Digital CPG Blog

General Mills has creates a portal, called G-WIN Digital, for the public’s ideas on its digital initiatives, including applications and games. Consumers with digital-product ideas can use G-WIN to send their concepts directly to the company’s marketing team.

So, consumers with digital-product ideas can use G-WIN to send their concepts directly to the company’s marketing team. Here’s how it works:

Those just bursting with ideas for a game involving Cheerios or a mobile app for Betty Crocker–or any of the multitude of General Mills brands, including Green Giant, Pillsbury, and Häagen-Dazs–are directed to the innovation portal to share their non-confidential idea, product, company, or technology. Once submitted, GM’s digital marketing group vets the ideas, and status updates are promised within three weeks. From there, a dedicated review team is at the ready to quickly hand intriguing ideas right over to the digital marketing operations. Specific ideas they choose to engage in will likely start out small and experimental with lessons and experiences applied on a broader scale.

Being first in the digital marketing space is important to General Mills:

This past April, it was the first consumer packaged goods company to use a daily deals service, offering consumers in Minneapolis and San Francisco a sampler pack of GM goodies for $20 on Groupon, a 50% discount. Also, in October the company announced an ambitious initiative called Trail View that creates a first-person, street-view style experience of national parks such as the Great Smoky Mountains, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon.

And General Mills is trying to act more like a lean start-up than a massive CPG corporation:

Addicks offers the mantra “create, iterate, learn, and scale,” which, he says, means becoming an agile, learning organization. “I don’t think that’s a small thing; I think that’s a big thing for organizations like ours. There’s a big cultural change that has to happen–you have to be very agile, ready to move super fast and you have to be in the moment. You have to learn. We call it ‘market while we research, research while we market.’ Those used to be discreet functions. Today, it’s finding partners, trying something on the brand and really watching and learning as we go and continuing to iterate.”

Is it time for the public relations industry to take on themselves? And is it time to redefine your own strategies and definitions in this age of social media?

Finding a new definition for public relations is “a process we know is overdue,” said Rosanna Fiske, the chairwoman and chief executive of the public relations society who is also associate professor and global strategic communications program director at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Florida International University. “We felt we could no longer let it go.”

“Before the rise of social media, public relations was about trying to manage the message an entity was sharing with its different audiences,” Mr. Lavelle said. “Now, P.R. has to be more about facilitating the ongoing conversation in an always-on world.”

“In a world where the ordinary consumer is walking around with global publishing power in his or her pocket,” said Mr. Tisch, who is also chief executive at Argyle Communications, “the role of public relations and corporate communications has shifted from creating content to attempting to influence the content that’s created by others.”

People who use coupons aren’t just deal-chasers, they’re your best customers:

According to a new survey of consumers conducted by Forrester Consulting (commissioned by online coupon company WhaleShark Media), active coupon users reported spending more than $800 per year with e-commerce sellers than the less active coupon users ($1,805 vs. $1,025). Moreover, nearly three-quarters of active coupon users said they would be more likely to try a new brand if they had a coupon or promotion code, compared with 54% of less active coupon users.

“[Online coupon use] generates new users and it increases spending,” Cotter Cunningham, CEO of WhaleShark, tells Marketing Daily . “I had this image in my head of the coupon user who buys the most expensive thing they can [with the coupon] … but it clearly isn’t the case.”

In addition, 88% of the respondents said the promo codes and coupons were the deciding factor when it came to making a purchase. The codes and coupon also reduce shopping cart abandonment, with 60% of respondents saying they would be more likely to reconsider buying a product they had placed in an online shopping cart, but had not bought if they received an online coupon or promotion code for that product.

“Consumers seem to be more loyal and have more positive feeling to merchants who [offer] coupons,” Cunningham says. “And if I’m a merchant I would find it exciting.”

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!

I have long argued that social networks aren’t really social and we shouldn’t let a few platforms define what social means online. Now, others are coming around. Econsultancy argues:

Social technologies have seen great advances and widespread adoption. But the way we behave socially online is still unnatural and stilted. The technology doesn’t yet fully reflect the way we socially interact in real-life.

Amen! The article goes on to reveal the results of an interesting psycholgy study carried out amongst UCLA students:

Interestingly, In contrast to similar studies conducted previously, it found that:

…the overwhelming quantity of [social network site] use among college students is more consistent with the global use paradigm, which sees internet use as universal, as opposed to a realm inhabited by people who are somehow different than non-users.

The Internet isn’t just for the lonesome any longer, which will hopefully mean some increased innovations into mirroring technology to our human interactions.

Is your brand doing anything interesting to mirror offline behavior online?

Next up in charts and infographics, we’ve got a great one on social commerce growth and f-commerce:

The survey also highlights the importance of information on returns polices. 46% said they always check returns policies before making a purchase online, 43% sometimes check this, while just 11% never bother.Some great graphs from Econsultancy as you integrate your  marketing efforts with your site design:

If you are shopping from a retailer you don’t know well, how would you decide whether to trust the website?

Product Page Essentials

The best product pages need the five things in the chart below, while the experience can also be enhanced with use of video, 360 product views, effective cross-selling, and so on.

What information do you need to see on product pages to help you decide whether to make a purchase?

Basket Abandonment

After adding items to your basket, what would make you abandon your purchase?

Checkout Abandonment

Once you are in the checkout process, what would deter you from completing the purchase?

Digital coupon company Coupons.com recently closed on a $200 million funding round, reports GigaOm.

“Right now we have about 300 employees based in Silicon Valley,” CEO Steven Boal said. With this new funding, the company plans to add 100 new staff members in the next six months and add new sales offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. Coupons.com will also focus on adding new mobile and social networking technologies, he said.

But while Boal was happy to discuss Coupons.com’s consumer traction, he was notably mum in the GigaOm interview on disclosing details about the company’s financial performance. He declined to answer questions about Coupon.com’s sales figures, its prior funding history, whether or not it’s profitable, or who exactly participated in this latest financing round.

Regardless, the news is great for all those involved in digital couponing as this space only gets larger and more profitable.

Companies are losing out on billions of dollars and pounds in revenue due to a poor online experience, according to research published today by Econsultancy and Tealeaf. A global survey of more than 500 businesses for the Reducing Customer Struggle report found that companies able to quantify site abandonment estimate they are losing the equivalent of 24% of their annual online revenue due to a bad website experience.

Ouch.

“This focus on understanding customer acquisition and giving less emphasis to the rest of the sales and marketing cycle mirrors the marketing bias towards acquiring customers which has been a feature of the business landscape over the last few years,” the report argues.

I believe that user interfaces and experiences, not data will redefine online commerce in the next wave. I would love to see an interface that allows me to see what strangers and my friends are browsing in real-time. I’d really love to invite my best friend in Madison to go on a shopping date while I’m in DC and browse a site simultaneously while I glance at her and what she’s browsing.

If you try to imagine these experiences in the web’s current architecture, it seems clunky, unrealistic even, but I assure you, the interfaces that use the data of web 2.0 will evolve and become increasingly important in web 3.0. And that’s what will define social on the Internet.

Common predictions are that “the first phase of e-commerce was the utilitarian hunt for staples, the next phase of e-commerce will be about recreational shopping where the merger of social and interest graphs will drive buying decisions,” but here’s my prediction: after the data, it’s going to be the experience. Data is useless without a meaningful experience to plug into. How the interface and experience of social is formed will drive the next evolution of online commerce.

This is the kind of graph we all like to see:

For CPG manufacturers, going online enables a deeper, more personalized relationship with the shopper, reports Nielsen.

Five things to know about online grocery shopping:

1. Consumers love online grocery shopping, but it takes time getting used to. You can simply the process by improving the online experience with navigation, search, online help and porting over shopping lists. Deliver a better time-saving experience and consumers will hang on.
2. Online baskets are different than offline baskets. The average transaction size is much larger for food and beverages ($80 online / $30 offline) and health and beauty purchase ($30 online / $10 offline). And online shopping offers a greater mix of pack sizes and categories.
3. Consumer perceptions and purchase behaviors are affected in important ways. The interactions with the online ‘store’ environment are fundamentally different than an in-store experience. The online experience is fueled by a needs-driven experience as a greater variety of options are made available on screen.
4. Online shopping “levels the playing field”. Big brand ‘physical’ advantages do not translate online. With universal distribution and search functionality an inherent bias toward niche players is created. Ultimately, price transparency, connectivity and open content favor a purely ‘rational’ market.
5. Large and small brands can win online by combining marketing savvy with digital capabilities to add value. With interactive websites, smartphone applications and social media connections, expanding your brands in new and innovative directions is virtually limitless.