smp, the London-headquartered commerce marketing agency, has announced two new specialist appointments to its Amazon team, to support the agency’s ongoing international growth. Bella Bui has been appointed Media Buyer, with Febby Mpundu appointed Content Specialist.

Following a series of new business successes in the tech sector, the new appointments will bolster smp’s dedicated Amazon team established earlier in the year.

Headed up by smp’s Head of Planning, Chris Cooper, the Amazon team, which also includes dedicated Amazon account managers and data analysts, will continue to support clients’ growing Amazon demands. Its focus is on using Amazon Advertising tools to reach and influence shoppers at every stage of the purchase journey, from discovery and search through to purchase.

As a result of this growth, the agency today moves from its Charlotte Street offices, which have been the agency’s home for over a decade, to Aviation House in Holborn. The move allows smp to accommodate the expanding team and focus on growing its eCommerce offering and Amazon expertise, still within touching distance of some of the best shopping streets in the world.

Managing Director, Chris Carter added: “It’s a very exciting time for smp, thanks to new business wins and the growth of the Amazon side of our business. We needed to boost our specialist team to meet demand and are very happy to welcome Bella and Febbi on board. We’re looking forward to continued growth and further strengthening our offering in delivering solutions for an ever-evolving shopper journey.”

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The Citizen’s Foundation UK, the UK arm of a major Pakistan-based charity, has appointed shopper marketing agency smp as its UK lead social media agency to drive awareness of its work and raise funds.

The Citizen’s Foundation is in the top five largest charities in Pakistan, helping give underprivileged children access to education in Pakistan, building over 1,482 schools, and educating over 220,000 children in the past 22 years.

Effective immediately, smp will refresh The Citizen’s Foundation’s paid social strategy with an initial focus on Ramadan. The appointment is a new scope of work and is part of a wider change in marketing strategy to move away from email marketing to social media-led campaigns. Led by Business Director Mark Burgess, smp will handle all the NGO’s social activity, including advertising, media buying and analysis.

Cally Archibald, Social Media Strategist at smp, says: “The Citizen’s Foundation is an exceptional organisation that brings genuine, positive social change in Pakistan through education. We’re very excited to be collaborating with them to increase awareness of the important fundraising work they do in the UK.”

Rukhsana Parveen-Cic, Executive Director at The Citizen’s Foundation, comments: “We’re an organisation working to help bring 22 million children out of poverty in Pakistan. Donors in Pakistan and the United States have been supporting the programme, but TCF UK has struggled to establish a foothold in the UK market. We’re really excited about the potential for social media to spread the word about the extraordinary work of TCF. We have won awards for the quality education that we provide for some of the most vulnerable children in the world. We hope that with the help of smp we will ultimately generate more donations.”

smp is a multi-award-winning marketing agency specialising in creating compelling content experiences for all stages of the customer journey, both online and offline. Client experience spans leading brands including Electrolux Group, Fitbit, Western Digital Corporation and Kimberly-Clark.

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Forget demographics – marketers need to be concentrating on shopper mindsets, says Chris Carter, of smp

All too often, how marketers seek to understand shoppers becomes a game of Guess Who. Match the shopper to a certain set of characteristics and Bob’s your uncle.

But we now live in a world where boundaries of country, race, age and gender are disappearing fast. Take the emergence of genderless fashion championed by the likes of Selfridges’ Agender or Zara’s Ungendered. US retail giant Target has even introduced a gender-neutral approach to communicating children’s products.

Technology is also fragmenting audiences and disrupting shopping habits. Therefore demographics, which can treat consumers like cardboard cut-outs, have become outdated. So, what comes next?

To move beyond demographics and better understand the modern shopper, marketers need to stop guessing ‘who’ and start getting to the bottom of ‘why’.

Driven by this realisation, we conducted a study to explore the motivations and values of shoppers, and the influence they have on shopping behaviour. This involved speaking to industry experts and 1,000 shoppers across different sectors, as well as sifting through a vast library of research articles.

Towards a new framework

All this preliminary research led to one conclusion: the marketing industry needs a new framework for understanding shoppers today.

Victor Schwab’s 40 emotional drivers that inform people’s decisions helped categorise our preliminary findings, but they were still too broad and required scientific validation. Cross-referencing them with Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs allowed us to refine things further.

What we discovered is there are seven key mindsets that can define how people shop today much better than the old system of demographics. They are: conscious, creative, fulfilled, influential, knowledgeable, secure and sociable.

These seven mindsets transcend age, gender and income divides. A 19-year-old restaurant worker is just as likely to be creative as a 66-year-old barrister. They also aren’t static, instead fluxing in response to personal life experiences like home ownership, having children and divorce.

Mindsets change according to mission

What’s particularly interesting is that mindsets even change depending on what people are shopping for, meaning marketers can exactly tailor and optimise their activity, like media channels, messaging and promotions, when people hit the shops.

Groceries, for example, are considered life’s essentials. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that the secure mindset – the drive to safety, security and value – is most prominent when people are shopping for groceries. Post-recession, the secure mindset is growing to be an ever more relevant driver, as likely to motivate people on higher wages as it is for lower earners, which is why the likes of Aldi and Lidl are experiencing such a boom.

Personal care shoppers are also most likely to have the secure mindset, though being knowledgeable and conscious are also important to them. In fact, personal care is the only sector of our survey (which also explores alcohol and tech) where the conscious mindset – closely linked with ethical shopping and the desire to be a ‘good person’ – is among the most dominant. With natural products taking an ever-larger chunk of the personal care market, it’s likely the conscious mindset is linked with growing shopper mistrust of synthetic and chemical products. President Obama’s recent ban on plastic microbeads in cosmetic products is a great example of this.

Online breaks down traditional demographic barriers

We know that as circumstances or shopping intentions change, mindsets shift, which is also true of the environment people are shopping in. Life online has broken down the barriers between people, whether social, cultural or geographical. The external signifiers that underpin marketing segmentation have less weight than they once did. Today, a 17-year-old from Kentucky has access to the same media and information as a 72-year-old in Kensington. In the future, the experiences and media consumption habits that traditionally define demographics will all but disappear.

Naturally, this has revolutionised the way people shop. It no longer starts at the shop door and ends at the checkout. It’s a process that can happen anytime, anywhere.

Mindsets offer a flexible and holistic framework on which to build all marketing activity across every stage of the shopper journey. While marketers might balk at the decline of demographics, unsure of where to go next, being mindful of the seven mindsets will ensure they are equipped with the right tools to understand shoppers, improve targeting and maximise sales.

Chris Carter is Managing Director of shopper marketing agency smp. smp clients include Andrex, BLACK+DECKER, Kimberly-Clark and SanDisk.

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