Are your research investments helping the bottom line?
Pick up a copy of the WSJ, Fortune or Bloomberg Businessweek and you will see how things are dramatically changing for the research, marketing and advertising departments at some of the largest CPG companies. The new corporate mandate slashes costs by requiring all expenditures to help the bottom line. What does this mean for our industry? It means that research can no longer exist to mitigate risk; research needs to earn its seat at the table by paying for its own dinner.
In light of this new reality, it is incumbent on us to help our clients get the research results they need to prove value, drive more in-store dollars and make budgets work more efficiently. Here’s a sampling of five ways that our patented truVu™ audio and video recording glasses have gone well beyond justifying the expenses of the research.
• We recently helped a global CPG to strategically reduce their on-shelf SKUs by 25% while increasing the frequency of overall product pick-ups. This uptick in product interaction was essential to the increase in purchase activity because simply noting a package on-shelf has little correlation to sales.
• Working on behalf of a leading retailer, we identified how they should rearrange their organic and nonorganic items to give shoppers a full spectrum of available cleaning products which significantly increased sales in both categories.
• A snack food manufacturer asked PTG to help them increase their struggling in-store sales. What we found is the products lacked commonality in their packaging; however, with a strategically placed design element the SKUs blended together to form the equivalent of an on-shelf banner which greatly increased product visibility.
• Since the impact of a well placed and well designed POP display can offer up to a 300% increase in impulse sales, we were contacted by a multinational personal care company to help them to better understand why a recent POP effort wasn’t performing as expected. The video clips that we captured among shoppers quickly showed how the in-store placement of the display was being entirely missed. Once the display was moved to a different location the POP began performing as expected.
• A beauty retailer was struggling to understand why sales in one of their aisles were inexplicably down. Our in-store and exit interview research showed that the aisle in question lacked any compelling merchandise at the end of the aisle which would serve to entice shoppers to walk down the aisle and increase foot traffic. By replacing the end of aisle merchandise the retailer quickly saw sales bounce back.
Stay tuned for my next post where I will share similar bottom line building techniques for the advertising industry.
