The State of D2C, Mobility, Analytics in CG

CGT asks Justin Honaman, SVP Digital Solutions at Moxie USA, to unveil his predictions for sales and marketing trends in the consumer goods industry. See what Honaman says about dealing with direct-to-consumer, taking a "mobile first" approach and ramping up analytics, including real-world examples from P&G and Coca-Cola:

Direct-To-Consumer: CPG manufacturers have traditionally marketed to consumers via mass media and in-store activation with retailers. Consumer media consumption has fragmented across channels and mobile has increasingly become the screen of choice. These shifts challenge the way both retailers and CPG companies manage their product portfolios and require a shift in thinking as it relates to consumer engagement. With new consumer data sources now available to CPG companies, they are able to more effectively track consumer behavior and product and promotion performance. In addition, brands are expanding their direct-to-consumer offerings thereby enabling a tighter 1to1 relationship based on consumer data and sales analytics. As P&G demonstrates via their 1, Consumer Place program, direct-to-consumer relationships enable a broader relationship with the CPG manufacturer across brands, products, packages, and geographies while providing new and detailed consumer insights to P&G brand leaders.

Mobility: Retailer and CPG manufacturers are taking a “mobile first” approach to consumer engagement in 2016. In addition to the consumer relationship, mobility also continues to evolve in support of the delivery driver, merchandiser, and retail account manager. From a consumer perspective, the camera and scanning capabilities of smartphones and tablets allows consumers to scan product codes to get detailed product information (e.g. ingredient facts, recipes, sustainability information, etc.), and in 2016, “augmented reality” will become increasingly available in-app to provide life-application demos of consumer products. These capabilities yield data that the CPG manufacturer can use in planning future consumer engagement channel investments. On the operational side of the business. For example, merchandisers have immediate plan-o-gram access via tablet (by store, location, promotion) and account managers have ready-access to promotion and shelf space data for evaluation in store. This type of data enables decisioning at the point of retailer interaction and fuels sales increases while reducing out-of-stocks.

Predictive Analytics: CPG manufacturers have significantly ramped-up their analytics resources to support data-driven initiatives across the enterprise (e.g. Out-of-Stock Reduction, Programmatic Ad Buying, Predictive Ordering, New Product Launch Forecasting, etc.). CPG manufacturers have traditionally used historical performance (note: many are still stuck in “reporting and dashboarding” versus analytics) and retailer experience to make decisions on price, package, promotions, and assortment. As Coca-Cola demonstrates through the integration of Retailer POS, Shipment, Weather, and other outlet-level daily data, they are able to model daily demand by outlet, optimize orders, reduce out-of-stocks, and begin to affect sales and profitability using a data-driven approach.