Up to now it's been hard to know just how each brand's customers react to promotions in general and the different types of promotions. In a four month study led by the Future Foundation, and sponsored by SMP and 8 other organisations, PromoFutures interviewed thousands of shoppers across Great Britain. As a result Future Foundation established PromoTypes - the first segmentation based on promotional responsiveness. As a key partner in the study SMP used this to develop a way of profiling how this segmentation applies to a brand, establishing a brands unique PromoSignature.

PromoFutures is a major research study undertaken by Future Foundation over the period November 2010 to March 2011, covering a nationally representative online survey of 3,700 consumers, focus groups, in-home depth interviews, accompanied shops, in-store observational research, exit interviews' as well as expert interviews - (including Marketing directors, Retailers and Industry Experts).

The PromoFutures study found that looking for promotions is now an ingrained behavior and that even those who are less interested in promotions, still expect them to some extent. As an output of the study Future Foundation created a bespoke segmentation which identified 8 different clusters of promotional behavior. These range from the Expert promotion Users who are totally driven by promotions and have little or no loyalty to brands, to the Passive Promotion Users who tend to take part in promotions but do not actively seek them out. See attached for further details.

SMP's unique PromoSignatureT tool, means that they can apply key insights from the PromoFutures study to brands, informing brand owners as to the specific behavioural characteristics of their shoppers including; promotional responsiveness prefered promotional mechanics, offers and media routes for each group. As a result SMP can play a pivotal role in helping brands build highly effective promotional strategies .