Omnichannel Shopper Marketing Mind Map And 5 Ways To Use It

The omnichannel shopper marketing job is a tough one (I wrote about it at length in this post), and it’s getting more complex and technical each year. This shifting playing field got to a point where shopper marketers have a hard time explaining what they do, especially when you talk to industry outsiders like your family and friends. But even in the internal conversations, the clarity about what it is you actually do is often missing. And it’s not a good feeling when it’s time to ask for a raise or pitch for more resources for your team.

Perhaps, it’s time to remind ourselves and everyone around how vast the shopper marketing domain is. I find that mind mapping tools do this work really well. I built this mind map to illustrate the shopper marketing ecosystem in a typical large- or medium-sized CPG organization. It explains what stakeholders, systems and processes omnichannel shopper marketers deal with on a regular basis.

Click “See The Board” button to load and interact with the mind map on this page:

There are a couple of additional ways to access and use the mind map:

Interactive Source File in Miro where you can see this map in full screen, zoom in and out as well as create a copy to make edits and customize the map. To make your own copy, just click on the name of the file in the top left corner and agree to Sign Up and Duplicate - the basic account in Miro is free.
High-Res PDF download. Save this file for future reference or easy sharing.

How to Use The Mind Map

This mind map will not only make you feel good or help you explain to your teenage kids what you do all day at work. It’s also a very practical development and persuasion tool. How can you use this map?

Make a case for headcount increase. Assess the gaps in your team's skill set, develop a hiring plan and write relevant job descriptions (ChatGPG can help). Look for adjacent key stakeholder functions as a source of your future talent. For instance: if your team is heavy on former sales folks who've never managed a creative agency, perhaps you need to hire more from the brand side. If you want to crack the Retail Media code, hire a RMN vendor expert with CPG account management experience; if budgeting is your weakness, seek talent on the finance and accounting side, etc.
On-board new hires. Sharing a map similar to this is a great first step in on-boarding new team members. A big picture view of the shopper marketer’s ecosystem helps you create on-boarding content, such as process documentation. It also helps new hires identify the most important stakeholders to have meetings with and the most relevant software systems to be trained in.
Faciliate process and systems change. Use this map to design activity-based studies that document process gaps and quantify productivity waste in order to make a case for process improvement and new tools investments. If you have a hunch that your planning process is not optimal, follow the dotted lines to see how your team interacts with their internal and external stakeholders, what data they get, generate and share and how much duplication of efforts there is and how many versions of the truth exist.
Build a personal development plan by assessing what parts of the omnichannel shopper marketing ecosystem you are least familiar with and need to be exposed to. For example, if you have been spending most of your time in brand-facing conversations, you may want to pivot and learn how retail works by meeting more with your sales teams and attending Joint Business Planning meetings. If creative agency management is what you are most comfortable with, perhaps, it’s time to learn how to manage a media agency or learn how to buy media directly on RMNs.
Demonstrate why you need a raise. If your daily work touches most of this map, your job scope is vast. And, if you do your job well, your value for the organization is immense. Now you can demonstrate to your team and your supervisors how and where you add value. This mind map will become an important tool to handle your performance and career development meetings. It is especially helpful if your bosses did not rise through the ranks of omnichannel shopper marketing or have not been in the frontlines of it lately. They will be amazed by all the work you do ♥️

Do you aspire to create a custom version of this map but don’t have time or don’t know where to begin? Reach out to Shopperations for a free consultation. We offer a range of consulting and software solutions to large and medium size CPG clients to streamline and digitize their marketing operations.