Kraft Scores with Strategies for Better Retail Servicing
By Rose Anthony
In recent years, ensuring that products are presented to shoppers in the best possible light has increasingly become the responsibility of CPG manufacturers. That is why retail servicing has become such a key part of the sales process.
But maintaining an effective retail sales force is a substantial investment. The right mix of training, sales practices and incentives needs to be designed. Moreover, the time and effort invested in developing a brand strategy will be wasted if the strategy isn’t executed effectively on the shelf.
Kraft Foods has put together and deployed effective strategies for better retail servicing. The global food company uses its retail servicing team as a key ingredient in enhancing productivity and customer satisfaction.
Autumn McDonald, Director, Consumer Insight & Strategy at Kraft Foods, outlined Kraft’s strategies in a recent webinar titled “Strategies for Better Retail Servicing: Using Test & Learn to Enhance Performance.” Joining her was Eric Schimmel, a vice president with Applied Predictive Technologies (APT). The webinar was moderated by John Karolefski, editor-in-chief of CPGmatters.
APT is the leading provider of Test & Learn Management Systems for consumer product manufacturers and retailers. McDonald and Schimmel explained how APT’s system can assist in determining potential drivers of retail servicing performance and identify possible opportunities for improvement.
Kraft’s In-Market Testing (IMT) Group is an internal team of experts responsible for consumer-, shopper-, brand- and retailer-oriented in-market testing. The company‘s Center of Excellence is involved in test design, measurement and analysis. The group aims to provide action-oriented results, functional and technical expertise, and innovative problem solving.
“Our in-market testing organization has skill sets spanning sales, marketing, primary research and analytics – all of which we feel has contributed strongly to our success,” said McDonald.
Kraft uses Test & Learn to evaluate the performance of retail servicing strategies as well as to understand the performance of a wide range of other in-market programs and initiatives such as DSD delivery initiatives, merchandising and displays, seasonal programs and promotions, and brand-specific initiatives.
McDonald said the program helps Kraft in several ways:
Valuable Learnings
- Identified factors contributing to lift
- Pin-pointed unexpected drivers’ success
Project Management
- Real time internal access-ability
- Faster results reporting than previously available for full blown IMTs
Internal Capability
- Development of hands on IMT expertise “in house”
- Ongoing training provided by APT
- Ability to customize “on the fly”
Leveraging APT’S Platform
- Generating improved learnings and insights
- Lowering the cost per IMT
- Allowing more IMTs to be completed.
“In-marketing testing can inform a wide range of servicing choices,” McDonald said, “such as approach (in-house vs. brokers), intensity, activities and workload.”
Experience with in-market testing of servicing, she added, provides optimal strategies that are highly channel and customer specific as well as whether existing intuition and conventional wisdom on servicing approaches should be validated and confirmed, or revised.
“We also recognize the importance of collaborating with our retail partners throughout each and every test,” said McDonald. “We work very hard to ensure that we are doing that from the very beginning in setting up objectives up front that are mutually important to Kraft and the retailer – and then selecting programs that effectively meet those objectives.”
She presented a case study on in-store servicing. The initiative used existing distributor networks to provide certain underserved store formats the benefits of DSD-like coverage without the cost of building a new DSD network.
The objective was to provide coverage to drive incremental sales by: improving order quality, controlling out of stocks, ensuring planogram integrity, providing store-level awareness, and aiding in retail execution of all Kraft products.
The APT platform empowered Kraft to measure results rigorously and accurately across more than a dozen chains and 2,800 stores. The test locations were combined by APT into one analysis spanning eight distinct time frames. Closely matched control stores were selected automatically from a pool of over 5,000 candidates, matching on numerous relevant characteristics such as sales history and store size.
Here were the key results:
Trends over Time Stores with more time in the program outperformed stores still in the early implementation stage
Representative Autonomy Stores where the representative had greater control substantially outperformed others
Kraft Share of Wallet Servicing benefits to Kraft were concentrated heavily in the stores where Kraft sales were already strong
Category Impact Kraft presence in a pivotal product category was also a driver of better performance for the servicing support.
“All of these learnings combined,” she said, “helped us to tailor and optimize a servicing program prior to its expansion. It was a very useful and business-impactful test exercise
for us.”
Schimmel, who presented another successful case study during the webinar,
summed up by noting that the increased focus on retail servicing is being driven by the increased complexity of the retail environment: more channels and formats, more items in the assortment, need to customize planograms for different stores and consumer segments, and an expansive number of in-store merchandising techniques.
APRIL 2010
Information Resources, Inc. (IRI)
Renamed SymphonyIRI Group
By Lynne Cooke
Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) has unveiled its transformation into SymphonyIRI Group (SymphonyIRI). The new entity aims to continue enabling CPG, retail and healthcare companies to drive growth through innovation in insights, marketing and sales.
SymphonyIRI Group is building on its established position in market measurement and is adding a new family of solutions for predictive, automated analytics, technology platforms, and strategic consulting services to deliver a dramatic step change in value.
The foundation of these new capabilities is the Advantage Solutions suite, built on the IRI Liquid Data (ILD) platform. SymphonyIRI made this announcement on the opening day of its "Summit 2010: Reinventing CPG and Retail Conference," held recently at the J.W. Marriott San Antonio Hill Country.
“While we now have all of the capabilities to play a much broader role, the IRI brand name in some ways was confining,” said John Freeland, President and Chief Executive Officer. “The last two years has been about fortifying the required set of building blocks, defining a bolder vision and, most importantly, innovating new capabilities and executional competencies to place us center stage in addressing clients’ most important strategic issues. SymphonyIRI Group is more than a new name; we are revitalizing our core business, strengthening our emerging businesses and evolving our fundamental value proposition to more accurately reflect our broader, higher value orientation and focus—a transformation that both embraces and extends beyond the traditional market research space.”
Freeland said the evolution of IRI to SymphonyIRI Group is a direct reflection of the company’s increased agility and relevance, combining its rich heritage in market measurement, with an expanded ability to solve clients’ most challenging strategic business issues across their entire enterprise, including the c-level executive suite. Supporting this ongoing transformation, the company has continued to make significant investments to materially broaden and deepen the value of its core information assets offered by its content business, translating day-to-day data to new levels of powerful business insights.
SymphonyIRI Group Chairman, Dr. Romesh Wadhwani said, “A unified SymphonyIRI Group enables our blue-chip clients to translate deep, highly-nuanced business insights into transformational strategies and actions for a markedly elevated level of impact across their entire organizations, including sales, marketing, merchandising, category/brand management and shopper marketing. This approach represents an entirely new plane of value creation and engagement with our clients to fundamentally help them achieve breakthrough performance and dramatically improved ROI.”
He said SymphonyIRI is supported by excellence in the following core domain areas:
- World-Class Leadership and Expertise Highly-experienced senior management as well as a team of consultants and subject matter experts with proven track records and expertise in a variety of areas and disciplines, including shopper marketing, consumer and shopper insights, predictive analytics, technology development and management consulting.
- Integrated Information SymphonyIRI integrates its large proprietary syndicated POS databases of retailer sales and its leading national panel data on consumers and shoppers with frequent shopper data, media data, shipments and other data to provide the foundation for integrated category, consumer, shopper and customer/retailer insights.
- Innovative Advantage Solutions Portfolio Innovative and predictive analytic modeling and real-time, forward-looking solutions available through the Advantage portfolio of advanced decision support solutions, built on the Liquid Data platform and powered by the next generation Liquid Modeling capabilities.
SymphonyIRI Unveils Target Advantage
Target Advantage, developed in partnership with Acxiom Corporation and SRC, has been launched by SymphonyIRI Group. It is a collaborative, Web-based solution that enables CPG manufacturers and retailers to significantly enhance their ability to directly reach their most valued shoppers through advanced segmentation, modeling and targeting capabilities.
The solution represents the first phase in a new generation of shopper segmentation and targeting solutions designed to provide more actionable insights to drive improved marketing effectiveness down to the individual household and retailer level. Marketers can now target more effectively through predictive attribute modeling versus geo-demographic targeting, identify stronger linkages through historical purchase and forward-looking information and quantify market opportunities based on actual demand versus fulfillment.
CVS Caremark Praised
Fortune magazine has named CVS Caremark the most admired company in the food and drug store industry. The magazine recognized the chain’s innovation, shareholder value, people management, use of corporate assets and financial soundness.
Fortune bases its annual ranking on national surveys of business executives, investment analysts, and boards of directors. CVS was included in a story about the “World's Most Admired Companies” in the March issue.
Turner Joins GMA
Todd Turner has joined the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) as vice president of industry affairs.
“I am pleased to welcome Todd to the GMA team,” said GMA President and CEO Pamela Bailey. “He is a veteran of the retail and CPG industries with a proven track record of providing first-rate member service as an association executive. He is well-equipped to help food, beverage and consumer product manufacturers deliver on their promise to provide safe, healthy and affordable products to consumers.”
