In the modern marketing landscape, understanding the intricacies of consumer behavior is crucial, particularly for consumer-packaged goods (CPG) brands. CPG is a diverse and expansive market, with thousands of competing brands offering products that range from household essentials to personal care items. For marketers aiming to succeed in this space, adopting a “custom” approach to audience targeting isn’t just recommended—it’s essential.
Why CPG Requires a Custom Approach
What sets CPG marketing apart from other sectors is the sheer scale and diversity of its SKU’s and audience. Unlike narrower categories like luxury automotive or financial services, CPG and its sub-categories touch practically every single household and individual, from toothpaste to detergent, from pet food to beverages. In turn, CPG drives a dynamic ecosystem of advertisers aiming to tap into buyers across geographies, life stages, and needs.
In many CPG categories, nearly everyone is a potential customer. Products like soap, cleaning supplies, and other household essentials are universally needed, which makes it tempting for brands to target as broad an audience as possible. However, casting too wide a net can lead to wasted spend and diluted messaging. Being too narrow might exclude valuable potential buyers. In times of inflation CPG products are particularly susceptible, and shoppers more easily swayed. Focused efforts to conquest and steal market share requires the perfect advertising balance – target the right audience at the ideal scale.
So, how can CPG marketers dial in their approaches to audience targeting in a world of fierce competition? The solution lies in an approach to data and audiences that is efficient in cost, scale and speed to market while also being granular - down to the specific product level and factoring in other relevant shopper attributes.
The Uniqueness of CPG Loyalty
One of the unique features of the CPG sector is the deep brand loyalty that often characterizes consumer behavior. Unlike industries where brand loyalty can be more fluid, CPG consumers tend to form long-standing relationships with specific products and brands—often passed down through generations.
Think about the deep connections most families and individuals have with certain brands: "I’m a Crest kid," or "We’re a Tide household." These declarations are not just personal preferences; they represent a tradition, a trust that’s been built over time between consumer and brand. It’s more than just a product; it’s a part of the consumer’s identity, lifestyle and shopping patterns.
For marketers, this strong sense of loyalty is a golden opportunity. These loyalties are on full display each time a consumer is filling their cart online or waiting in store to check-out. Which also highlights, it's not just what they buy, but where they buy it that they have strong brand loyalty to. By leveraging data that highlights these deep-seated connections, marketers can craft campaigns that reinforce brand affinity, drive repeat purchases, and even engage the next generation of consumers. Access to relevant transactional data can help CPG marketers harness consumer loyalty to create strong audiences – but it’s not the full picture.
Not All Loyalists Look Alike
Loyalists of the same brand can differ dramatically based on age, life stage, income, behaviors and more. The CPG products a household buys only tell part of the story. The same product can appeal to consumers with vastly different demographics, experiences, and interests.
For example, a college student who buys Dove body wash isn’t the same as a 50-year-old executive who uses the same product. The 20-year-old student might be into the new Bar Stool Sports podcast, live streaming on Meta, and cares about sustainability, meanwhile, the executive is a hiking and fishing enthusiast who recently purchased a new home. Despite their shared loyalty to Dove, their lives, interests, and media consumption habits are completely different—and the way marketers approach them should be too.
This illustrates the need for nuance in CPG audience targeting. One-size-fits-all campaigns are unlikely to resonate with today’s fragmented consumer base. Instead, marketers only being able to identify shoppers of specific brands and products, there’s a clear need to understand other demographic, behavioral, and lifestyle factors that make each consumer unique. Therein lies the need for accurate and predictive consumer data.
CPG Audiences – The Alliant Way
At Alliant, we recognize the importance of this nuanced approach, and we’ve built a new custom CPG audience solution with this in mind. Known for advanced data science combining transactional data with demographic, behavioral and lifestyle attributes, our newly launched Custom CPG Audience Targeting from Alliant doubles down on this approach.
Advertisers can leverage Alliant’s new direct-to-consumer CPG purchase data down to the brand and product level. Sourced from 9 million+ active consumers shopping across 6,000 brands, CPG data is combined with Alliant’s leading audience solutions that don’t rely on panels or broad approximations. Instead, Alliant’s unique aggregated view of consumer purchase behavior further drives the modeled CPG audiences for scale and accuracy. This means you can pinpoint not only who is most likely to buy a certain product but also who is most likely to switch brands, stop purchasing, or increase their frequency of buying.
CPG categories include Beauty & Care, Groceries & Essentials, Health, Diet & Nutrition, Home Essentials, and Pets. You can also incorporate brand specific requests and combine with other purchase, demographic and lifestyle target attributes, the custom audience possibilities are limitless!
Tell us about your next CPG campaign and let the Alliant team build you an audience that delivers the goods!
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