Column: Thrills & Chills & Shopper Marketing

A few years ago, I was interviewing a potential Shopper Marketing Hall of Fame candidate to vet her credentials for a potential honor. Our vetting process considers various forms of information, but we don’t have objective, third-party data points to help us make these kinds of evaluations. There are no box-office tallies or TV ratings equivalents that neatly gauge a company’s performance along the path to purchase, and metrics like a company’s stock price are at best distant, lagging indicators.So, I was grasping at straws a little bit with that candidate when I brought up the fact that her company’s latest Kantar Retail PoweRanking had risen by one position during the previous year. “Does that kind of metric matter much around here?” I asked. “Do your bosses even notice?”“What, are you nuts?!” she replied. “Senior management is all over that report. We’ve got people whose bonuses depend on those numbers.”This is the kind of statement that both thrills and sends chills down the spine of any editor who has ever worked on a company “Giants” ranking, “Who’s Who” compilation, awards competition and similar industry programs.When you’re privy to some of the “sausage making” that’s necessarily involved with these projects, you learn about the challenges, idiosyncrasies and yeah – foibles – that come with the territory. And knowing that it might directly affect people’s livelihoods should make one take that responsibility even more seriously. Dan Raynak, EVP, strategy and development for Kantar Retail, knows what I’m talking about: “Anytime you tie a metric to something, people really get behind it,” he says. “So the PoweRanking really does help companies focus. If a company wants to improve in a certain area such as shopper marketing, even if it doesn’t break into the top 10, just getting the organization to rally behind the effort can pay off in different ways for both the company and its trading partners.”I’ll confess that we did indeed peek at the 2016 PoweRankings when finalizing our choices for the 2017 Hall of Fame class. When considering the candidacy of Cheryl Williams, CIO at Wakefern Food Corp., for example, it didn’t hurt to discover that while the chain was ranked #19 overall among retailers, it broke into the top 10 (ranked #9) for its “Use of Digital Platforms.” Similarly, Tyson Foods climbed one position (to #13) from its 2015 overall rank, with specific gains made in insights and category leadership, areas of special interest to another honoree, Chris Witte, Tyson’s VP, shopper & category development. So what else can you glean from the 2016 PoweRankings? Raynak says that judging by this year’s study, when it comes to maximizing the potential of shopper marketing, “best in class” manufacturers are focusing on five key themes:1. Dedicated Resources: Steady increase in the number of experienced marketing professionals that are embedded into customer teams, and the hiring of agencies that are more sophisticated in this field.2. Increased Investment: Reinvestment of trade funds from price reduction to shopper marketing activation driven by higher ROIs.3. Seamless Integration: Improved integration between consumer marketing campaigns with shopper marketing.4. Data Utilization: Greater sophistication of mining shopper transaction data and faster translation into insights and strategy.5. Inspiring Value: Agency partners creating inspiring and motivating messages that enhance price discounts. Clearly, there are a lot of layers to the PoweRanking reports, and I’m pleased to report that a lot of the data is now being made available on P2PI.org. We’ll keyword the results to the search term “poweranking” – be careful to use that nonstandard spelling with just the one “R” – which will enable you to access various charts, comments and scores for the various chains and CPG companies tracked. Have fun, and as always, thanks for reading & clicking.

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