People to Watch 2018: Ashleigh Borchers

Ashleigh Borchers has never been afraid of a challenge. Pulling from experiences both in the classroom at Grand Valley State as well as her work experience (mostly on the agency side of shopper marketing), she says she learned early on to collaborate and be a team player, navigate hard conversations, deal with conflict and find solutions. She says that is a large part of her day-to-day now, versus true-grit marketing. She’s put it all to good use, having been recognized by Meijer as a best-in-class partner from the vendor community.As customer director, shopper marketing, for the Meijer and drug accounts at Mondelez, Borchers takes the strategies set by the brand teams and creates and executes programs with a lens of how the program will be meaningful for the retailer as well as its shoppers. “Ultimately we need to inspire shoppers to want to buy our products, but we’re thinking of it from a strategic standpoint and then executing it with the activation plan that makes sense,” she says.Borchers started on the agency side at what is now Geometry Global and then IN Marketing. She held account management and partnership marketing posts, then was the brand excellence team lead in shopper marketing at IN Marketing. From idea generating to timelines and managing projects, she says she gained valuable experiences working with the greater team and began to understand how to communicate differently when talking to sales versus brand, as well as key triggers that can help navigate those conversations a bit easier. “A lot of that prepared me for what I do today,” she says.It was a natural progression for her to move over to Mondelez in February 2016. “It fit nicely into my long-term thoughts of being very involved in strategies for brands and how that executes within the retail environment,” she says. The move also helped Borchers realize one of her passion points. “I always knew I liked learning and testing new capabilities and technologies.”Her manager, Steve McGowan, has allowed her to partner with him on various digital tests and has been very open to testing, as has the organization. “If you fail, you learn from it,” she says. “It has allowed me to test different technology within the shopper environment that I might not typically use because we haven’t proven results.”A recent example was an April texting program for Ritz crackers at Meijer. Consumers could text one of a choice of emojis and in return get a recipe sent to them with the emoji that was used. “It was all food-based and all toppings that go on a Ritz cracker,” she says. The simple recipes included food emojis that went across produce, cheese and meats and was brought to life from an in-store perspective on a display and on signage that communicated text instructions for the recipes.Along with the digital piece of the text-in option, there was also a digital landing page, so if a consumer wanted to see all of the recipes, they could click through from the text to that landing page or simply find it on its own. “We had digital banner ads and a digital microsite that consumers could get to separately but that still provided the same recipes,” she says, adding that while she and the team are still vetting through results of the program, it was successful from an engagement standpoint and should show incremental increase compared to the company’s year-over-year figures in its annual program.

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