James Tenser

Invoking Relevance

May 31, 2022March 3, 2014 by James Tenser

BEST PRACTICE IN MOBILE ADVERTISING remains an oxymoron, as marketers grapple with the natural tension between intrusiveness and usefulness. There is a strong drive to justify ad spending and validate the business premise behind personalized promotions. Relevance seems to be the key, we are told, and the unique data-capturing and consumer-tracking capabilities of mobile devices should materialize a marketer’s nirvana in which every message is on-target and welcomed.

Recent consumer research from PriceWaterhouseCoopers suggests that this formula may need to be applied with greater subtlty, however. In Mobile advertising: What do US consumers want?, PwC researchers find, “There is an overall aversion to the prevalence of mobile advertising. Even ads that are relevant to personal interests do not directly translate to ad interest or engagement.”

This poses a challenge indeed, since according to PwC, “The biggest challenge is to leverage the knowledge of how consumers are using mobile to improve monetization from ad delivery.”

Independent Grocers – 3 Ways to Gain a Trade Promotions Edge

May 31, 2022February 14, 2014 by James Tenser

NGA, LAS VEGAS – When it comes to capturing their fair share of impact from trade deals, independent grocers have long struggled to match their crosstown, big-chain rivals. Scale is a key challenge. The effort and resources required to identify, negotiate, accept, implement and publish a single promotion are the same, whether the execution is for 12 stores or 1,200.

Big chains may spread these tasks across more hands, but they also suffer from promotion practice logjams and disconnects that may tend to neutralize their advantage, due to versioning complexity, duplication of effort, review and rework.

Make the Effort-to-Benefit Ratio Work for You

The opportunity is open for smaller retailers – who are inherently more consolidated, nimble and fleet of foot – to gain an edge in the promotions game. It comes down to defining and enabling promotion practices that permit streamlining and collaboration across the enterprise. Independents should explore three areas of present opportunity:

Streamline and connect your processes. Neutralize the scale advantage by making promotion decisions faster and adopting disciplined executional processes that offset the differential effort. Use automation to reduce and simplify steps and ensure that correct information is in play across functional areas of your business. Harmony is enabled when you successfully align the creative process with the business decisions.
Collaborate within your enterprise. Structure your ad process for collaboration and design connectivity throughout the lifecycle of each promotion, from planning, to execution, to measurement. Establish a consistent workflow with roles defined, assigned and tracked.
Collaborate with your vendors. Establish a portal-based system that transfers responsibility to vendors to enter complete information about each offered deal and makes it better for them to do so. Online accuracy will make faxes, emails and paper forms a thing of the past. Negotiations and decisions will commence faster while minimizing the need for reviews, changes and reconciliations.

These trade promotion management capabilities are enabled by software solutions but rooted in best practice. They are quite readily available now, and adopting them can be far less disruptive than you might think, especially where web-based technology is available.

The right promotional tools and processes can enable independents to exploit their natural advantages to win with shoppers and capture a fair share of deal profits.

© Copyright 2014 James Tenser
(This article was originally commissioned by Aptaris LLC. Permalink. Republished here by permission. All other rights reserved.)

NRF Bulletin: Personalization Done Right

May 31, 2022January 17, 2014 by James Tenser

I’VE BEEN ON RECORD many times as a hater of shopper loyalty, but an advocate of intelligent personalization.

I admit my position can be construed as mincing words, but I remain stubbornly committed to the distinction. When marketers and retailers try to ascribe loyalty to their card-carrying customers they are usually delusional. When they demonstrate their commitment to those customers through good acts – by providing relevant values and experiences – they embark on a golden path.

Supermarket chains so regularly miss this distinction with their frequent shopper card programs that it is a small revelation to encounter one who seems to have it right. In a presentation at the National Retail Federation Convention and Expo this week in New York, Loblaw Companies, Ltd., the leading grocery operator in Canada, shared some insights about its PC Plus shopper program, launched last May, that suggest it belongs in that exclusive tier.

“From our best customers we capture 55-60% of their share of wallet. That leaves so much opportunity just with them,” said Peter Lewis, Sr. Dir., Customer Analytics & Loyalty at Loblaw (pictured at left in the photo above, with Graeme McVie, VP and GM at LoyaltyOne.)

That’s an insightful way of looking at the return from a frequent shopper program that truly distinguishes highest-value relationships and cultivates them accordingly. Best shoppers deserve our best efforts because they are our best prospects too.

Loblaw has embraced this approach with PC Plus, its digitally-enabled frequent shopper program, said Lewis. On a year-over-year basis, enrolled customers who used the targeted offers changed their behaviors in desirable ways:

They increased their number of visits by 12%
Their average basket size increased by 5%
The number of categories they purchase increased by 7%

Lewis also shared some statistics from the first 6 weeks of the program that indicated rapid acceptance:

40% of sales were made using the card
More than 6,000 members were signed per store
50% email open rate
35% click-through rate on those emails

PC Plus uses analytics to deliver relevant, highly personalized offers. With thousands of offers available across the store, the mix is tailored down to the individual level, based on each shopper’s history.

“How big is the prize from personalization?” said Graeme McVie of LoyaltyOne, the company which helps Loblaw implement and operate PC Plus. “Even with best customers, opportunities exist to grow share of spend.” He shared an analysis of the 50 store categories across the top 20% of customers, which indicated a 50-70% share of spending, a finding which underscores the present value of best shoppers, but also their upside potential.

PC Plus is increasingly focused on the smartphone app as the “control center” for the shopper, Lewis said. It allows them to manage shopping lists from their phones, informs them of available offers, and allows them to accept offers in real time, even while waiting in the checkout lane moments before a transaction.

McVie added that the design of PC Plus is oriented toward “democratizing shopper insights.” Its strategy is two-fold: understand the needs of individual customers and consistently execute actions to satisfy them.

I’ve stated previously in this blog that we are entering a “post-loyalty” era, but intelligent personalization is far from dead. In fact it may just be hitting its stride at Loblaw.

Do CPG Companies Get Online’s Potential?

May 31, 2022December 6, 2013 by James Tenser

CONSUMER SURVEYS FROM Deloitte and others consistently report strong intentions by households to purchase more of their grocery and packaged goods online. This has been true for many years. I suspect there’s some response bias in play.

A recent Retailwire.com discussion raised this issue in the context of a gap between measured shopper interest in online CPG purchases and the less-than-dynamic efforts by most CPG companies to take full advantage of the opportunity. Are they missing the boat? Or are they just taking a prudent approach in the face of greater complexity?

Here’s my take:

Until the perspective shifts from, “How will we sell our products online?” to “How will we help households better manage their pantries?”, I believe this business will continue to be “just around the corner” for CPG, as it was in 1997.

Certainly, splintering the grocery shop into dozens of weekly decisions, transactions and deliveries is no way to help shoppers streamline their consumption routines. This was then and remains now the fallacy of the “consumer direct” concept. Disintermediation is bunk.

A re-consideration of the grocery basket and how it arrives to the home is another story. That requires a solution orientation on the part of the service provider (the retailer). Never-run-out tools, bulk shipments of high-consumption items, and secure unattended delivery have all been well-received in the past. Rapid delivery mechanisms from Amazon.com and others may add traction in areas with urban density, but the relevance will vary widely by location and purchase occasion.

Unfortunately for brands, these emerging concepts will not simplify the in-store shopper marketing imperative in any way. They do add, however, a whole new set of required practices for brand promotion and interfacing with online channels and shopper marketing outside the store. Set against the hard reality of somewhat inelastic total demand, that’s a very tough formula.