Find the Persuadable Buyer, Not the Propensity Buyer with Will Sanchez of Blue Labs
We sat down with Will Sanchez for the last interview of day two at Shoptalk Fall in Nashville. Will is managing director for CPG at Blue Labs, and the company’s story starts outside of commerce.
“We were actually born out of politics,” he says.
Swing Voters and Incremental Buyers
In politics the budgets are finite and a campaign gets one chance to prove itself. The Blue Labs team learned to find the persuadable group inside the voting population, then saw the same pattern in retail.
“A swing voter and an incremental buyer, very similar as well,” he says.
Blue Labs now works with entertainment, government, CPG, apparel and retail brands, and the question it asks is who else a brand can move.
“So propensity versus persuadability,” he says.
Four Steps
Step one surveys a couple thousand buyers in a category and extrapolates to a consumer file of about 200 million US adults with more than 200 variables. Step two runs a pre and post survey, showing the content to one group and not to another, to find the persuadables. Step three hands the brand personas showing what moves each group and where they shop, so step four can measure the result.
“We’ll do a matched holdout based on persuasion score, demographics, et cetera. And then we see where the real lift is,” he says.
A test with no lift still pays off. “Even if there’s no lift, that’s a great read as well. Because now you know where to divest and invest.”
AI Packages the Work
Because a team of data scientists does much of the Blue Labs work by hand, Will expects AI to let the company package the method into an offer in place of a custom project, and he says it opens new things to measure. One customer asked him whether an AI rollout for its shipping and receiving staff produced any return.
His definition of AI slop is marketing that leans on AI to find look-alikes of current buyers.
“They’re getting a basic result but not a really intricate answer on who your customer is or what they what moves them,” he says.
Those look-alikes were going to buy anyway, which makes them propensity buyers.
Retail Media Grades Its Own Test
Will’s hot take landed on retail media, which he likes for branding while seeing a gap in how it is measured.
“Everyone’s grading their own test. Right? So everyone’s gonna grade themselves with an A or better,” he says.
He hears the same complaint from customers, lift without a clear return on ad spend, and he thinks brands and retailers that start measuring now will get better results.
Learn more about Blue Labs at bluelabs.com, and find Will on LinkedIn.