TPMA San Francisco Event Update
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.
Everyone Needs an Alice (Part I)
Will consumers habitually buy and replenish non-perishable food, household cleaning and HBA items online, en masse? That’s the question the founders of Alice.com asked themselves when thinking through their business model. I think the answer is definitely maybe.
It all comes down to assortment, convenience and price. Fulfill these three wishes and a segment of the population will happily work with Alice.com as their go-to source for non-perishables. I honestly can’t see my parents (mid to late 60s) using this service, nor my sister (married w/ 2 kids, but traditional bricks retail shopper) logging onto Alice to reorder some Tide laundry detergent.
But my household (and hundreds of thousands of households like mine) could be all over this. For example, just last weekend we ran out of diapers for our 6 month old. Late on Saturday night we placed an order for Pampers diapers and Pampers Sensitive wipes on Diapers.com. What a pleasant suprise to see the Diapers.com delivery box sitting on our doorstep first thing Monday morning as I left for work. Talk about convenience. And it’s tough to beat the price of diapers on Diapers.com. The assortment of products is good too. The service works well, is cost-effective and allows us to try new items when we want to.
But how can Alice.com support free shipping for relatively low ticket items? That’s where the CPG marketer value proposition comes into play. Reality is that CPGs like P&G aren’t banking on channels like Alice.com to drive big volume today. The real near-term power of this channel is to establish direct connections with consumers and, more importantly, drive a deeper level of shopper insight. Behind the scenes of Alice.com, I’d suspect, is a pretty sophisticated set of shopper behavior engines that mine deep, detailed consumer insights and reports. At scale, these insights could be pretty valuable to big CPG brands to better understand shopper behavior and propensity to buy through a new channel of distribution. For this insight, consumer products manufacturers may happily subsidize the “free shipping” offer that is so attractive on Alice.com
Should be interesting to see how this service does – both in terms of consumer adoption and CPG advertiser support!
Brandcentric Blog Wordle
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.
Optimizing the Trade Plan with Applied Science
Note: I produced this product demo overview for DemandTec, my employer, to help show off some cool capabilities for the Trade Planning & Optimization software service. The movie runs ~2.5 minutes and has a pretty cool audio overlay…so turn those speakers up!
Consumer products manufacturers are under pressure to drive more volume — and profitable volume — without increasing the trade promotion budget. Problem is, most trade promotions don’t deliver economic value for the manufacturer nor do they drive an increase in category performance for the retailer. Selling in a bad plan like this to the retail trade is tough at best.
What to do?
Isolate plans that drive profitable volume for you, the manufacturer, and also hit key category performance objectives for your retail customer. Sounds easy, but doing this requires a quantified understanding of category behavior — including every item in the category — so that you can simulate events before they occur and isolate the good ones from the bad ones. Predictive software from DemandTec and others do just this, and help customer-facing sales teams develop win-win trade promotion events and entire category plans.
Some of the biggest CPG companies are using capabilities like this today, paving the way for a step change in how the industry goes to market.
Targeting Green Consumers
It seems every major CPG manufacturer has jumped on the green bandwagon with environmentally friendly packaging, business practices and even new brand platforms. But does this flight to greener pastures actually return an investment? Is the brand reaching the right consumer and shopper demographic? Experian’s GreenAware servicehelps marketers answers these questions and more. Experian has developed a consumer segmentation around four tiers of “greeness”, allowing marketers to uncover opportunity areas and directly reach the greenest consumers.
It’s exciting to see very targeted one-to-one marketing make a big push in to CPG-land, but my experience to date is that not all CPG marketing organizations are very well set up to take action. Some very large manufacturers don’t have a central team that “owns” the database. Consequently, marketing programs deliver excellent, fresh consumer data that often goes stale. Conversely, some smaller, more nimble CPG marketing organizations I have worked with have the right people, tools and processes in place to scale relationship marketing programs. Scary, but true.
CPG Industry News
- Campbell recipe competition supports heart health February 9, 2012
- Big G boxes go back to the '80s February 9, 2012
- AeroShot delivers caffeine without the beverage February 9, 2012
- PepsiCo-Tata joint venture to launch Tata Water Plus February 9, 2012
- Mitchell promoted to Crossmark president February 9, 2012
