With 2013 right around the corner (Year of the Snake), it’s a great time to enhance your shopper marketing mix to better connect and inspire with today’s increasingly savvy consumers. Here are four trends birdsong gregory is helping clients leverage and exploit.

1. Technology as a major influencer
According to Nielsen, e-commerce will rise from around 6% of total packaged-goods sales in 2009 to 10% by 2015 in the U.S., surpassing club stores and matching drugstores’ share. Today someone can be in your store, locate the same product online, purchase it, and never physically give you a dime. This should encourage you to find the right mix of mobile-to-life connectors that extend your brand into every aspect of the increasingly fractured path to purchase. Mobile apps and QR codes are great tools to incentivize consumers and drive sales.

2. Convenience is a key for online purchasing
According to Compete’s Shopper Intelligence Survey, 48% of health and beauty shoppers would purchase more online if they were able to return products to brick-and-mortar locations. It’s not only about being available by mobile and online, it’s about convenience. If consumers are going to shop online, give them a reason to choose your company over someone else’s. Why not allow them to return items to your store, offer them free shipping labels or give away free shipping at certain times.

3. Preplanned shopping behavior remains pervasive
Conventional wisdom says that 70% of purchase decisions are made in the store aisle, but Campbell’s Soup reports that food shoppers make 80% of their decisions prior to entering the supermarket.

Consumers will continue to use store circulars to plan their shopping trips and to make brand decisions, but impacting the shopper before they enter the store and then carrying that message over into the retail environment, via taste tests or in-store merchandising, provides a seamless branding opportunity.

4. Social media meets e-commerce
Social tools that encourage and simplify self-expression will dominate the landscape in 2013. Pinterest is a great example of the power of simple self-expression tools.

Retailers need to use these social tools not just for brand awareness, but also for product development, consumer insights, and customer service. It’s a great opportunity for brands and retailers to better understand what’s engaging as their consumers openly share what they love with the rest of the world.