Un-learning Sampling : Re-learning Sampling.

It is not revolutionary as an idea but it is effective as hell. And like most things around, it has now even got it selves a sexier tag - “tryvertising”. 

Call it what you may, the fact remains that while folks don’t believe in advertisements too much, the consumers and prospects want to (and love to) discover new products, test them in the comfort and privacy of their living room before buying them at the shop on a regular basis. Sampling of your product converts prospects to consumers. 

While it has been proven to be effective, it is also expensive and difficult initiative to effectively implement in the FMCG / CPG space, predominantly due to scale, which leads to serious process in-efficiencies. 

The sampling processes have stayed relatively unchanged for decades – and that is tragic – because if sampling is done well to the modern socially hyperactive consumer – the impact is going to be far higher today then it has ever been. 

Tools like “like” & “share” assist the success and enable the sampled prospect to advocate the product within peer groups with a lot more ease today that just a few years ago. However, leveraging the power of social networks to generate referrals and reviews within the community is a small, though crucial, part of any well-run product sampling initiative. 

However, one needs to guard against falling pray to turning the campaign into a mere “like” campaign on Facebook with little subsequent follow-thru’ and a measurable return for your efforts, that helps drive sales. 

AaramShop has have come up with an effective sampling solution enabled by technology, curated for the FMCG / CPG brands, which uses AaramShop’s strength of being a hybrid model having retailers on the ground who are able to reach out to consumers in their catchment areas. 

“WannaSample” is a move towards using the engagement opportunities on the Web, Mobile, and on-ground activation options to drive effective sampling and trials among the consumers. The unique solution is geared to go beyond and generate product reviews, references and advocacy.

Based on our understanding and research into current sampling programmes & solutions we have identified the areas in which they are deficient, and then looked at how our solution can help mitigate the challenges. 

Talk to us and evaluate the opportunities offered by this unique process; please contact us here.

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The changing profile of Indian retailers & AaramShop.

A typical Indian Neighborhood Grocer

Kamal Desai is the 2^nd generation grocery retailer based out of Andheri West, in Mumbai. He took over day-to-day management and operations of his family-owned grocery store about 9 years ago.

The 9 years of running his store 1^st hand and assisting his father since early childhood enables Kamal to reflect on changing trends in Indian retail and its opportunities and challenges over the last 4 decades with a level of expertise.

The changes have been happening over the years, but the last 7 to 8 years have been the most exciting and challenging. Based on what he saw around, he started off by doing minor modifications to the store layout since he took over – starting with creating self-service isles, better product displays and accessibility, in-store lighting and then going on to air-condition the store.

While the neighborhood that Kamal services has seen a steady population growth and income levels, it has also seen a change in consumers’ tastes – prompting Kamal to move away from commodities to brands. And while Kamal has a strong one on one relationship with a lot of consumers and almost a legendary service level efficiency for loyal consumers – he is facing an increasing challenge with the changing lifestyle of a number of his consumers and of course from the increasing competition from the modern trade outlets.

India Independents' Day on 16th of August.

15th of August is the Independence Day & 16th of August is going to be the Indian Independents’ Day. 

Independents’ Day will fly the flag for local retailers across the country: the businesses and the people behind them, who help make our villages, towns and cities so diverse, colorful and so very special. It’s all about championing diversity and recognizing the skills, efforts & the free spirit behind the shop-front. 

The day will highlight the important role smaller, local, independent retailers play in our local communities they have been serving for generations, the local economy they contribute to, and in the retail sector as a whole. 

The focus of the campaign is multi-fold: 

Encouraging consumers to shop local, to celebrate their favorite independent retailers, to remind themselves of the fantastic shops within their neighborhoods, and to go out there and bring forth that love.

Encouraging independent retailers to create a buzz to increase consumer engagement, footfall and sales. To let everyone know that they are proud of the contribution their small business makes. 

Encouraging suppliers and all those who serve the independent retail sector to spread the word. To support the retailers in delivering experiences, to add to the excitement; remembering that Independent Retailers are often a critical route to market for a wide range of product designers and producers. 

My organization (AaramShop) will support this initiative in multiple ways and would like to welcome supporters of the Independents to come together in various ways to show our appreciation and support. 

To get involved in the initiative as an individual, corporate, government or association; please write to me.

"Clicks to Bricks" integration for FMCG brands' digital campaigns.

The growing importance of digital marketing is not lost on anyone. However, most brand marketers in the FMCG / CPG space find it difficult to justify the high engagement cost per consumer, especially because most current digital assets are restricted to creating awareness. 

There is now an option to change that. AaramShop has digitized the FMCG brands' existing last mile, thus enabling an integration of a “purchase now” prompt option within all digital assets. 

The consumers can now browse through all manner of digital communication, have the additional option to click on a “purchase now” tab, enabling them to order a brand from their preferred neighborhood retailer, who packs up and deliver in a matter of hours. 

Here is a neat example of seamless "Click to Brick" integration by Saffola (Marico Industries) giving its consumers a “purchase now” option on its website and at the same time it helps build a stronger bond with its channel by helping generate direct demand and action specific to the retailer outlets.

All digital assets of the brand like its websites, social media presence on platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc, review sites, blogs etc and and digital marketing campaigns can be now made to perform harder for the marketing dollar spend, and go beyond the just feel good awareness.

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• AaramShop launches AaramTV to help FMCG brands narrowcast their brand messages at the neighborhood grocer.

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• CPG & eCommerce - the new approach.

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• Digital Influencers of Brand Selection.

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The future of shopping.

Came across this wonderful article on HBR which talks about how every 50 years or so, retailing undergoes a kind of disruption. 

A century and a half ago, the growth of big cities and the rise of railroad networks made possible the modern department store. Mass-produced automobiles came along 50 years later, and soon shopping malls lined with specialty retailers were dotting the newly forming suburbs and challenging the city-based department stores.

The 1960s and 1970s saw the spread of discount chains—Walmart, Kmart, and the like—and, soon after, big-box “category killers” such as Circuit City and Home Depot, all of them undermining or transforming the old-style mall. 

 Like most disruptions, digital retail technology got off to a shaky start. A bevy of internet-based retailers in the 1990s—Amazon.com, Pets.com, and pretty much everythingelse.com—embraced what they called online shopping or electronic commerce. These fledgling companies ran wild until a combination of ill-conceived strategies, speculative gambles, and a slowing economy burst the dot-com bubble. The ensuing collapse wiped out half of all e commerce retailers and provoked an abrupt shift from irrational exuberance to economic reality.

Today, however, that economic reality is well established. The research firm Forrester estimates that e-commerce is now approaching $200 billion in revenue in the United States alone and accounts for 9% of total retail sales, up from 5% five years ago. The corresponding figure is about 10% in the United Kingdom, 3% in Asia-Pacific, and 2% in Latin America. Globally, digital retailing is probably headed toward 15% to 20% of total sales, though the proportion will vary significantly by sector. Moreover, much digital retailing is now highly profitable. Amazon’s five-year average return on investment, for example, is 17%, whereas traditional discount and department stores average 6.5%.

What we are seeing today is only the beginning. Soon it will be hard even to define e-commerce, let alone measure it. Is it an e-commerce sale if the customer goes to a store, finds that the product is out of stock, and uses an in-store terminal to have another location ship it to her home? What if the customer is shopping in one store, uses his smartphone to find a lower price at another, and then orders it electronically for in-store pickup? How about gifts that are ordered from a website but exchanged at a local store? Experts estimate that digital information already influences about 50% of store sales, and that number is growing rapidly.

Access the full article here on HBR

How Web Traffic is Driving Brick and Mortar Expansion

People will always want to shop, and that’s not going to change, but the online experience has raised shoppers’ expectations and made them much more discerning, so it behooves all retailers to know their customer that much better.  The Web is providing a much broader, more accurate and real-time picture of exactly who they are and where they live, arming retailers with the information they need to make smarter decisions about physical expansion — the most capital-intensive of investments.

Read more of this insightful article on Forbes here. 

This hybrid retail opportunity creates opportunities not only for retailers but also for the  brands. Data & trends provided by online retailing is a reflection of the offline consumer behavior and is far more accurate and trust-worthy as against data based on surveys and focused groups. 

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Digital Influencers of Brand Selection.

Here is yet another research that supports the need of multi channel marketing initiatives – especially from a digital perspective in the CPG / FMCG space. The fact that consumers have adopted the digital media in their daily life is not lost on anybody; however, it is important to understand that they use it in different ways and with different intentions.

The key for brands, marketers and manufacturers looking to capitalize on digital in the CPG environment, is to identify how each consumer group embraces digital media.

Clearly the 18 - 34 year old consumers are comfortable with digital technology and their use of digital resources has an impact on purchase. What is even more dramatic is the extent to which this group is influenced by product and brand recommendations from bloggers and social networking platforms. In-store digital touch screens and phone applications are also seen to address this group effectively and present immediate, high-impact brand marketing opportunities.

Another plus for marketers is that these digital-savvy consumers are often trendsetters and influencers in their own circles. Word-of-mouth and informal, viral marketing can make a huge impact on those that are fully engaged in digital media.

Download the SymphonyIRI Group Point of View report: Digital Dimension: Consumers Embrace Digital Media with Diverse Approaches from here (PDF)

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CPG & eCommerce - the new approach.

"The CPG of the future will rely on a sales ecosystem that integrates online interaction with in-store marketing. That will require sophisticated digital capabilities throughout the business, across all functions, including marketing, sales, R&D and supply chain. The companies that win will be the ones that aggressively exploit e-commerce models, integrating digital deep into their businesses to do so."

Really enjoyed reading the article titled "We are all eCommerce Companies Now" on the HBR  by Bonin Bough, Vice President of Global Media and Consumer Engagement at Kraft Foods. 

Mr. Bough's article is a validation of the business model created by us at AaramShop to address the traditional challenges faced by FMCG / CPG companies in leveraging the opportunities offered by eCommerce. For too long CPG companies have either tried to emulate the traditional eCommerce models (and failed) or have just kept away from it completely. However, now with the fast changing media consumption habits of the consumers reaching consumers at point-of-purchase is no longer simply a battle for shelf space, but a war to connect meaningfully across a wide range of digital platforms and delivery mechanisms. 

Read the article here to understand the opportunities offered by the hybrid commerce models. 

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Since the great majority of CPG purchasing occurs in-store, how important is digital in the path to purchase?

The title of this post is the question that Joel Rubenson asked Catherine Roe, head of CPG for Google. What stumped me was the sheer volume of "interest / passions" related searches, which just goes to indicate the opportunities for the CPG marketers.

Catherine reports that searches on Google.com related to recipes are up 38% in 2011 over 2010. And it’s a huge number. It’s 7.8 billion recipe-related searches on Google.com.

Just to give you a perspective, there are more searches around food and recipes than there is travel, beauty, and luxury. It is absolutely huge. The iPad or her computer or her phone has replaced her cookbook. So, she’s doing that research ahead of time on Google and then going to either a recipe site or a food site or whatever it might be to get the tips, to get the health information, to get the ingredients to get everything she needs. 

Read the interview in parts here

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The Flight From Conversation.

Sherry Turkle, a psychologist and professor at M.I.T wrote this wonderful article in the NYT where she says that we’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.

We live in a technological universe in which we are always communicating. And yet we have sacrificed conversation for mere connection. 

At home, families sit together, texting and reading e-mail. At work executives text during board meetings. We text (and shop and go on Facebook) during classes and when we’re on dates. My students tell me about an important new skill: it involves maintaining eye contact with someone while you text someone else; it’s hard, but it can be done.

Read more of her insightful article here.

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etail is retail is etail.

Wonderful as ever. The latest edition from trendwatching.com

Mobile and Social Steering Future for CPG.

"We see a merging between social and mobile as two really popular platforms coming together, not only for ecommerce, but also to drive multichannel behavior. It’s just incredibly dynamic, and we’ve really adopted an integrative planning framework that takes into account the consumer journey and how the consumer is using digital channels and platforms. That’s become the driver for how we plan our entire marketing strategy and budget."

It was good to read this interview of Jeff Jarrett, vice president for global digital marketing, as he spoke about the most effective ad formats for consumer packaged goods, and how online CPG sales have required the industry to establish a larger footprint in digital. Read the full interview here where-in he talks on strategies, RoI, impact of mobile & social media and the changing consumer behavior. 

A must read for all FMCG / CPG marketers on how the trends are shaping up.

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The evolution of the "path of purchase".

Conventional wisdom has always been that most brand purchase decisions are made in the store. 

But with the new, digitally empowered consumer entering the store better prepared than ever before, is the new reality that most purchase decisions are made at home or on the way to the store?

This wonderful white paper by The Hub seems to suggest that the truth most likely lies somewhere in between.

The white paper goes on to list how can manufacturers ensure that their brands are included in the consideration set and make the final cut. They must identify shopper needs and behaviors at every phase along the path-to-purchase and deliver relevant experiences that shape purchase decisions, from pre-purchase to point-of-purchase, from consumption experience to post-experience reflection.

The consumer’s media consumption methods have changed and therefore the relevance of methods in which a brand can be relevant to them. The 24x7 access to socially connected devices is the single largest factor to change dynamics of marketing. The white paper reemphasizes what we are trying to create with AaramShop – an integration of the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) with the First Moment of Truth (FMOT) of the brand. Read more about it here.

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Real Paths of Purchase.

The importance of the shoppers' path of purchase is not lost on any brand marketer. If you can get your brand / product in the natural path of purchase of the shopper, more than half the battle is won.

The problem - while everyone understand the importance of the PtoP, establishing an exact path is a very tough exercise. It is made tougher as it would change as per variations in shopper demographic.   

This has often led folks to adopt a more "anecdotal" approach to establishing a path of purchase rather than looking at & relying on empirical data.

AaramShop has been able to accurately map the buying behavior of shoppers and their paths of purchase using the hybrid commerce platform. While what is presented here is an overall P2P of specific category-wide behavior, it is possible to establish this specific to shopper demographics, like age, gender, etc and also to brand specific behavior. 

As illustrated - if you are a brand in the "breakfast cereal category" you are more likely to be bought by buyers of "biscuits & cookies" than by the buyers of "rice, atta, lentils & dals". Make you wonder about brand placement, promos, and lot more.

This intelligence can assist brand marketers to better position / place their products in association to categories, thereby leveraging the consumers natural path of purchase.

You can view the various paths of purchase specific to category in the State of Online Grocery Shopping Report - which you can download from here. 

It is important to clarify that these depict "in-store" path of purchase and not the entire consumers shopping journey. 

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What is getting into the Shopper's basket in India.

AaramShop has just released the 2nd State of Online Grocery Shopping Report, which takes a deep dive into the shopper's behavior online when shopping for FMCG / CPG brands. The unique report is not based on a sample survey but on the authentic buyer data on the hybrid platform - the consumers shop online via the 1900 AaramShops (neighborhood retailers) across India.

The report can be downloaded in full from here, however some of the significant & unique aspects are worth highlighting and one of them relates to what is being shopped. 

While the men have averaged a spend of Rs. 580/- and the women have averaged Rs. 552/- when shopping online what is significant is that 30% of the expenditure of an online shopper in India is restricted to two categories - "Rice, Atta, Lentils & Dals" (16.81%) and on "Edible Oils" (13.70%)

Download the full report from here. 

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Digital Marketing Trends | Social Ecommerce + Conversion + Mobile

Where tomorrow‘s customers will place their trust.

One thing is clear: mass marketing has had its day. For decades people have consumed what they learned about through the constant barrage of advertising – and what was available in the shops. Retailers stripped their shelves of everything that only sold occasionally, in order to free up valuable shelf space for the real top sellers.

That is all in the past. In the new online economy of the “long tail”, providers increasingly earn their money with niche products. Thanks to limited costs for storage and for the “showroom”, it is well worth their while to offer the unusual and the quirky as well.

Consumers like niches. They no longer want to be one of the masses; they want to own things that are rare and unusual. Small groups of aficionados grow up – “social networks”, which replace the mainstream as a peer group.

These networks take over the job of communication. Information about “cool” new offers travels round in no time. Providers who want to be noticed in increasingly fragmented markets must therefore make themselves visible in these circles.

The explosion of choice makes heavy demands on consumers. To reduce the flood of information, they go along with a calculated risk: they trust the recommendations and tips of others. They increasingly take decisions for emotional rather than objective, factual reasons.

Read the report here

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The Story of Unstoring.

The enD of The ShoP AS We KnoW iT !

One of the first products to be sold on the Internet was a pizza. That was in 1994 and the provider was an international restaurant chain called Pizza Hut. One year later Jeff Bezos took up the idea of online retailing. He started by selling books online on amazon. com. The sales channel faced a wall of scepticism. Who in the world would order books online when they could buy them in a shop? Fifteen years later the answer is clear: lots of people, and more every day. A comparatively young trio of Apple, Google and Amazon are in the process of forcing 500 years of printing and its distribution channels to adopt new business models. This development is already in full swing in the music industry and has the potential to turn conventional retail upside down. The triumphal advance of the Internet and e-commerce is changing the way in which the world gets its information, exchanges views and ideas, and shops. There is no sign that this momentum is about to change. The launch of user-friendly Internet browsers in the mid-1990s triggered the race for ever cheaper and more powerful terminals; since then, the story of retailing has been an ongoing process of steady revision. Bypassing the shop.

Unstoring denotes a development that short-circuits the classic retailer. It is a future that could render shops superfluous – if they refuse to change. The reality is that digital technologies are increasingly part of the real world. The clear distinction between online and offline, between virtual and real, is blurring as the two universes merge. But what will happen to conventional shops when more people use the (virtual) pixel shopping cart than the conventional (real) wire cart? When sales migrate off the retail floor, it is time to reinvent the retail store.

Download the summary of the report here

Facebook Considers Adding The Hate Button.

Just imagine the impact on your brand's Facebook centered marketing strategy if you have more "hates" than "likes" on your brand's timeline. 

When the original Like button was announced, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold prediction there would be over 1 billion Likes across the web in just the first 24 hours. Sources at Facebook say Mark is estimating 2 billion Hates on the first day. Facebook studies have shown the sad fact that people hate things on the Internet more than they like things. There’s also an internal debate on whether the new button should be called “Hate” or “Dislike.”

Since the tiny Like button makes up such a huge part of Facebook’s revenue, the introduction of the Hate button could raise Facebook’s valuation further ahead of the IPO.

If FB decides to add the button, then personally I think "dislike" has a better ring to it than "hate".

Read more about the possibilities of hate button here

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Saving Abandoned Brand Mobile Apps.

There’s a graveyard of brand apps that were a little more than a flash in the pan in terms of repeat usage from consumers. And the reason for this is simple. The majority of brand apps serve little or no utility at all to users.

The key, unsurprisingly, is making apps that are based more on long-term utility rather than campaign one-offs. The tradeoff is that true brand platforms require a mix of departments while most brand apps originate from marketing departments and are geared to specific campaigns.

“Utility apps have broken the path for the app world,” said Yvonne Caravia, chief experience officer for Mobients, a mobile design and strategy agency. “People who are on the go want to get stuff done quickly, and having a branded app that provides some sort of utility is a good way to get them coming back over and over again.

A study by Localytics found that just one in four mobile apps are never used again after being downloaded. The same study also found that 26 percent of apps aren’t used more than once.

Read more here

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