One Blog |January 19, 2012 | Point-of-Sale Marketing Management

Shopper Marketing: Change the Experience, Experience the Change

Denis Clark

According to Vice President of Shopper Marketing at Coca-Cola North America, Diane Wallace, "Shopper marketing is the next big step in the evolution of strategic retail marketing." (See Note 1)

For a typical Consumer Package Goods (CPG) company, Shopper Marketing–sometimes called Trade Promotions (TP) or Marketing at-Retail–is the second largest expense item behind COGS; and it’s growing.

According to IDC Manufacturing Insights, the following items are included in the Top 10 Trade Promotion Management (TPM) Challenges:

TPM spend effectiveness and the ability to measure the ROI remains low
Most CPG companies are dissatisfied with promotional results — They know some percentage of promotional events are unprofitable, just not which ones
They lack a good TPM tool

Bottom line they have no effective way to track, measure and manage their point-of-sale (POS) promotions.

OnTrak software is designed to take the guesswork out of POS marketing management and help CPG companies improve the ROI of POS promotions. Our tools provide the information that is needed to help companies more effectively track, measure and manage trade promotions —from ordering, through production, to placement, and removal.

Our reporting and analysis tools give greater insight into the profitability of marketing campaigns by measuring a promotion’s impact on sales performance. Once suppliers, distributors and retailers see how their POS efforts really work–or don’t–they can modify them accordingly and improve both the performance of Shopper Marketing initiatives as well as their sales organizations.

Armed with tools from OnTrak, suppliers, distributors and retailers can answer the questions, "What was spent; Where; and What was purchased as a result?"

Answers which must be known before an organization can set the foundation for Trade Promotion Optimization (TPO).