REDWOOD CITY, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Rocket Fuel (NASDAQ: FUEL), a leading Programmatic Marketing Platform provider, today announced the release of its annual report on consumers’ holiday shopping habits and preferences. The report identifies the demographic, behavioral, and contextual factors that influence shopping decisions and highlights the optimal way to reach consumers by focusing on moments -- rather than more singular, event-based targeting centered on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.
“The 2015 holiday shopping season will be driven by moments,” said Ryan Bleich, director of market development for retail at Rocket Fuel. “The market continues to shift focus away from Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopper targeting to a more holistic, moment-based experience throughout the shopping journey during the holiday season. Ultimately, a marketer’s influence on consumers’ holiday shopping decisions will be reliant on their ability to score time of day, day of week, device, mindset, and recent purchases in order to identify the best moments to reach those consumers with targeted ads across any and all kinds of their devices.”
Key findings of the report include:
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Long-Term Planners Spend More than 3x as Much as Last-Minute
Shoppers
In Rocket Fuel’s consumer survey of holiday shoppers, three distinct shopper categories were identified: Pouncers, who typically wait until the week (or day) of Black Friday or Cyber Monday to shop; Planners, who start making plans one to two months in advance; and Prognosticators, long-term planners who start planning three or more months in advance. Of the three groups, Prognosticators plan to spend the most, at an average of $2,191.89. Planners plan to spend an average of $793.31, trailed by Pouncers, who plan to spend an average of $682.82.
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Nearly Half of “Black Friday” Shoppers (45 percent) Already Know
What to Buy and Where
One-third of all shoppers surveyed will have already made a decision about either what to buy or where to buy it; for Black Friday shoppers the number jumps to 45 percent. Since shoppers are making buying decisions so far in advance of Black Friday, marketers must be prepared to target the precise moments to reach and influence them earlier than ever before.
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Moment Marketing Drives 8x Increase in Addressable Audience
By identifying shopper type; identifying whether the shopper has already decided what and where to buy; and identifying the right moments of influence, Rocket Fuel estimates that advertisers may be able to increase their potential pool of “persuadable” Black Friday and Cyber Monday consumers from 6 percent to 55 percent during the week prior, and by even more during the month prior.
The National Retail Federation is forecasting a 3.7 percent increase in sales this year, higher than the 10 year average of 2.5 percent. Sophisticated technologies, such as Rocket Fuel Moment Scoring and cross-device optimization, allow marketers to reach consumers at the precise moment of influence, taking into account key factors including demographic, behavioral and contextual information, to deliver higher performing, more effective marketing campaigns.
As part of its report, Rocket Fuel surveyed 600 consumers ages 18 and older in October 2015 about their holiday shopping habits, including their plans to shop on Black Friday and Cyber Monday and how they were going to decide what to buy and where to shop.
For a copy of Rocket Fuel’s 2015 Holiday Shopping Study:Influencing Shopper Decisions, please visit: info.rocketfuel.com/holiday-shopping-study
About Rocket Fuel
A leading Programmatic Marketing Platform provider, Rocket Fuel (NASDAQ: FUEL) offers brands, agencies, and platform partners managed services, as well as a SaaS-based Data Management Platform (DMP) and Demand Side Platform (DSP), to optimize performance, awareness, and lift across marketing objectives, channels and devices. By applying artificial intelligence at big data scale, Rocket Fuel’s Moment Scoring™ technology performs a real-time calculation of each ad opportunity based on a marketer’s goal to determine the likelihood a consumer will engage in a desired action. Moment Scoring goes beyond 1:1 marketing by learning to predict what marketing actions to take with a campaign at a precise moment in time, which results in a much more efficient use of marketing dollars. Rocket Fuel serves 96 of the Ad Age 100, three of the top five agency holding company trading desks, and partners with some of the world’s leading CRM platforms, marketing platforms and systems integrators. Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Rocket Fuel has more than 20 offices worldwide.
