As a young buck associate brand manager at ConAgra Foods, I developed a deep appreciation for how big brands stay competitive at retail. My assigned brand, Wesson Cooking Oil, enjoyed a strong affinity with loyal consumers, near ubiquitous distribution, and the halo effect from a long-time celebrity spokesperson, Florence Henderson (aka “Mrs. Brady”). We had a sizable consumer marketing budget to build off an established base and compete for consumer mind share against Procter & Gamble’s Crisco brand. This was the fun, “creative” part of brand management.
But what I quickly learned is that building great brands also requires sound business management and a command of the data. Nowhere was this more important than on the cooking oil business, where a good chunk of retail sell-thru takes place between October and December — holiday cooking season. Getting the trade marketing plan right meant securing all feature and display activity during the right weeks with the right retailers. It meant making, or even exceeding, your number. But getting the trade plan wrong meant a potentially devastating peak season was in store.
Fortunately for me ConAgra was (and still is) a pioneer in using predictive planning software to build better trade plans. This made my job somewhat easier. We used two first-generation tools to predict promotion events and our overall trade plans, appropriately called PROMOMAX and TRADEMAX. With a few key inputs such as trade allocation, product mix and merchandising assumptions, the software would spit out our expected volume and profit for a given scenario. This was a Microsoft Excel model on steroids. We didn’t blindly follow what the software told us to do, but we sure paid close attention to the simulated results.
So my early lesson as an ABM was that big brands need both art and science to thrive. Strong, creative consumer marketing is critical, combined with a fundamental understanding and use of data and technology to drive the trade. Left brain/right brain thinking at its best!
As a funny side note to this story, I had the chance to meet the entrepreneur behind PROMOMAX and TRADEMAX my first day on the job at DemandTec. Jose Anstey, who founded Applied Information for Marketing (AIM), and I were at an industry conference in Tampa Bay. It didn’t take us long to put two and two together.
Like all good marketers ought to do, I wrote the obligatory contributed story on what this challenging economy means for CPG brand health. Specifically, my call to action was to apply more rigor and science to the trade promotion planning process. Doing so is both good brand hygiene and also a likely long-term competitive hedge against private label. You can find the published story on the Journal of Trading Partner Practices website.
