Big Picture

The idea of working with a vendor (brand marketer) partner in retail seems a simple one, but in practice is often fraught with complication and pitfalls. This panel session seeks to help outline the best methods and practices to help build winning initiatives with your retail and vendor partners. Session takeaways:

• How to identify brands (vendor) partners to work with.
• Working with the other company – understanding cultural and organizational pitfalls.
• Building a win-win-win initiative with retailers and partners.

A truly shopper-centric organization revolutionizes capabilities across the company – brand, sales, category management, customer marketing, merchandising, agencies and more – around a common shopper vision, framework and insights. Hear how Hershey built and deployed their insights-driven performance model that powers customer collaboration, marketing and retail innovation in ways that connect with shoppers to unlock demand for both the category and Hershey brands. In this session you will:

• Hear how Hershey designed and deployed key company capabilities.
• Learn how shopper marketing creates real impact across the business.
• Understand the power of a unifying vision and framework to drive real organizational change.

Despite current interest in developing an easy-to-navigate path to purchase, reality shows a path that remains littered with obstacles for the shopper that includes multiple but disconnected messages, technology paths to nowhere, and hopes for a final destination that is often unclear for the shopper as well as the retailer. Weidauer will draw on his own retail experience to walk attendees through the requirements needed to effectively integrate media tactics and the message they contain, and ultimately restore the missing element in many of today’s marketing campaigns: relevance. Attendees will learn how to: 

• Develop a fully integrated path to purchase strategy.
• Execute it consistently across all the various media elements.
• Use technology effectively to engage and educate the shopper.

Different messaging touchpoints fill different shopper needs. In this session, attendees will learn how to create an architecture that provides navigational help, inspirational motivation and educational information to connect with the shopper on all levels. Participants will:

• Learn basic principles to help construct their own version of an in-store communication “playbook.”
• Discover how to plan shopper messaging holistically as part of an overarching plan.
• See first-hand examples of how LG Electronics is connecting with shoppers using the “playbook.”

To develop category and brand initiatives that strongly resonate with the shopper, retailer and shopper insights need to be integrated into the brand planning process at the earliest stages and infused throughout the process of bringing an initiative to market. 

This session will provide an overview of how Kimberly-Clark integrates shopper and retailer needs into its brand planning process, including the unique organizational structure that connects the brand and sales teams. Related topics include initiative prioritization, shopper marketing budgeting, and how the shopper fits into the integrated marketing planning process. Audience takeaways:  

• How shopper and customer insights can be integrated throughout the brand planning process.
• How to find the shopper marketing “sweet spot” to ensure integration of brand and retailer priorities.
• The benefits of including the shopper marketing function in both the front and back end of the organization – i.e., both internally and within an agency of record.

The linear path to purchase is long gone. It has become digital, social, multi-sensorial and multi-dimensional – free of space and time. Today, we need to go beyond the shelf to achieve shopper loyalty, empowering our shoppers to shape our brand world. Brands that deliver ideal experiences and invite genuine interactions are the brands shoppers want to keep buying, creating a path that is a continuous infinity loop with the purchase action at its core. Takeaways:

• Thinking beyond the transaction requires “fusion” of disciplines.
• The importance of leveraging the “2nd moment of truth” and understanding the power of the social shopper.
• How can an infinity loop carry ideal experiences that lead to shopper loyalty (global case studies)?

Today, there is a new currency that extends beyond the dollar. It is made possible by digital technology and can be minted by anyone who has a mobile phone. This new currency is behavior.

This session will outline a new kind of transaction at work in our economy – shopper behavior in exchange for digital scrip. This phenomenon will revolutionize the way we market goods and services, because it shifts the labor and budget of marketing directly to the shopper. In this session, marketers will get:

• A framework to understand an important phenomenon.
• A new way to think about driving shopper behavior.
• A preview of the newly released book, The Shopper Economy, plus a free copy for all session attendees.