Campbell’s Navigates Choppy CPG Waters By Digitalizing Efforts
The consumer goods space is filled with give-and-takes — a game of strategy, relationship-building, and balance. From dedicating time to both physical and digital commerce to building trust and transparency with both consumers and retailers, it’s a landscape filled with unique challenges.
To keep up, CPGs are having to get sophisticated about digitalizing their efforts.
Mike Pierson, SVP and chief customer officer of snacks at the Campbell Soup Company, shared that threading the needle between physical and digital commerce remains a challenge — with areas like retail media akin to navigating rough white-water rapids.
“It has to be seamless,” said Pierson, regarding aligning digital and in-person experiences, at the 2024 Consumer Goods Sales & Marketing Summit during a fireside chat with CPG Guys podcast co-founders Peter Bond and Sri Rajagopalan.
Keeping Digital in Focus
On the operations side at Campbell's, there’s an entire team dedicated to digital commerce and the company has been rethinking how to modernize its category management function.
On the consumer-facing side, the company is focused on keeping digital experiences aligned across the entire customer journey. During Campbell’s pilot launch of Goldfish Crisps, the company gave extra attention to digital assets to create a unique visual experience.
The key, however, was ensuring what consumers saw on their phones was the same thing they experienced in the store. As a result, in the first 90 days of the launch, 40% of its purchasers were net new consumers.
The advancement of data and analytics — and the modernized tech stacks that support them — is allowing Campbell's to get more targeted with its digital activations.
Think sonar: CPGs can drop the bait into the ocean, but through data and personalization tactics, they’re increasing their chances of dropping it in the right place, at the right time.
Navigating Rough Waters
Every consumer has a retailer right in their pocket — instantaneous accessibility to digital shopping and placing orders online for in-store and curbside pickup.
“How are you representing that? How have you internalized that?” asked Rajagopalan.
The landscape is deeply competitive. If CPGs don’t have content readily accessible, either directly from the brand or through the retailer, competing companies will take a customer from them right through the phone, said Bond.
The retail media space provides an added opportunity to deliver that content to consumers where and when they shop. However, it can be intimidating to navigate, said Pierson, comparing it to filling a boat with commercial functions to safely navigate rapids. With the right tools, it might get a little bumpy, but companies can unlock new opportunities to drive personalization and convert more business.
“Content personalization is definitely here today and … it's gonna get even more narrow because the infrastructure today can't handle that level of personalization,” said Pierson. “But as AI continues to build and learns more about our personal interactions, our behaviors, we're gonna start to understand more about ourselves and our consumers.”
At that point, the challenge shifts to being able to harmonize retail media data in a way that is digestible for the average brand manager and salesperson, he added, so they can use insights to build strategy.
Strong Leadership and a Collaborative Mentality
Bond and Rajagopalan emphasized the importance of preparing sales teams for the future through upskilling and digitizing functions. Part of that is mentorship and providing opportunities for growth.
“I think certain leadership can be universal in nature,” said Pierson, who prioritizes lateral leadership, helping peers elevate themselves.
Working cross-functionally is also key to navigating rough waters in a cohesive manner. Pierson recommended that teams align their KPIs across their commercial functions between sales and marketing so everyone is paddling in the same direction.
It’s also a matter of becoming an expert and adopting a mentality of continuous learning.
"Learn it, master it, leave a legacy," he said. In the learning phase, you’re absorbing everything like a sponge. The mastery phase is when you become the go-to person in your field. And the legacy phase is when you leave a role and people have to split your job into two or three because you did it so well, said Pierson.
