Global Watch 2019

Location: Shanghai, ChinaBrian Chau, General Manager, E-Commerce, China, The Coca-Cola Co.Experience in market: More than 20 yearsMy job: “I lead the fastest growing online B2C business for the Coca-Cola system in China.”Shopper behavior: “The shopping experience in China has been fundamentally digitalized over the last few years, which is well-reflected in the term ‘New Retail’ first introduced by Jack Ma of Alibaba. Central to this is the seamless integration and interaction of the online and offline shopping experience, enabled by the highly connected digital ecosystems and big data enablement. In the beverage category, whereas the path to purchase would only sit within a brick-and-mortar store location in the old days, it is now extended far beyond to multiple digital/online touchpoints and devices.”External technologies: “The pervasive digital payment ecosystem is definitely the one impacting the path to purchase the most in China, since it enables a highly seamless and convenient shopping experience.”Collaboration: “Digital partners in China are generally very willing to collaborate with brands. For example, we have been working with our partners on big data mining initiatives to help us in developing product innovations, digital activations and even route-to-market optimization.”Successful activity: “For the 2018 and 2019 Chinese New Year, we have collaborated with the Alipay/Alibaba ecosystem to transform a traditional Chinese ritual (giving red pockets) to a fully integrated digital online shopper marketing experience, leveraging our Coca-Cola Chinese New Year packaging as an invitation to participate and as a gamification media to deeply engage with consumers.”Keeps you up at night: “Whether we have a robust future-state digital/online commerce capability and enough bench strength in place to keep up with the fast-changing digital landscape in China.”E-commerce: “E-commerce is already highly developed in this market, given China is already the No. 1 e-commerce market globally. Moving forward as the shopping journey becomes more digitalized and connected, it’s never good enough to only consider e-commerce in China, without covering the omnichannel implications in the marketplace.” Location: Sao Paulo, BrazilRoberto Torres, Perfect Stores & Hot Zone Senior Manager, Mondelez InternationalExperience in market: More than 15 yearsMy job: “My area is responsible for the 5P’s strategy definition for all of our categories in every retail environment where we have our products. We define Perfect Stores targets, assess the biggest ‘closing the gaps’ opportunities, convert insights into action, and provide capabilities to our team and customers in order to influence and leverage superior execution at the point-of-sale.”Shopper behavior: “Although shoppers vary by category, a typical shopper in our market is a woman (nearly 70%) who buys twice a month and is within middle income. Shopper behavior has dramatically changed in three significant ways: 1) they are being more multi-retail environment, jumping from five to eight retail environments in the last five years; 2) they are more tech-driven, finding the best deals using smartphones and even choosing which store to go to based on what they find on retail apps; and 3) likely to grow in the future is the use of services such as Rappi, which would reduce the number of ‘real’ shoppers in the store, impacting our impulse-driven categories’ sales.”The store-within-a-store trend: “We could see industry leaders segmenting their categories’ products according to decision tree hierarchies and then creating a more pleasant environment through fancy POS materials. We have seen this with wine, coffee, health & beauty and craft beers. We’ve made our own attempts, such as segmenting chocolates by consumption occasion (for me, for us, for them). This had promising results in the pilot (the growth was two times faster) and has been rolled to more than 300 stores. All of these initiatives are to create a more pleasant shopping trip and to reduce shopper leakage to other retail environments.”External technologies: “Retail apps are really the ones having the biggest impact on the path to purchase. Shoppers choose what and each brand to buy before being at the point-of-sale based on their promotions. Sometimes, they even choose which retail store to visit.”Collaboration: “It depends on the initiative. In general, [retailers] are collaborative. There are many examples of collaborative initiatives, such as category management, exclusive shopper campaigns, joint business plans, etc. However, since the country has been in a recession for a few years now, customers are becoming more tactical and a bit less open to initiatives that do not have a quick return on results.”Successful activity: “Our biscuits team put together a strong campaign behind Oreo. To be eligible, the shopper had to buy Oreo products and subscribe on a website to participate in a contest to win trips to South Africa and a variety of other prizes weekly. To execute this campaign there was a POS execution incentive, artistic tabloids (leaflets), digital communications and PR media. The full communication plan enabled superior execution at the POS, leading to an increase in sales, record market share, better distribution and more extra spaces during the campaign period. All of this with a positive ROI (+1.7%).”Keeps you up at night: “Bringing some innovative analysis/vision that might create a WOW effect on my peers.”E-commerce: “It has developed significantly, with most larger retailers having their operations. All of them started with electronics and appliances, but now also have grocery. However, e-commerce still represents too little in our categories (less than 2%). The main challenge here is finding ways of leveraging sales online for products that are impulse-driven.” Location: SingaporeChitkala Nishandar, Marketing Operations Lead, Asia Pacific, Consumer Business, 3MExperience in market: 13 years in AsiaMy job: “I am responsible for planning and ensuring the right execution of regional integrated brand communication programs, online and offline, in the Asia-Pacific region. I also lead the insights and planning function for the region for our consumer business.”The path to purchase: “As data becomes cheaper in Asia, the use of mobile phones to search, view content and transact purchases has become commonplace. It varies vastly across the region, though. For higher value products, there’s more pre-search involved; even for lower-end products that offer innovation/differentiation, online pre-search is becoming increasingly relevant. Having a strong digital footprint is important, as well as word of mouth. This has changed in a big way over recent times.”Shopping/buying stage: “This is where comparisons become important. There is more fluidity offline to online and vice versa in Asia. It’s important for retailers to work with their vendors/manufacturers on building a strong omnichannel strategy. As the cost of having promoters in-store becomes more constraining, we need to rely on more electronic in-store media or online to support marketing and other demand-generation activities. When consumers are buying, it’s important to have retargeting, improve ratings and reviews, have relevant and updated content, and build ongoing promotional plans.”Collaboration: “Retailers are usually quite collaborative and looking for win-win solutions. Increasingly, they are aware that they need to partner with manufacturers to build programs that are mutually beneficial and will bring in footfalls, increasing the shopper’s overall basket. The ability of the manufacturer to leverage insights data and POS data to build strategic recommendations is critical. We used simulated planograms to model expected outcomes on sales impact in Australia. The learnings not only helped our customer adjust existing shelf plans, but also helped other country teams when they used the information to input into their plans and share with their local partners.”Successful activity: “To grow a mature home improvement solutions business in Taiwan, we developed a comprehensive learnings plan through shopper insights. Working with our retail partners, we conducted in-store shopper observations and intercepts to build an understanding of the shopper behavior in-store, which helped us build a joint plan on planogram changes to increase shoppability and ease of navigation at the shelf. Understanding the shopper needs, persona and touchpoints also helped to develop a more targeted strategy to accelerate sales with the right portfolio, resulting in a significant growth in the business with our customer.”Keeps you up at night: “Constantly ensuring we have the right programs along the entire shopper journey to support the excellent and innovative product offerings from the 3M stable; ensuring we have a data-driven media and communication strategy; and keeping pace with the high speed of transformation in Asia Pacific – both in terms of consumers and customers.”E-commerce: “E-commerce development varies widely across Asia Pacific, with China being the most developed in terms of size and growth as well as the evolution in technologies that support its growth, followed by Korea. That includes agility in integrated marketing across digital touchpoints and the utilization of big data. The seamless shopper journey across communication touchpoints to the digital marketplace and digital payment options has enabled a dramatic transformation in how consumers access a wide spectrum of choices.” Location: PanamaSebastian Posteraro, BEO (Business Executive Officer), Nestle PurinaExperience in market: 1 year in Panama; 20 years with the company in various countries including Argentina, Columbia, Mexico, Chile and Peru.My job: “To ensure that strategic business priorities are achieved, lead change and reach business goals over the next four years.”The path to purchase: “The channels of commercialization are evolving rapidly, and with it retailers are designing simpler, more direct solutions, looking for the highest impact in stores experientially. The consumers of today demand so much that they won’t accept errors or lack of information. … If they do not have what they went in to look for they could change brands.”Shopper behavior: “The shopper has various options and information at hand. Price always has relevance at the time of the decision, but it must be accompanied with ‘something more …’ such as products that are increasingly healthy, natural and that also contribute to global trends with packaging that, for example, [is environmentally friendly] and that not only looks to take care of the person and their family but also the planet.”Internal/external technologies: “The technologies that are most impactful definitely are the digital platforms and comparison websites. The conventional path to purchase, in my opinion tends to disappear or to be minimized.”Collaboration: “The collaboration of retailers will depend on how predisposed this industry is to adapt to its own strategies. If the industry is willing to do so, retailers would become very cooperative, insofar as they do not tend to close. For example, less and less retailers value category advisors and medium-term joint strategies.”Successful activity: “We have installed parks for dogs in green areas and also promoted that companies accept pets in jobs in the appropriate conditions. We believe that pets and people are better together, contributing to recreation, socialization, less stress and a healthy life, [and we have communicated] this in social media campaigns.”Keeps you up at night: “Ensuring product quality for consumers and pets, and developing people with potential who believe in organizational values and culture.”E-commerce: “We’re still underdeveloped. There’s a long way to go, at least in the category I work in.” Location: Mexico CityDennise Gaona, Go to Market and Shopper Sparkling Director, Mexico Business Unit, The Coca-Cola Co.Experience in market: 17-plus yearsMy job: “To decode brand strategies into commercial and trade marketing integral solutions across channels to develop a proper shopper journey and ensure wins at the point-of-sale.”The path to purchase: “We have an online and offline path that allows us to provide shoppers what they want, while creating a strategy driven by our mission. It all starts in the pre-purchase, creating awareness for our target. During the purchase we ensure the proper shopper journey in each channel, offering the shopper different product choices. At the end, we close the circle by developing experiences for our consumers. One of the biggest opportunities is connecting shoppers and consumers through technology. We need to link the online and in-store experiences, always considering the consumer at the center and during the path to purchase. It’s important to consider the consumer/shopper as one.”Shopper behavior: “The typical shopper – for one of our main channels – is often females who are more likely to have large households. Shopper omnichannel behavior and habits have been evolving through four main macro forces: technology, individuality, wellbeing and instant gratification.”Internal technologies: “Artificial intelligence and data analytics, which provide a deeper consumer/shopper understanding.”External technologies: “Technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, allowing shoppers to connect with brands, products and other people at any time, on any device, anywhere.”Collaboration: “We have developed a collaboration process with our key customers in Mexico to maximize top initiatives at the point-of-sale. It’s important to mention that customers are requesting integral solutions that enable category growth not only on the transactional side, but also enabling innovative experiences like digital platforms that allow us to connect and increase shopper traffic to the stores. An example of this is our #BeSanta campaign that was developed and executed with one of our largest customers. The Integral Communication Plan included 17,900 activated stores, an exclusive can edition and customer collaboration through their own digital campaign.”Keeps you up at night: “In a dynamic market environment, I always think of how to reinvent and offer an integrated consumer-centric shopper journey.”E-commerce: “It’s still in an early stage in Mexico, due to the low level of banking among the population. However, the most advanced sectors are the food and retail aggregators. In the near future, we expect that our sector will reach the financial digital solutions that Brazil has.”

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