brandcentric blog

Hard to believe, but it’s been a year plus since I launched the brandcentric blog.  Many lessons learned about the art and science of blogging (mostly positive), and still a lot more to discover.

On the content front, this has been a fantastic opportunity to refine my focus in this bold, new era of CPG marketing.  A few of the more meaningful themes from the past year include:

• The expanding share-of-wallet that digital media has claimed from traditional media vehicles.  CPG was slow to adopt, but quick to catch up to (and potentially surpass) other industries.
• The coming-of-age of social media and marketing for CPG brands.  Word-of-mouth makes a lot of sense for considered purchases, even in the world of fast-moving consumer goods.
• Leveraging applied math and modeling techniques to achieve superior merchandising strategies.  The data is available, the science is mature and business-user applications are available through a browser.
• The relentless pursuit of developing, nurturing and monetizing direct-to-consumer relationships.  Alice.com was unexpected, but is exciting to watch.

As I look forward to 2010, a few early focus areas bubble to the top:

• Shopper centricity.   This will be huge across several fronts, including in-store marketing, trade planning, and broader merchandising strategic planning.   Retailers are ready to unleash the data and shopper segmentation, and manufacturers need to step up to the plate.  Collaborative planning has made a comeback.
• Pricing.  Commodity and ingredient cost volatility is expected to rear its ugly head once again.  The focus on promoted shelf price is more important than ever, especially when considering issues like gap to private label and the incredibly elusive consumer.  Expect manufacturers to funnel more marketing dollars to price as a strategic marketing lever.
• Digital integration.  Will this be the year that digital media and marketing shifts from a “center of excellence” service to a brand-driven strategic capability?  For some brands not quite yet, but for others absolutely.

There are many more themes that are percolating.  I’d love to hear what’s on your mind as you look forward to the coming year.

As an associate brand manager at ConAgra foods in late 1998, I remember pondering how digital media would eventually impact our overall consumer marketing mix.  With that thought, I did a quick landscape analysis taking note of media opportunities (Yahoo! and Excite at the time), plus the proliferation of direct-to-consumer grocers, including NetGrocer and Webvan.

While the needed scale was probably a few years out from that point (my boss at the time felt that our consumer wasn’t online and might never be online), the market has clearly evolved.  What a telling sign to see ConAgra Foods make a fairly significant  investment in digital media with Yahoo! as outlined in today’s press release.

Here’s a little sneak peek into what ConAgra will accomplish with Yahoo! — a fairly immersive consumer experience overall.

This is a follow-up to Part I on the same topic, which you can find here.

Earlier this month I had the opportunity to catch a live presentation by the founder and CEO of Alice.com, Brian Wiegand, at the Consumer Goods conference in Orlando.  This was a learning experience on many fronts, as my earlier views were based on partial information.

In a word, the best way to summarize Alice.com is PLATFORM.  What Wiegand and team have done is to offer CPG brands the tools and forum with which to sell direct to consumers.  Alice takes no ownership of the product, the data or the consumer.  They have built a nifty e-commerce platform that allows a brand, and really a community of brands, to easily merchandise themselves to a set of engaged shoppers.  Alice does take the burden of financial transaction processing, fulfillment, customer service and data management off the hands of the brands — a welcome proposition for most CPG companies so they can focus on building and marketing their goods.  Their fees are based on the services they provide, not how much volume they move.

This business model puts Alice in a unique position.  Unlike the first generation of selling consumer packaged goods direct to consumers (Webvan, Netgrocer, etc.), Alice can put their focus on three things: building the platform, ensuring excellent service, and working closely with the brands to mine the data.

So while my earlier analysis concluded that this channel may not move tonnage for many brands, it does offer a quick, easy and value-added way to reach a set of high value consumers…efficiently.  And since Alice isn’t directly taking a piece of each transaction, the full retail margin is passed directly to the brand helping to support Alice’s promise of free shipping.  But the real potential boon here for CPG brands are the valuable insights that can be gleaned by interacting with and marketing directly to consumers.   Alice intends to drive a lot of value with this part of the proposition, and rightfully so.

Trade promotion best practices are fairly well established across the fast moving consumer goods industry.  But looking forward over the next 1 to 3 year horizon, two “next generation” themes stand out:

1. Aligning “top-down” strategic trade planning with “bottom-up” account planning processes on a single technology platform

2. Weaving in the shopper insights dimension to what has traditionally been a brand/category focused planning framework

We are already seeing signs of both development themes taking hold among some of the larger CPG manufacturers.  Better technology made more broadly available through SaaS frameworks are fast-tracking theme #1.  And many retailers who have come to recognize the importance of more localized, shopper-centric trade planning are helping to drive theme #2 among the vendor community through richer data-sharing policies.

Note: I recently completed this thought-leadership eBook for DemandTec, my employer, to help articulate what’s on the horizon in the trade promotion space.   Hope you enjoy thumbing through it, and I look forward to any thoughts you care to share on the concepts.  Since the document has some small text, it is best viewed in full-screen mode.

I will be presenting with Jon Van Duyne from Booz & Co. on a webcast next Thursday, October 8 at 11 AM Pacific.  The sesssion is titled Innovation through Predictive Analytics: Preparing Your Organization for Market Success and will be facilitated by Consumer Goods Technology.

You can register here for the event.  Hope you can join us!