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.

Day 1 of the TPMA San Francisco event just wrapped up at the Stanford Court hotel.  Lots of focused, practical dialog around trade promotion optimization, collaborative analytics, funds optimization and the role of shopper insights.  While attendance is on the lighter side, this conferences offers a set of rich discussions among industry peers.

Day 2 kicks off tomorrow at 8:30 AM, when Todd Bortel from Cannondale Associates and I will deliver our presentation titled “Trade Promotion Planning & Analysis: A Game that Needs Changing”.  We hope to see you there.

Wordle is a free web service that generates a “word cloud” using a website, blog or text document as raw input.  Here is the Wordle for the Brandcentric blog.  I found it interesting to compare the content in the Wordle to the blog tag cloud located in the right column of this web page.  The tag cloud is driven by key word tags that I define when posting each blog entry, while the Wordle scrapes the entire blog and builds a cloud from the ground up.  Given the similarity between the two, looks like I am (for the most part) selecting the most relevant blog tags.

I’ve adapted this visual framework (courtesy of David Armano) to capture a very simple, yet important point about the role technology plays in the world of CPG marketing.  When you boil it all down, technology is really nothing more than a means to an end to driving richer (and more profitable) consumer relationships.

Throughout the past several decades, business automation, processing power, analytical software, the internet and social media have all introduced disruptions to how CPG marketers achieve their goals.  For example, instead of relying on gut instinct or store audits to infer consumption trends, gobs of store-level data is available for analysis and interpretation.  Similarly, rather than simply pushing media announcing  a great new product out through a few national broadcast TV channels, marketers are now tapping into social networks to do the heavy lifting for them. 

In both examples, technology is helping to augment, even supplant, how a marketer can do his or her job.  But it doesn’t replace the ultimate, and very necessary, objective of developing better insight and wrapping ourselves around the consumer.  So at the end of the day, each new advancement in technology helps marketers to become more consumer-centric - which is ultimately a good thing for everyone.

One thing has been consistent during my 11 years in the CPG industry: marketing, sales and brand professionals generally aren’t big fans of SAP.  So what’s up with the lackluster sentiment for one of the backbone systems used across the enterprise thousands of times a day?

I propose that part of the issue is (or at least was) a usability problem combined with an unfortunate branding challenge.

During my first week on the job at ConAgra Foods, my boss told me she would walk me through the “sap” reports.  And she said this with a detectable tinge of disdain in her tone.  “Sap” I thought?  I had no idea what “sap” was at that moment, but I already didn’t like the sound of it.   As a brand marketer myself, I felt fortunate that “Wesson Cooking Oil” didn’t have any negative inferences baked into the brand name.

After quickly discovering that “sap” was shorthand speak for SAP, I got to dive into the report query interface.  Not pretty.  Not only were we dealing with greenscreen technology, but the commands I needed to learn were cryptic and cumbersome.  Multiple cheat sheets were required just to get basic inventory and sales rollups.  It was frustrating to say the least.  It didn’t take long for the rest of my cohort of Associate Brand Managers to start referring to the “sap” reports with the same tinge of disdain in our voices.

Adding fuel to the fire, it didn’t help that Hershey Foods very publicly blamed a botched SAP implementation for a massive miss in quarterly sales and earnings.

Fast forward a decade.  While I’m no longer an SAP user, I assume that the interface issues have been largely corrected and that usability is not a major challenge.  Perhaps not?  A trusted colleague who works for a well known CPG manufacturer has been sharing his occasional SAP frustrations via Twitter.  These tweets aren’t too frequent, but frequent enough to remind me of my own frustrations a decade earlier.

I truly hope that SAP can nail the user experience.  Sure, sales and brand folks are tough-to-please customers, but software design has made great advances during the past 10 years.  SAP should not be losing points due to usability.  As for the “sap” branding issue?  That’s a tough one.  But a good old-fashioned “how can we help you” outreach campaign to the user base couldn’t hurt.