As online plays a bigger part in grocery shopping, Nielsen Brandbank has launched a service to help brands and retailers drive and improve the m-commerce experience by making product images more mobile friendly.
The firm’s new Mobile Ready Image Service solves the fundamental, but often-overlooked, problem that standard pictures used on websites of how grocery products look in real life, don’t work on mobiles.
“They don’t work because the available screen space just isn’t big enough so it’s hard for people to see any detail,” explains Richard Stanley, product manager at Nielsen Brandbank. “It makes for a tricky and poor shopper experience which partly explains why accidentally picking the wrong product is fairly common, particularly for size and variant.”
Despite the fact that 75% of smartphone or tablet owners in the UK use their devices for grocery shopping¹ and 55% of ecommerce transactions are made on a mobile device², Stanley says the issue has “really crept up on the industry, who’ve rather overlooked them in the rush to create the m-commerce experience.”
The key to making images more mobile friendly is removing the normal detail from the packaging and making key details more prominent – such as content, brand, variant and size – so it still represents the product but has a clearer overall appearance. The industry calls them mobile “hero images”, which Stanley says is “simply about making the image on a phone stand out as much as the real thing does on the shelf.”
Figures from Unilever and Danone show the value of hero images. Magnum sales leapt 24%³ while Simple Skincare and Volvic’s Touch of Fruit range both saw 20% rises when hero images were used. However, Stanley points out that hero images don’t just grow sales but also reduce returns as less people pick the wrong product, particularly if shoppers use the search page to select items rather than specific product pages, “essentially hero images make mobile grocery shopping easier, faster and more accurate.”
Maryland cookies have also employed mobile hero images to great effect (see before and after image) and Harriet Sanders, senior brand manager, says that when the firm was looking to utilise them, “No other supplier came into the mix. Whenever we look at online imagery, I always see Nielsen Brandbank as a leader in this field and most knowledgeable.”
In addition to creating the images, Nielsen Brandbank – who collect, manage and distribute FMCG product content, primarily for ecommerce and logistics purposes – will also host and publish them on behalf of retailers and brands. The new service also incorporates creating images for tablet devices.