brandcentric blog

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.

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.