Gaining the Upper Hand with Shoppers – Without Relying on Retail Media

Retail media has become a cornerstone of marketing strategies for FMCG brands, offering access to retailer-specific audiences and unique channels such as in-store digital media, point-of-sale signage, retailer-owned social media and publications.

For brands without an e-commerce presence or CRM, retail media currently provides the only way to directly engage their shoppers. While effective, it does present significant challenges that makes it an unsustainable, long-term strategy for brands:

• High Costs – fee structure based on reach, with points redemptions (where applicable) charged separately,
• Lack of Flexibility – campaigns require long lead-times, up to nine months for some channels, and typically run for short bursts,
• Limited Post-Campaign Engagement – brands lose ability to establish an on-going relationship with audiences,
• Message Dilution – campaign effectiveness can be reduced due to multiple brands targeting shoppers through the same channel. Solus campaigns typically incur 4x high budgets.
• Transparency Issues – retailers control campaign activation and management, with brands reliant on post-campaign reviews (PCR), often taking up to 4 weeks to be presented

Brands do have the opportunity to engage shoppers in-store without relying on retail media, but they pose significant trade-offs. These approaches are often costly, complex and logistically challenging.

An example is on-pack promotions – such as cash-back offers or competitions. While they can influence decision-making at the shelf, they present several hurdles:

• High production costs for short packaging runs tailored to limited-time promotions,
• Logistical complexity managing unique batch numbers and SKU codes across different retailers,
• Post-promotion challenges, such as clearance pricing for unsold units, and
• Low engagement, on-pack QR Codes typically deliver interaction rates of less than 1%.

Similarly, product giveaways, often via pop-up activations, can boost awareness and trial, but they’re expensive to execute, difficult to scale and don’t guarantee long-term shopper conversion.

For brands who have invested in their own CRM or loyalty programs, without access to granular, transactional data at the individual shopper level, it’s hard to accurately measure revenue contribution or customer value.

A New Innovative Marketing Technology to Influence Shopper Behaviour and Increase Loyalty

Until now, FMCG brands, particularly those without a direct-to-consumer model, had limited opportunities to connect directly with brand shoppers outside of retail media. Shping has developed a retail-agnostic marketing ecosystem that connects brands directly with shoppers – a game-changing innovation that finally enables brands to reclaim customer ownership.

As a complete marketing ecosystem, Shping empowers brands to:

• Communicate directly with shoppers of their brand and category, including those buying from competitors,
• Drive sales through any retailer and channel, not limited to specific retailers unlike retail media,
• Analyse and action powerful data and insights, leveraging sales data sourced from sales receipts uploaded by shoppers, and
• Own their shopper data and relationships.

Full Transparency, Performance Tracking and Loyalty Building

By bringing transactional data from receipts directly to brands, Shping puts brands in the driver’s seat, giving them visibility into sales and campaign performance down to the single user level, across multiple retailers. This enables brands to:

• Create and manage their own loyalty program – building a database of engaged shoppers,
• Encourage repeat purchases and retention – incentivise shoppers with tiered rewards, fostering long-term loyalty even amid competitor promotions, and
• Shift category purchases in favour of their brand – maintaining regular purchase frequencies unlocks greater incentives for shoppers, driving up average revenue per user (ARPU) and increasing units per store per week (UPSPW).

Cost-Effective, Engagement-Based Pricing

The Shping ecosystem not only breaks legacy boundaries by removing intermediaries in the brand-consumer relationship, it also completely transforms the cost model. Shifting from traditional, outdated approaches that charge for reach and impressions, brands only pay for actual conversion through a performance-based model. This eliminates wasted ad spend on low-intent audiences and prioritises conversions.

Designed for agility – brands can plan and launch campaigns within days with a defined budget, seamlessly integrating them into existing marketing strategies.

More Than Just Another Ad Channel

Shping is a complete marketing ecosystem with an integrated activation engine that guides shoppers through the full sales journey – from discovery to loyalty – via multiple coordinated touchpoints, all managed by brands within a single platform.