• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 11, 2012

Jeff Griffin, one of the chief architects and a co-founder of Interpublic’s Shopper Sciences division, has joined HookLogic, the e-commerce company backed by Bain Capital Ventures, to launch a new retail-focused division. The move is significant, not just because Griffin is a serial entrepreneur known for innovating markets, but because as general manager of IPG’s flagship shopper marketing unit, he has been privy to some of the most advanced research on the so-called “moment of truth” -- the point at which consumers make a retail purchase.

While most of the work Shopper Sciences has focused on has been to understand what “influence nodes” impact those decisions for brick-and-mortar retailers, Griffin will be doing the same for HookLogic’s online retailing clients. While the retail division is new, HookLogic has made significant progress with its base in the travel and automotive categories, and it received a new, $9.5 million round of funding from Bain late last year to expand into new categories.

Griffin, who was a senior executive at digital out-of-home media giant PRN before helping to form Shopper Sciences with its founder and CEO John Ross, likens the online retail industry today to where the digital out-of-home business was when PRN helped develop that marketplace, and says that it needs a critical mass player to give it structure. Initially, he says, he plans to do that with research and better insights that demonstrate to brand marketers and retailers how consumers journey down the path from consideration to conversion to purchase.

He comes into HookLogic armed with intelligence from more than 40 proprietary studies conducted by Shopper Sciences over the past 18-months, including one he presented to the senior management team at HookLogic in Miami just last month. It was during that meeting that Griffin says he bonded with the HookLogic team, and that things just clicked between them. He says he was attracted as much by the strength of that team as by the financial and strategic backing of Bain.

His own moment of truth, he says, was about a “four-week process,” while he negotiated the details of his new role at HookLogic, and “bluntly” discussed the impact on Shopper Sciences.

Griffin says the impact on Shopper Sciences will be mitigated by the fact that much of his role as general manager of the division has been “somewhat systematized,” and that the Interpublic unit is being reorganized to work more closely with sister Mediabrands division Geomentum, which focuses on so-called “hyper-local” media and marketing.

Interpublic has not announced details of that reorganization, but Griffin’s bio has been removed from the Shopper Sciences Web site.

Griffin, meanwhile, will begin building an organization to cultivate the online retailing marketplace and to court new clients. He says he has no immediate plans to extend HookLogic’s role into physical retail, but he doesn’t rule that out as a possibility down the road, and he says he does plan to continue working with Shopper Sciences and Geomentum to help develop that market at HookLogic.