerned about protecting the brand. But somehow they are going to need to learn to deal with this problem because, like it or not, in-store is not just a medium -- for a great many marketers it is becoming their primary medium. For more news and comment every day visit our blog, TPMtoday. Among the topics in the past few days: The opposite of channel stuffing Recent posts related to the effects of media fragmentation: |
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