POI Pulse: August 10, 2015

Grounds for Excitement – Center Store
Source: (Grocery HQ August, 2015)
Single-serve cups are expanding the overall category; not cannibalizing it, says Dennis Crawford, senior marketing manager at Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA, the Portsmouth, Va.-based manufacturer of Chock full o’Nuts, Hills Bros., Kauai Coffee, MJB, Chase & Sanborn, Krispy Kreme and other brands. “Research shows that those retailers that have embraced the expansion and allocated additional shelf space to the total ‘coffee’ section have experienced exceptional growth across the coffee category,” Crawford says. Learn more

Diet Pepsi’s Aspartame-Free Launch Includes NFL
Source: (Ad Age August 7, 2015)
The brand announced plans to remove the much-maligned aspartame sweetener in April and replace it with sucralose combined with acesulfame potassium, known as Ace-K. But cans and bottles won’t start hitting stores until Monday. With football season around the corner, much of the marketing plugging the new version will take advantage of the marketer’s pricey NFL sponsorship. Learn more

Join 300+ of Your Peers at POI Summit in Dallas!
Your next opportunity to learn, network, and advance at the POI Fall Summit is November 4-6 in Dallas, TX. The agenda will once again be advanced, so make your plans now to attend, as the POI April 2015 Summit was sold out!

More than 300 CPG Manufacturers and Retailers will join us —
Teams taking advantage of early registration include:

Reynolds, Diageo, MillerCoors, Ruiz Foods, Edgewell, Grainger, Borden Dairy, Idahoan, Wrigley, Jack Links, Post Foods, Deli Express, Ruiz Foods, Hershey’s, Lidl, Pernod Ricard, AB Inbev, Tree Top, Storck USA, Bellisio Foods, Bimbo, Kind, Whole Foods, Ahold USA, JBSS, AAFES, DairyPure, Mondelez, Mars, PepsiCo, McCormick, Starbucks, Pinnacle Foods,Coca-Cola, Food Lion, Nestle, Kimberly Clark, Red Gold, DPSG, Johnson & Johnson, Perfetti Van Melle, Kraft Foods, Pictsweet, Hormel, Clorox, Tyson, Kellogg’s, Dannon, 7-Eleven, JM Smucker, Church & Dwight, Busch Bros.,Topco, Keurig Green Mountain, Hillshire Brands, Giant Eagle, Jarden, Musco Family Olive, ConAgra, Windsor Foods, Ainsworth Pet Nutrition, Del Monte, Rich Products, Mckee Foods, SC Johnson, Novartis, and many others. By now you should have received your invitation. If not, reach me today at mkantor@p-o-i.org

How Effective Has Personalization Been So Far?
Source: (eMarketer August 5, 2015)
While some respondents reported a significant boost in certain metrics as a result of personalization, results as a whole showed much room for improvement. Email open rates, return visits and site visitors saw the biggest lifts from personalization, with more than six in 10 respondents reporting at least some increase in each. Learn more

More CCM Candidates w/ POI SJU
Source: (Orientation is December 10-11, 2015)

CCM graduates and candidates included sales, marketing and merchandising executives from Starbucks, Ahold USA, Walgreens, Norseland, Inc., Pinnacle Foods, 7-Eleven, ESM Ferolie, Hormel, Delhaize America, Keurig Green Mountain, Wakefern, Campbell Soup, Mondelez, Continental Mills, and others. Learn more

Integrated TPM – Enhancing Trade Promotion Mgt.
(NeoGrid & Western Michigan University: August 6, 2015)

The case study reveals how a top global consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturer effectively manages trade promotions in a method that was once only thought to be a theoretical necessity. For the first time, innovative technology is enabling true alignment across Finance, Sales, Marketing, Category/Brand Management and Demand Planning.
Read the entire Case Study here.

POI Global Summit is Set for Belgium Brussels
Source: (POI 10-11, May 2016)
Building on the success of the inaugural POI Global Summit in Geneva, CH on 12-13, May 2015 leading global companies are advancing their understanding, and associated benefits of Joint Business Planning and the components of successful promotion collaboration.
At the POI Global Summit, these leaders come together around the critical sales, marketing, merchandising, and retail execution capabilities to create and optimize promotional plans, assortments, and pricing that drives brand/category/store sales and profits. Save the date!

Post Maneuvers to Mitigate Egg Crisis
Source: (Food Bus. News Aug 10, 15)
We will incorporate new learnings into our business model in a way that will seek to mitigate the impact of ongoing costs and potential future events. We believe our ongoing commitments to collaborative customer relationships and safe and reliable supply has resulted in us becoming a better company.” Learn more

Guest Column – Accenture

Many consumer goods companies are just skimming the surface of consumer data. Explore reasons to delve deeper to get to value.

Companies have begun to realize that macro segments no longer exist. We have shifted from a world where a grocery store might have five customer segments to a world where Netflix has 76,000 micro genres of films. Data about consumers has never been more available and abundant, and the technology to make sense of it has never been more mature. Taking full advantage requires more than just ‘big data’ – it’s about taking analytics, and even consumer interactions, to a new level of granularity, then bringing it back up to a level that’s actionable at scale. Such micro segmentation can allow companies to create net new value – just look at the original content Netflix has produced in the past few years based on consumer analytics.

Making sense of massive amounts of data can be daunting, but not so much when you take it piece by piece. Begin by taking your consumer information and breaking it down to the most granular level possible. This dissection might include looking at trade promotion data, transactional data, social media data and even in-store data on the consumers that are shopping there. This is the first step to capturing extraordinary insights into the consumer.

Store clustering is one way to imagine this concept. In the past, CPG companies would cluster stores by size, demographic and geography. That approach works well for a regional media buy, but it doesn’t answer the question of, “what promotion should I run in a given store at a particular time?” Granular data helps CPG companies learn who is consuming the product and how they behave. Behavior may be very different among consumers in the same size store with a similar demographic, or it may be very similar to the behavior of consumers shopping nearby at different format. By breaking down the data to a micro level, CPG companies can begin to assemble demand-driven store clusters that tie specifically to what consumers are buying and consuming.

Rebuilding granular data into something of more value has impacts on social engagement, dialogue marketing, shopping list management, mobile ordering and more. It can help brands to step away from large-scale promotions and move toward customized journeys that add value at every touch point. And data is not the only thing that will go molecular – fragmented customer interactions will create a new opportunity for engagement as the Internet of things grows. This newfound granular layer of detail will usher in a new era in brand strategy, consumer engagement and service delivery for years to come, but only for the companies who are ready. Learn more

See information, and testimonials from the last POI Summit here!

Reach me with questions, and have a sensational week!

Michael Kantor
CEO & Founder
Promotion Optimization Institute, LLC
mkantor@p-o-i.org

www.POInstitute.com