Hall of Fame Profile: John Mount

There seem to be as many definitions of shopper marketing as there are companies practicing it these days, but all of the good ones are grounded in one uber-important word: collaboration. At The Coca-Cola Co. and its North American operating unit, Coca-Cola Refreshments, collaboration is a major investment in time, staff, real estate and technology that’s embodied in many ways: highly integrated customer teams; a habit of gathering and then sharing insights industry-wide; and live research facilities such as “KO Lab” (a consumer research center) and the SEIC (Shopper Experience Innovation Center).Proving that collaboration sometimes really is a two-way street, this month’s Hall of Fame profile subject, John Mount, was nominated by his partners at Kroger – Evan Anthony, VP-Corporate Marketing/Advertising/Loyalty, and Peter Bond of dunnhumbyUSA. Mount’s role at Coca-Cola is to create and implement a shopper marketing vision that includes occasion-based messaging, multi-cultural marketing and the use of emerging shopper technologies; lead a shopper marketing team that can leverage insights to emotionally connect with Coca-Cola’s customers’ shoppers; and ensure that shopper marketing is a growth engine for the company’s collective business. This conversation was conducted in late February.Mount will be inducted into the Hall of Fame at a ceremony held in conjunction with the Shopper Marketing Effie Celebration from 6-9 p.m. on Tuesday, April 9, during the Shopper Marketing Summit at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Center Hotel in Schaumburg, Ill. He will be inducted along with Mir Aamir, President, Customer Loyalty & Digital Technologies, Safeway Inc.; and Spencer Blaker, Director of Global Retail Marketing, Burt’s Bees Inc. Mr. Blaker was profiled in the March issue of Shopper Marketing. Mr. Aamir will be profiled in the May issue.How did you get started in the industry?Mount: After graduating from Denison, a number of great companies came to campus to interview. I ended up receiving a job offer from Nabisco, although I had no idea what I was getting into in terms of the CPG industry. When you graduate from college, you think that you’re going to have some sort of a desk job. But right away I was told, “Here’s a territory map. A guy is going on vacation next week and you’re going to cover his route.” And of course that guy had made sure that his vacation was going to be on one of his busiest weeks, so I ended up having to merchandise from 6 in the morning until 8 at night every day that week.Eventually I got my own Kroger route in Cincinnati. In those days, Kroger store personnel did all the merchandising so you got a lot of experience by being a pure salesperson, which was fantastic.Did you learn anything in particular?Mount: I’ve been lucky to have a number of mentors, and one of them was a Kroger store manager who early on took me aside and actually coached me to be more aggressive. We happened to have a big CBS promotion coming out at that time, so I went ahead and had the local CBS affiliate come out to his store to see “what a great store looks like.” And we showed them one of the most spectacular displays ever built.I did put in a lot of hard time working in the stores. It’s not easy, but it still guides me in what I do today. We know what the account managers and the merchandisers go through every single day, so my team is focused on making their lives easier to sell and activate our shopper marketing initiatives and be successful.You joined Coca-Cola in 1998 as a Cincinnati-based category manager, and then took a director of marketing position in St. Louis.Mount: That was a lot of fun. One of the biggest promotions we did was give away “season tickets for life” to the St. Louis Cardinals. We filled three “Texas Tankers” with submissions. And they tell me that the winner still shows up, every year, by March 1 to collect his two tickets.After that, I returned to Cincinnati in a region director of marketing position and eventually co-lead the Kroger Total Beverage Team, which had responsibility for all of Coca-Cola’s beverages – including Minute Maid and our fountain portfolio. We focused on five things: shopper marketing, shopper insights, business relationship, our supply chain and retail execution.In Evan Anthony’s nomination letter, he said that you’re a rare marketing guy because you “understand the business side of marketing.” What do you think he meant by that?Mount: I think what he means is this: Everybody wants to be Kroger’s most valued supplier, but are you able to operationalize your shopper marketing so that their store managers can execute the program? We made it turnkey; we made it simple; we pushed the boundaries on what had been done before.David Preston, Lorran Brown-Crosby and Van Taylor – my shopper marketing leads at the time – worked hand-in-glove upstream with our brand teams to really bring those initiatives to life and ensure that we had great packaging tied to, for instance, the Daytona execution. And then, over the top, we ensured that we had the right media, with the right billboards and out-of-home, driving traffic back to Kroger. We’ve got 20 million-plus My Coke Rewards members, and they love to see content that’s exclusive. So we were able to leverage My Coke Rewards to help bring Kroger’s whole Daytona initiative to life by offering double My Coke Rewards points. So I think Evan appreciated that our Kroger team really understood the operational needs of his store managers when bringing initiatives to life.When Wade Duke, who was my co-lead on the Kroger team, and I inherited the team, we tried to break down boundaries. I’ll never forget going to see Jeff Burt at the deli department who said, “Why on earth is Coke coming to talk to me?” Well, there were opportunities with Daytona, for example, for Coke 2-liters and wing buckets. So basically, we were constantly trying to work with different departments within Kroger.2010’s North American business integration brought together two entities, The Coca-Cola Co. and its largest North American bottler, Coca-Cola Enterprises, creating a new operating unit, “Coca-Cola Refreshments.” How did things change for you?Mount: We’ve had 11 straight quarters of growth. This past year, we had 2% growth in North America. Our No. 1 priority is to grow soft drinks and to nurture the No. 1 brand in the world. When you look at the Nielsen numbers from the past year, we are particularly proud of our volume and value share swings compared to our closest competitor. We won across all of our core segments, so we are really pleased with that.We feel like we’ve got a lot of momentum, but we’re not done and still have a ton of upside and a long way to go. There are so many different platforms to focus on from leveraging big events like the NCAA Tournament, the World Cup and the Olympics to working with our “Power of Many” partners like Mondelez, Hershey and Time/Warner, to name just a few.What is the “Power of Many”?Mount: It came about when our competitor [Pepsi] began to go down the path of the “Power of One.” We’ve had great relationships for years and years with so many different suppliers, and we decided to take that to a whole new strategic level. Eileen Thanner’s [VP, Commercial Capabilities COE] group has done an incredible job working our “Power of Many” strategy. For example, through our partnership with Mondelez, we’ve successfully placed co-branded merchandising racks with customers in the supermarket and drug/value channels. It’s a very big deal.When you can have a conversation with a retailer about an Olympics initiative and have a Procter & Gamble, an Anheuser-Busch, a Chobani and a Kellogg’s with you – well, all of a sudden, you represent 30% of their ACV. And it shows, for example, in the Olympics initiatives where we had 90% participation across our customers. Some participated for as long as 100 days of activation; our “cases on display” grew significantly during those first two weeks in August; and we also saw a great share swing during that time period as well. And our brand equity … it just took off.Tell me about your role today. You don’t have shopper marketing in your title – it’s “retail strategy and marketing” – but is shopper marketing a big part of it?Mount: It is. I am responsible for retail strategy. When you think about the Advantage or the Performance Monitor scores, one of the nine measures is “clear strategy.” My team is responsible for supporting our “2020 Vision” overall company strategy and bringing it to life within each one of our retail channels – which includes supers, hypers, mass, club, drug, value and national specialty chains like Home Depot and Menards.For us, it’s all about collaborating for value with our customers, so I’ve got a core commercial team that’s responsible for that. At the end of the day, we want to make sure that we’re matching our brand strategies with our customers’ strategies.We are also responsible for working back upstream with our category business units and bringing all of our commercial plans to life throughout the year. We set the annual business plan for the different retail channels and retail customers; we make sure that our monthly company initiatives are commercialized well in advance so our teams are able to sell and secure the activity; and then about 60% of my organization is tied up in shopper marketing.We’re a cross-functional group. Our shopper marketers sit directly on the customer teams and are closely connected to the brand and the category. We have shopper marketing leads – assistant vice presidents or AVPs – for our core large-store teams: Walmart; Kroger; the West (supporting chains like Safeway); the Central (supporting Target and Supervalu); the East (supporting Ahold, Wegmans, Giant Eagle and Meijer); the South (supporting Publix, HEB, Food Lion and military), convenience retail and drug/value. Other cross functions include a category advisory team, shopper insights and a revenue management team.What do you spend most of your day doing?Mount: Most of it is spent on supporting the business plan, ensuring that our commercial plans are in place and working closely with the shopper marketing team, and basically, trying to clear the path for my teams to be able to be successful with our customers.How do you define shopper marketing?Mount: My definition is pretty simple. It’s about having an emotional connection with the shopper and getting them to make the purchase. I’m not a big believer in doing promotional point-of-sale just for point-of-sale’s sake. I think the biggest opportunity we have in shopper marketing is creating compelling initiatives that change shopper behavior.There are certain core initiatives that we invest in that are real game changers such as the vitaminwater/Carrie Underwood program at Kroger. It’s all about an active, balanced, healthy lifestyle, and Carrie exudes the essence of the brand. Our people have done an incredible job working a 360-degree marketing campaign with Evan Anthony’s team that provides exclusive digital content that you can only access when you shop at Kroger, great point-of-sale, and strong price package components.For us, it is all about understanding the core occasions (whether it’s a meal occasion, or a staying fit occasion) and then turning on our OBPPC or “occasions, brands, price, package and customer” plans with each one of our customers.Retailers own their own “retail labs” – their stores – so what do they get from coming to Atlanta and visiting your labs, the SEIC and KO Lab facilities?Mount: For one, they are clearly removed from the day-to-day stresses of their businesses. Coming here gives them an opportunity to talk about issues that may be two or three years down the road, get a glimpse into some of the innovations that we’re working on, and basically “kick the tires” on some new possibilities. And retailers especially love the SEIC because we literally bring shoppers in and watch them and learn from them.Sustainability was a hot topic until the recession came. Almost everyone stopped talking about it except people like Burt’s Bees and, of course, Coca-Cola. How is your recycled/recyclable P-O-P display program coming along?Mount: We’ve done some great work in that area specifically, but it’s still a work-in-progress and there’ll be more to come. Stay tuned on that. In general, though, our intent is to leave a zero footprint in society, and the company is truly committed to this goal.Another initiative that we also take seriously from a shopper marketing perspective is the “plant bottle.” It’s 30% made from plants and it’s a 100% recyclable plastic bottle that can still go through the normal recycling process. These are issues that resonate really well with shoppers.What performance metrics do you consider the most valuable? I assume it’s probably sales, right?Mount: Oh yeah. As I said earlier, our total portfolio here in the U.S. grew 2% this past year, and we’ve had 11 straight quarters of growth. I’ll tell you the other benchmark that’s very important to us: We want to become our customers’ most valued supplier. We strive to do that every day. In the Advantage report on “most valued” in supermarkets last year, we went from No. 5 to No. 4; in convenience retail, we moved to No. 7; and in drug, we moved to No. 2. And within shopper marketing, we were in the top tier across the board. So we’re really pleased with the progress we’ve made.During the recession, the number of men shopping increased significantly. Did you have to change anything to react to that trend?Mount: Mom, of course, is always important. We made a simple but significant shift in terms of making mom “the hero” in a lot of our shopper marketing materials. She’s the hero in buying the products for her kids and husband that lets them enjoy family time together. You’ll see on some of our point-of-sale during the fall football time period, for example, that the kids are out playing fall football and they’re tackling mom. It’s about creating an emotional connection.But at the same time, we are seeing a lot of insights emerge right now where dad is more and more of a shopper. The key, for us, is making sure that we understand his different trip missions – whether it’s a speedy fill-in, a stock-up trip, or if dads are shopping for different occasions than moms are shopping for.One last question: An industry executive recently described you as “a thinking man’s salesman.”Mount: I’ll tell you this – I have a high propensity for action. I’m always telling my team, “Let’s just go sell something.” But it has to be done within the right parameters. We must think through what the brand is trying to do with their core strategies against our billion dollar brands and marry them up with the customer strategy, find that intersection and bring it to life. So yeah – let’s go sell something.

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