Digital CPG Blog

A recent report found that Walmart shoppers aren’t always so loyal:

• The price king has been toppled. 86 percent of Walmart shoppers no longer believe that Walmart has the lowest prices. Every brick and mortar retailer lowered prices and shouted sales throughout the recession, while the Internet became the go-to place for shoppers in search of the lowest price. If Walmart no longer stands for everyday low price (EDLP), what does it stand for?
• Where did the Walmart shopper go? The Walmart Shopper is finding better shopping elsewhere, including dollar stores, supermarkets and other mass merchants. “The most frequent core shoppers are still in the [Walmart] store, but they have less money to spend and so are always looking for a better deal,” says Liebmann. “If Walmart can convince them that it has the best deal every day, they will hopefully not be so tempted to go elsewhere.”
• The recession is not over for Walmart shoppers. 82 percent of the retailer’s shoppers say they haven’t seen any improvement in their financial situation in the past year, and 70 percent don’t expect their finances to get better next year. The economic downturn, credit crunch and higher gas prices, among other factors, squeezed the discretionary spending out of the wallets of Walmart shoppers.

Has the recession caused a permanent shift in how consumers shop for deals? Are shoppers finally going online and staying there?

In case you missed it, General Mills recently launched a new e-commerce strategy for their gluten-free products called Gluten Freely, which is the latest in their direct-to-consumer effort.

Using Windows Azure as a platform, General Mills was able to build a direct-to-consumer online channel in the cloud. While the company isn’t commenting on traffic, they claim a great amount of consumer enthusiasm and positive social media feedback, including more than 90,000 Facebook fans.

The strategy is not integrated with their existing e-commerce sites, BettyCrocker.com and CascadianFarms.com

Everything is so new that everything is constantly being tested. But apparently, it’s hard to measure success – or even define what it is:

In a global survey by the Just-Food media group, 54% of food and beverage executives said their company does not measure return on investment for social media, and another 18% didn’t know if their company calculated social media ROI. The survey also found that 52% of food and beverage companies now have a strategy for social media.

This echoed the sentiments of brand marketers at a conference I was at last week where companies were struggling to define measurability.

What barriers are there for you to measure success?

Are you activating your Facebook fans? Here’s how:

1. Engage users creatively (and consistently) with likeable wall posts to support your f-commerce offering
2. Provide exclusivity with promotions, discounts and sales that are exclusive to your Facebook fans
3. Attract new fans with added incentives with one-time promo codes, coupons or discounted shipping for those Liking your page
4. Solicit input by asking your fans directly how you can improve the f-commerce experience
5. Make Facebook a PR tool with wall posts that provide news beyond retail – such as charitable and community service initiatives
6. Incorporate Facebook into Customer Service by enabling customer product reviews, a forum to share shopping experiences, and proactively, publicly and transparently addressing customer concerns
7. Keep an eye out for new features and tools with new f-commerce tools such as flash sales, group-buy offers, and contests – designed to may the f-commerce experience more fun and social

“Procter & Gamble Co. is adding to its custom-content lineup with sole sponsorship of DailyBuzz Style by beauty brands Olay, Pantene and CoverGirl, with content provided and curated by Federated Media Publishing,” reports Jack Neff. Here are the details:

DailyBuzz Style, launched Aug. 1, highlights the P&G beauty brands and integrates “editorially relevant posts into the content of the site,” said Federated spokesman Clint Bagley in an email. That’s similar to what Federated’s DailyBuzz Moms site has done since its launch in May with backing from Clorox Co.

The site will feature content from such Federated Media blogs as Fashionista.com, HonestlyWTF.com, YouLookFab.com, MakeupandBeautyBlog.com and Basenotes.net. It will also include Federated Media’s editor-curated list of “Top Nine” interactive posts, which discuss such topics as warm-weather wear and drugstore beauty buys and are organized into categories on fashion, beauty and home decor.

When it comes to deciding where to put your marketing dollars, how do you decide between traditional television advertising and the sparkly new Internet? Weigh the pros and cons:

TV Pros & Cons:

• No attention! Every day it gets easier to block commercials or simply access television content in commercial-free formats. A recent study indicated that over 60% of viewers had time-shifted some of their programming in one way or another.
• TV is expensive, even as its effectiveness wanes.
• There is now niche content to target, but less availablity to aggregate large audiences, which poaches viewers from the top of the market.

Online Pros & Cons:

• You can target audiences down to the minuatie, but do you want to? Many campaigns seek mass audiences, not niche and small.

• You’ve got to have a viral component. And to do that you have to prime the pump and leverage television. Campaigns can’t exist in an online vacuum!

• Online doesn’t offer quality videos – which could be a good or bad thing, depending on how you want your customer to engage.

• The context for online ads can be very exact, but it rarely has the same potential for emotional impact as a television event. Premiere League matches, NFL games, royal weddings and talent shows can make a brand part of a larger experience. Under the right circumstances, digital could do the same, but rarely does.

What should brand marketers be doing to prepare for 2012? How about the next five years? What are they already doing right?

Opening Keynote speaker Keith Anderson, Senior Analyst at the RetailNet Group predicts:

18 months ago, many CPG companies were still asking whether they needed an e-commerce strategy. Today, most understand that the answer is “Yes,” and they’re moving quickly to put a strategy in place.

Here’s a roadmap for CPG success in a digital world over the next 5 years:

1. Clarify and communicate the corporate vision and strategy for e-commerce
2. Adapt the organization (structure and capabilities) to support the strategy
3. Become expert in how shoppers shop your categories online
4. Constantly test which vehicles are the most effective for different objectives
5. Establish clear principles and policies related to pricing, promotion, assortment, and supply chain for engaging multichannel and pureplay online retailers

Importantly, the details vary across geographies. So for global CPG companies, step 6 is globalizing the model.

Learn more from Anderson at the conference:

The Smarter Shopper: Marketing to the Digital Consumer
Tue – Wed, September 20-21, 2011
Stamford, CT
Register now >
Don’t forget – Use the code “digitalcpg” at registration for a 10% discount just for DigitalCPG.com readers!

What are some of the retail trends unique to 2011?

Opening Keynote speaker Keith Anderson, Senior Analyst at the RetailNet Group predicts:

There’s a lot of 2011 left, but here’s a “pre- post-mortem” based on what I’ve seen so far and what I expect to see before year-end:

• Smartphones went mainstream (> 50% adoption by year-end), and tablets proved optimal for e-commerce
• Amazon was prioritized as a customer by suppliers, a competitor by retailers, and a target by regulators
• Multichannel retailers embraced online-offline integration and invested to make sites and stores support each other
• CPG retailers and brands realized that digital influence (marketing) is as important as e-commerce (retailing)
• Everyone realized that business model viability depends on context, and that the world looks very different for Peapod, Amazon Fresh, FreshDirect, Wag.com, and Petflow today than it did for Webvan, Pets.com and Kozmo a decade ago

There will be much more to talk about at the conference, but that’s a pretty good start.

Learn more from Anderson at the conference:

The Smarter Shopper: Marketing to the Digital Consumer
Tue – Wed, September 20-21, 2011
Stamford, CT
Register now >
Don’t forget – Use the code “digitalcpg” at registration for a 10% discount just for DigitalCPG.com readers!

How are e-commerce and bricks-and-mortar retail influencing each other?

Opening Keynote speaker Keith Anderson, Senior Analyst at the RetailNet Group responds:

For the first phase of e-commerce (essentially the last 15 years), most business models were based on the assumption that e-commerce was a substitute for physical retail.

For some shoppers, categories, and trips, it is—and will increasingly be over the next decade. But driving the next phase of e-commerce innovation is the idea that online-offline integration can be even more transformational. We’re about to undergo a major transition from the majority of shopping experiences being “pure-analog” to the majority being digitally-influenced.

One of my clients, a multichannel retailer among the largest in the country, told me this week that around half of the traffic to their site is from shoppers looking for information about the store—operating hours, local events & promotions, or doing product research.

Mobile search, proximity-driven offers, and local inventory transparency will increasingly influence outlet choice. List-building and list management apps will have major impacts on basket size and mix. Ratings and reviews are already often a factor in brand or SKU choice.

It’s also increasingly common to see retailers offer an “endless aisle” via in-store kiosks or tablets. So retailers aren’t just supporting their stores with their sites, they’re supporting their sites with their stores.

Some in the CPG industry think that e-commerce is only relevant to high-involvement categories like electronics and media like books, music, and video.

But we have hard data that shows that shoppers will increasingly use technology to make key decisions—or let the technology make the decisions for them.

Learn more from Anderson at the conference:

The Smarter Shopper: Marketing to the Digital Consumer
Tue – Wed, September 20-21, 2011
Stamford, CT
Register now >
Don’t forget – Use the code “digitalcpg” at registration for a 10% discount just for DigitalCPG.com readers!

Gen Y moms want more than just the basic tenets when purchasing products. In essence, they want to be part of something larger and like they are contributing to positively changing the world on those social, environmental and health factors. Here’s how to capture their global do-gooder interests:

• Engagement is key. Don’t just market your wares, engage your customers — online and off — around your efforts. This group wants that dialog online, so be accessible and embrace your customers for their opinions, congrats and complaints. But these women also crave real-world connections, so mobilizing them to join your brand in taking offline actions builds sustained loyalty.
• Walk the talk. Authenticity and transparency are tantamount. If you are just getting onto the green spectrum, don’t fret (you are moving in the right direction), but be transparent about where you are and where you want to be. Getting your own house in order through your business practices, product development and charitable efforts builds trust.
• Market with meaning. People in this demographic consume information constantly and at a rapid pace. Incorporating relevant, useful educational content deepens the brand/consumer connection and gives them something to propagate as a way of adding value to their lives and the lives of their peers.
• The power of incentives. Moms are still the primary budgeters and spenders in the household, so deals and incentives are effective tools; but they also grew up in the gaming generation. To resonate with these tech-savvy women, consider incorporating gaming mechanics into your marketing. Tying the incentive to offline action, such as making positive lifestyle changes, adds some social currency to the deal.
• Impact is paramount. Coupling attractive rewards with competitions, challenges and pledges that tie to meaningful action can generate extended engagement. Making that action measurable and trackable satisfies this generation’s desire to make a global positive difference and measure the impact.

How has your brand brought social and environmental causes into your online marketing efforts?