CPGmatters: Survey Shows CPGs to Focus More On Brand Building in Stores
Through a special arrangement, what follows is an excerpt of a current article from CPGmatters, a monthly e-zine, presented here for discussion.
Nearly seven of ten (68 percent) respondents to an Instant Poll on the home page of CPGmatters in December 2007 listed In-Store Marketing as their top area of focus in the New Year. Other areas of attention included Category Management (11 percent), Shopper Insights (10 percent) and Trade Marketing (10 percent). Nearly 400 executives took part in the poll.
"The results don't surprise me," said Alison Chaltas, principal of Interscope, LLC. "In-Store Marketing is very much the way category management was in the late '80s and early '90s where everybody was talking about it and everybody wanted to do it. It felt like the right thing to do."
In recent years, the industry's interest in in-store marketing - also referred to as at-retail media, shopper media, and shopper marketing - has been spurred on by two significant developments: one, Procter and Gamble's well-publicized initiative called the First Moment of Truth, and two, the industry's attempt at developing a metric for measuring in-store media.
Not long after P&G kicked off its Moment of Truth initiative, a group of prominent companies aimed to come up with a new yardstick for measuring in-store media audiences. In pilots, researchers use infrared sensors to track people's movements past strategic locations within test stores, and converted the measurements into audience data. Experts say the new measurement tool has the potential to change the way brands allocate media mix spending between traditional ad media and in-store channels.
The effort, called Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric (P.R.I.S.M.), initially involved six brand marketers, four large retailers, and one of the nation's largest media buying firms in a study that measured consumer traffic in 64 retail categories in 10 food, drug and mass stores located in Atlanta and Portland, Ore. The Nielsen Company is now spearheading the research.
"That is adding some legitimacy," said James Tenser, principal of VSN Strategies. "(In-Store) is not yet a measurable media, and it‘s not yet a media that's easy for advertisers to buy. But manufacturers have decided that they're going to shift money in this direction. It's loud and clear: they're moving dollars from traditional media and traditional types of advertising into the in-store environment. And the reason being is that the First Moment of Truth argument carries a great deal of weight."
"Shopper marketing or in-store marketing is something we need to invent, so it's getting a lot more attention and a lot more energy," adds Ms. Chaltas. "Both manufacturers and retailers are struggling with how to invent the right approach to shopper marketing for their own store or category or brand. It's creating a lot of buzz because it's an unknown and requires a lot of energy and attention. And most organizations are going from a world of doing almost none of it to doing it for the first time."
Discussion Questions: What do you think is driving the focus by the CPG industry on in-store marketing? What has been working in in-store media that could be built upon? What are the main hurdles impeding the CPG industry from improving in-store marketing?