Start Tracking, Measuring and Managing POS Marketing Programs

Fond Memories

It is increasingly unlikely that anyone reading this blog will actually remember the economy that emerged after World War II.

I was born in the early 1950’s, and although it is true that I was alive during the post war, post great-depression period, I mostly remember reading about, not living what it was like in the aftermath of the war.

“The World” of my earliest memories only goes back to the late 1950’s. My recollection of our economy is only of a growing economy and an optimistic society, fueled by the almighty consumer’s quest for “more and better”. I remember, or at least I think I do, the birth of the shopping mall — a wondrous place, a shrine to conspicuous consumption and the place to go to “see it all”.

At the same time, manufacturers and suppliers of all these ingenious new consumer products continued to accelerate production of “more” thereby providing hungry consumers with a seemingly endless supply of new, innovative products on which we could spend our newfound, post war “wealth”.

Those were the days of apparently boundless consumerism, both fueled and satisfied by limitless producer innovation — correct?

Not so fast.

Consumer-driven growth, then, just as now, is not simply the product of an industry’s capability and capacity to make bigger and better things.

I would argue that the prime driver — or what actually fuels growth — is marketing, and to put an even finer point on it, advertising.

The Good Old Days?

Here, in our blogs, we’ve exhausted our nostalgic perspective of last century’s nuclear family sitting around the TV watching the Ed Sullivan show or Ozzie and Harriet as the consumer goods manufacturers of the day injected their advertising messages directly into our collective cerebral cortex. In a typical evening of watching TV together, the entire family would see product promotions for consumer packaged goods, or what we now call CPGs, on the three available channels — ABC, CBS and NBC.

It didn’t even matter what network you watched. For the most part, the advertisements were identical on all three — we all knew Maxwell House was “Good to the last drop, and that “Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should”, no matter which network we watched. “Plop, plop, fizz, fizz,” and all that jazz.

Big brands were conceived, developed and launched via what we now call “traditional media” — and these big brands expanded nationally. With the vast majority of the population exposed nightly to the same messages, it was no wonder marketing or advertising is now credited with the meteoric rise of brands, including many of today’s giant CPG firms, including Kellogg’s, P&G and Anheuser-Busch to name a few.

The Better New Days!

Marketing and advertising today are even more important than ever before in the process of creating, building and maintaining brands.

The reason for this is that consumers are more fragmented now than they have ever been. So CPGs marketing programs have had to fragment, or segment in today’s market in order to retain their power and ability to inform and persuade the targeted market to buy.

In other words, “the primary engine" of our economic growth was and still is marketing!

And, the most effective marketing tool available to drive growth of CPGs is point-of-sale marketing —Targeting consumers at “The Moment of Truth” when a shopper becomes a buyer.

Any manufacturer who wants to establish or build a brand recognizes that we are currently moving through the “Era of the Shopper”. One of the hallmarks of this era is the rapidly declining effectiveness and increasing expense of traditional marketing: Declining effectiveness coupled with increasing expense is a recipe for free-falling profits.

What can you do?

Track, Measure and Manage Your POS Marketing Programs

If you’re a manufacturer, distributor, or even a retailer, one of the first orders of business in your quest to build and grow your brand or “increase sales”, is to begin to track and measure the impact of your point-of marketing or advertising.

It may have become a corny phrase, but it is true —

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure”.

Considering how little, if any, measurement of the effectiveness of point-of-sale marketing or shopper advertising is currently being done by CPG manufacturers, it seems obvious that there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit to be picked from the “tree of at-retail marketing”.

It may seem way too easy to say that “all you need to get started” down this road to optimized point-of-sale marketing is the selection of a couple of key performance indicators. Indicators that when correlated to sales, can suggest which of your at-retail marketing / advertising programs truly produce improved sales.

Finally, I’m going to let you in on another little known fact:

The software tools to enable you to automatically track, manage and measure your point-of-sale marketing / advertising programs are so inexpensive and easy to adopt you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you what it costs to buy and implement them.

Give us a call and be prepared to be surprised. If you choose not to call, you’ll be missing out on a marketing game changer.