This week, thousands of shopper marketers will get together in Minneapolis, MN for an annual Path To Purchase Expo. This is THE event for shopper marketers in the North America region.
Among attendees are brand marketers, retail markers, shopper marketing agencies, consultants and vendors who supply marketing products, services, data, technology and analytics capabilities. The breadth and the depth of this Expo is impressive, and that's why it's fascinating to watch what topic Path To Purchase Institute chooses to feature.
Over the last four years, we've been observing the P2P Expo agenda and its key topics and keywords with a goal to understand how our industry conversation evolves and how trends impact the way we work. The topics and presentations selected for the Expo provide a fascinating insight into what's trending, what's gone mainstream and what's no longer 'hot'.
To accomplish this task, we have been applying consistent methodology over the years. It's not very scientific but remarkably efficient. We take the P2PX's brochure, remove all numbers and proper names, drop the words into a word cloud generator, and... voila! The size of the word is proportionate to the frequency with which it appears on the P2P Expo agenda this year.
Unsurprisingly, and very appropriately, words like "Learn", "Shopper", "Brand", "Market", "Retail" dominate the landscape.
We then take it a step further and remove all of those dominating and obvious words that dwarfed the rest. The resulting word cloud is starting to look more interesting and insightful. Technology dominates, with Data and Digital rising to the top, a testament of times when Shopper Marketing and Digital Marketing have truly blended and when we have more data than what we know what to do with.
New keywords that we have previously not seen are appearing: AI, Virtual, VR, Voice - are quickly rising to prominence and finally coming of age. No longer are they obscure, unproven, bright shiny objects. They now command respect and attention from the industry leaders.
Was there anything surprising to you in this 'cloud'? What topics do you wish we explored more aggressively as an industry?
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