Exec: Marketers Must Go Beyond Product/Brand Experience

Rosemont, Ill. — Marketing to consumers is no longer “TV, print, let’s go,” and merely aiming for the best product and brand experience is no longer sufficient to generate demand. Navigating our complex digital landscape will require that shopper marketers be creative, proactive and persistent over time, said Tim O’Connor, CEO and founder of Retail Performance Solutions, during a Path to Purchase Expo presentation in September.“The key is to see this as a lifecycle of interaction, with an explicit and deliberate process for shopper retention,” O’Connor said. “Digital [marketing] is exposing huge opportunities to be taken into account.” To those who believe creating the best product and brand experience is the best way to retain customers, “I don’t disagree with them that it’s the best way. I just don’t think it’s enough anymore. And it will be even less ‘enough’ in the future.”Brands and retailers will need to work together to earn shoppers’ business, although retailers will be the go-to place for shopper research given their higher involvement in customer engagement and entertainment, O’Connor said. Marketing spend will continue to grow and continue to skew more digital, he predicted. “It’s increasingly influenced by apps.”CPG companies will need to think about how their path-to-purchase process holds up in a time of so much change, with the massive size of Walmart and rapid growth of Amazon.com as the two most outsized influences on the overall shopper marketing ecosystem. The growth of digital means the foundational metric most companies use to measure retailers’ reach – number of doors – might need to give way to page views, O’Connor said.And then CPGs need to choose their mix of retail partners strategically. “Do you want to hand everything to Amazon?” he said. “They have sales reach and growth, but they’re not your friend – they’re your ‘frenemy.’”The concept of proactive demand generation through collaboration between CPG and retailer has crashed onto shopper marketers’ plates in the past two to three years, as the dynamic has gone from “brands in control, to retailers in control, to shoppers in control,” O’Connor said. “People are still trying to figure out the whole process of investment.”Unilever jumped onto the CPG demand generation track when it purchased Dollar Shave Club, a small (less than 1% market share) but disruptive player that signed up 12,000 people in less than 48 hours for its razor blade club membership with a social media video that declared, “Our Blades Are F-ing Great,” O’Connor said.“These are capability plays,” he said. “It’s classic direct marketing on digital steroids. … Unilever bought the keys to the kingdom on scaling up demand generation with this acquisition. It will probably apply it to other products besides shaving.” Those who don’t have deep enough pockets to take such a dramatic step “will need to build stepwise around demand generation.”As more business gets conducted through apps or other “closed-garden ecosystems,” CPGs and retailers on the outside looking in will need to find ways to disrupt that dynamic and build relationships with shoppers, O’Connor said. “The road map for growth is always based around the lifecycle vs. the cost of demand generation,” he said.“There are advantages for first-movers, so don’t wait. It doesn’t mean you need to invest millions. Get in and try it.”

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