Rethinking Shopper Understanding

Brands have never had more data about channels, content and transactions. But knowing where people clicked, searched or bought is not the same as understanding why they chose. As retailers and digital sales platforms control the interface, algorithms, promotions, fulfillment mechanics and shopper behavioral data, brands need a clearer view of how shoppers make decisions in those environments.

Channel Obsession – Is it Limiting Sales?

We’ve become obsessed with channels. Shoppers haven’t.

For most FMCG brands, the uncomfortable reality is that much of the shopper journey is controlled by someone else. Retailers decide what is listed, where it appears and how it is promoted. Digital platforms determine search rankings, recommendations and fulfilment. Algorithms increasingly shape which products shoppers see at all. Yet, the brand is still accountable for creating demand and converting it into growth.

This is why manufacturers need to own the shopper decision model, even when they cannot own the channel. That means a clear, independent understanding of what shoppers are trying to achieve, how decided they are before entering the store, website or app, which cues help them choose quickly and what causes them to hesitate, switch or abandon.

Recent observational research conducted by Escalent in the UK brought this sharply into focus. In online grocery shopping, many decisions are habitual, fast and execution-led, while most products that make their way into baskets are added without shoppers opening the product page. That makes the hero image and product title, alongside retailer-controlled cues such as price, favorites and recommendations, critical to digital shelf visibility, performance and shopper conversion.

When the channel owns the interface, the manufacturer’s advantage comes from understanding the choice better than anyone else.

The Channel Changes the Shortcut, Not the Underlying Mission

We followed shoppers as they completed live online grocery shopping missions and observed hundreds of product choices. The research was qualitative and directional, but the consistency of the behavior was striking. Most online grocery shopping behavior was not a process of open-ended exploration, but an exercise in execution.

People arrived with much of the decision already made. They searched for a known product, returned to a previous order, opened their favorites, checked the deals page or moved quickly through a familiar category.

Across the products observed, the vast majority were added to the basket without the shopper opening the product detail page. In most of those decisions, the product hero image and product title were the only pieces of brand-controlled content that really had an opportunity to influence the choice.

The platforms were different, but the human objective was similar.

• Shoppers looked for shortcuts: favorites, previous purchases, promo prices and price-per-unit information.
• On some retailer websites, they relied more heavily on search results, sponsored products, customer reviews, best-seller labels and the reassurance of fast delivery.
• On quick delivery apps, recent orders, weekly promotions, store distance, delivery fees and delivery time became more prominent because the shopping mission was often immediate.

The interface changed. The digital shelf cues changed. But across the shopping journey, people were consistently asking some version of the same questions:

Can I find the right thing quickly? Do I recognize it? Is it suitable? Am I getting reasonable value? Is there any reason not to choose it?

This is the distinction that brands need to understand. FMCG purchase behavior isn’t channel-led. Shoppers are mission-led and shortcut-seeking, but the channel determines which shortcuts are available.

Why More Digital Content Does Not Always Mean More Shopper Clarity

One of the most revealing moments in these online shopalongs involved a shopper considering a cheese multipack of crisps.

The initial hero image, product title and retailer’s promotional price got her attention. But she could not tell whether the multipack contained several cheese-flavored bags or a mixture of flavors. She opened the product detail page to find out.

Instead of answering the question, the additional product images appeared to contradict one another. One suggested a single variant; another appeared to show several. The product description did not clearly state its exact contents.

She abandoned the product.

What is interesting about this shopper’s experience is that the product did not suffer from a simple absence of content. There were multiple images and a written description. It suffered from an absence of decision-ready clarity at the point of choice.

This is a useful challenge for FMCG brands managing digital shelf content. Content is often evaluated by whether required assets are present: a certain number of images, a product description, lifestyle photography, video and enhanced brand material.

But online shoppers do not reward asset completeness. They reward product content that reduces uncertainty, answers the immediate purchase questions and helps them move forward.

A single, clear image showing the pack contents would have been more valuable in that moment than several attractive but inconsistent assets.

Why Digital Fame Still Has to Work at the Shelf

Let’s take Surreal as an example of how brand influence travels between channels.

The UK cereal brand built much of its early visibility through social-first content and irreverent advertising. One of its most memorable “celebrity endorsement” campaigns featured enthusiastic reviews from ordinary people who happened to share names with people such as Serena Williams, Michael Jordan and Dwayne Johnson. The campaign generated hundreds of thousands of social views and substantial earned attention.

That visibility helped Surreal move beyond its direct-to-consumer beginnings and into retailers including Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Co-op, Ocado and Holland & Barrett.

But the more revealing part of the story is what the brand did as it moved into mainstream grocery retail.

In 2025, Surreal redesigned its packaging to make it work harder in supermarkets. The humor and personality remained, but flavor, product description and nutritional benefits became easier to recognize. The logo moved because its previous position had confused some shoppers. “High protein, low sugar” became more prominent. Product imagery and flavor cues were strengthened to help the pack stand out and communicate more quickly.

The brand appears to have recognized that the content which earns attention on social media is not necessarily the same content that completes the purchase decision on a retailer site, grocery app or supermarket shelf.

Social content can make the brand familiar and memorable. But when the shopping mission begins, that memory must collapse into a much faster judgment:

Is this the product I remember? Which flavor is it? What is different about it? Is it right for me?

That distinction closely reflects what we see almost every time we observe people shopping, regardless of whether they do it in-store or online. In digital environments, most products are added without shoppers reviewing detailed information on the product detail page. The hero image and product title are doing most of the immediate shopper decision-making work. At shelf, the execution of in-store activation gets shoppers’ attention, while the cues on the packaging drive quick purchase decisions.

For an FMCG brand, the social post, physical pack and digital hero image do not need to contain the same amount or type of content. They need to perform connected roles across the omnichannel shopper journey.

• The social content creates attention and memory.
• The pack and hero image trigger recognition.
• The title confirms flavor, format and size.
• The product page provides reassurance when the shopper still has a question.

That is what genuine omnichannel shopper understanding should look like. It is not repeating the same execution everywhere. It is understanding what the shopper needs from the brand at each moment and ensuring that the meaning created in one environment survives when the decision moves into another.

How Should Brands Research Omnichannel Shopper Behavior?

When researching omnichannel shopper behavior, there are four things we need to bear in mind:

1. What was the shopper trying to accomplish?
2. How much of the decision had already been made?
3. Which shortcut did the channel allow them to use?
4. What, if anything, created enough doubt to interrupt the shopper journey?

Those questions reveal far more than asking whether someone shopped online or in-store and expecting them to recall their entire decision-making process.

They show whether the brand needs to improve recognition, clarify the product title, display the pack contents, strengthen availability, provide better reassurance or create product demand before the shopper reaches the retailer.

They also help define the role of branded content more precisely.

Sometimes content should inspire. Sometimes it should educate. But during a routine purchase, its most important contribution may be much simpler: helping someone recognize the right product, confirm that it meets their needs and add it without hesitation.

That is not a lesser creative task. It is the right one.

The businesses may be organized around channels. But the shopper is organized around needs, habits, shortcuts and moments of uncertainty.

What This Means for Brands: Own the Shopper Decision Model, Even When You Don’t Own the Channel

When brands cannot fully own the route to purchase, the opportunity for them does not lie in forcing shoppers into a perfectly designed omnichannel journey. It is in having the clearest possible understanding of the shopper’s decision and using it to make their products easier to recognize, validate and choose in every retail environment.

For Escalent, this is where modern shopper understanding needs to move next: away from channel obsession and towards a more precise understanding of shopper missions, in-store or digital shelf cues, branded content and the moments that turn consideration into choice.

Next in the series: When AI becomes the shopper: from understanding journeys to understanding instructions

Stay tuned for Part 2 of Escalent’s Rethinking Shopper Understanding series, where we’ll explore what happens when AI starts shaping the shopper journey not just through recommendations, but through instructions.