The evolution of hybrid shopper behavior: 84.51° helping brands optimize omnichannel this holiday

As the 2022 holiday season approaches, brands and retailers are focused on how consumers will respond to the latest seismic shifts affecting how they’ll shop this year. While easing health restrictions are enabling consumers to return to the celebrations they love, unprecedented inflation and supply chain disruptions are changing the way they’ll prepare for those gatherings.

The hybrid shopper is here to stay

All this disruption has driven even more momentum behind the hybrid shopper — the group of consumers who emerged from the pandemic with new shopping habits that include both in-person and online shopping, also known as hybrid shopping. Hybrid shoppers move comfortably between shopping experiences ranging from ecommerce and in-store to grocery delivery services. They might use mobile apps to build their lists, then complete their in-store shopping or shop online for curbside pickup.

Emerging types of hybrid shoppers defined

Depending on their shopping habits, these shoppers typically fall into two categories: “Digital Dabblers” and “Digital Champs.” Dabblers are less committed to ecommerce, while Champs engage frequently in shopping online.

Though there are many similarities in how these groups shop in-store overall — they spend similar amounts and pick up roughly the same number of items — they vary widely in their online shopping habits. Digital Champs spend significantly more than Digital Dabblers and pick up more units online overall. And during the holidays, Champs make far more shopping trips online (50%) compared to Dabblers (15%).

No matter which primary buying method these hybrid shoppers use, each presents opportunities for brands to target and reach these different segments of customer groups across multiple touchpoints. It’s important for brands and retailers to develop a strong omnichannel strategy that improves the hybrid shopping experience in order to serve all their customers’ needs and build brand loyalty.

Solutions for your holiday strategies

Even in the face of unparalleled change, 84.51° Solutions offers data-driven strategies to help brands power their holiday strategies by better positioning their products both in-store and online. Combining consumer research with our industry-leading data science and analytics, our solutions bring together the “what” and “why” of shoppers to inform robust holiday marketing strategies. They include:

• KPM Always-On Product Listing Ads: This pay-per-click ad program aims to increase engagement for your brand as customers are building their baskets to drive online and in-store sales and build brand loyalty online now. These ads appear in the search results and other personalized carousels on Kroger.com and the mobile app. You can activate it across all Targeted Onsite Ad placements to inspire consideration among relevant shoppers who are in a purchase mindset.

• 84.51° Stratum: Powered by first-party data from nearly 60 million households with more than two billion brick and mortar and digital transactions annually, 84.51° Stratum brings insights to life and better identifies performance, profiling, and shopper behavior to show you what’s working and who’s buying what in-store vs. online. Its modality Insights provide new segmentations high, medium or low online engagement — to better understand ecommerce adoption.

• Clickstream Insights: To see how consumers are building their baskets, these insights show you how hybrid consumers shop online along the path to purchase, including what’s driving sales.

• E-comm Incrementality Measurement: To help brands know if ecommerce shopping drives incremental sales or shoppers trading off with in-store spending, this new measurement tracks true ecommerce incrementality for brands and compares it to CPG benchmarks.

• Best Customer Communication: Events such as LCMs, MyMags and MyMags Extras help stop the leaky bucket by retaining and rewarding your best customers, as well as acquiring new or lapsed users. They provide relevant, personalized offers that can be used across modalities to drive engagement, retention and incrementality, in addition to avoiding trade-downs.

• Pickup Substitution Impact: Learn how pickup substitutes impact your business with this analysis, which identifies the most commonly substituted items for your product groups and provides insights about how those events affect post-sub behavior to help you build customer-centric pickup strategies.

• New at Kroger: Promote your new products to gain awareness, trial and customer acquisition with this solution. It uses sales and customer metrics to acquire new households who have the propensity to buy your new products at Kroger.

• KPM’s Segmentations: A majority of sales — regardless of modality — are influenced by digital activity. Strategically reach must-win households with segmentations including purchase-based, ecommerce habits and demographic.

• Real-Time Insights help you understand hybrid consumer perceptions and motivations among verified purchasers so you can connect the “why” and the “buy.”

How should retailers prepare? See the holiday shopping insights driving these solutions

Are your holiday marketing strategies tuned in to this year’s shoppers? Discover the consumer behaviors that will be driving these solutions and learn why the hybrid shopper should be at the top of your list this year in our new white paper, Holidays 2022: 8 key shopper insights and how brands can respond to win the in-store and digital shelf this season. Unwrap our first-party data to learn more about the consumer behaviors we’re expecting to see this season — and how to turn them into opportunities to meet shoppers where they are.

If you’d like to learn more about understanding consumer behaviors and how to build strategies around them, here are some additional pieces that might interest you:

Over 30x return-on-ad-spend and over 1 million households converted: Conagra was looking to build awareness for their new plant-based frozen products. See how they leveraged Kroger's first-party data to identify the best households and develop a multi-channel campaign approach.

Optimizing reach and achieving 5x household spend: Snyder's of Hanover wanted to optimize their reach in the connected TV environment and grow new households. See where the company found success leveraging Kroger Precisions Marketing targeting and measurement.