India: Shopper intelligence series

The Shopper intelligence series brings forward Kantar’s domain view of how shoppers actually decide - and why many long‑held beliefs about retail, attention and choice deserve to be challenged. 

Shopper behaviour has changed, but the industry’s assumptions often haven’t. This series exists to break those myths. 

Grounded in global eye‑tracking, path‑tracking, behavioural science, and real‑store observation, the series translates deep shopper evidence into clear implications for growth, visibility and conversion. Each article of this series reframes an ingrained assumption and replaces it with a sharper, behaviour‑first truth. 

For businesses and marketers, the series offers: 

- A behaviour‑first lens for diagnosing where visibility leaks before conversion. 
- Clear design and placement priorities, based on how attention truly works. 
- Sharper executive questions that align brand ambition with real shopper behaviour at the moment of choice. 

Understanding shoppers begins with unlearning the myths - because that is where meaningful, sustained growth starts. 
The myth of impulse buying

Impulse is no longer spontaneous or in the moment. Shopper decisions are increasingly shaped upstream - by pre-store research, habits, algorithms, and mental shortcuts - with the store acting as a confirmation space, not a blank slate for persuasion. 

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The myth that shoppers decide at the shelf

The shelf is not where decisions begin - it’s where they are validated or abandoned. Brands that ignore pre-store influences (search, memory, brand equity, discovery) overestimate the persuasive power of instore execution. 

Read more 

The myth of more: Why extra disruption makes shoppers notice less

 

 

Stay tuned! Coming up next… 

 

- The myth of POS as the billboard 

- The myth of the persuasion shelf 

Stores are not open canvases. Shoppers move through them on habitual routes, with limited attention bandwidth. Adding more POS, signage, or activation often reduces visibility by fragmenting attention rather than increasing it. 

Read more   

Get in touch 

Contact your local Kantar team or write to our expert, Sreyoshi Maitra to discuss how we can support your brand in driving growth.