"Great post, Andy. Like you, I'm a serial optimist (and a small independent agency vet), so I also think that the "small people" can have it all. I also think you've made great points for being able to streamline internal processes, and why senior management needs to play an active role, particularly in pitches. (...) To William's assertion about having "powerhouse creatives in a pitch room", I'm not so sure I agree. I've talked to a bunch of brands lately, many of whom are sick of "celebrity" creatives - brand marketers want results, not inflated egos. Further, when you look at some of the great minds behind campaigns at larger shops, you also realize that these celebrities aren't necessarily generating those big ideas."
Gunther put his finger right on the problem with 'Agency Growth.' "Why senior management needs to play an active role, particularly in pitches."
This is a case where the left hand needs to know what the right hand is doing.
Agency growth is dependent upon two factors: How well the agency thinks it is doing, and how well the clients thinks the agency is doing. If you can keep both happy, then grow all you want. It is when the agency can no longer attain its standards, or those of the client, that the agency has to retrench.
Growth and effectiveness need to be mutual partners. As long as an agency is effective for its clients, no matter how it has figured out how to do it -- it should keep its growth going. But when the agency hits that window where internally the employees are complaining and the clients are not happy -- then it is a time to re-organize internally and also with clients.
Growth has a cap. When you hit it is determined by internal employee considerations and external client effectiveness.
SImple actually. If your employees are angry, you have a problem. If your clients are angry, you have a problem.
Either clone the guys that got you to the pinnacle by hiring new creative and business geniuses - or skinny down the business to contend with the business at hand.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Dialogue between Famed Advertising Creative Director Harry Webber and Daryl Orris
"adver-marketing." Great idea. Needs a better name. I know some guys in advertising that could hook that up for you. http://MadisonAveNew.com –HARRY WEBBER, LOS ANGELES, CA
(DIalogue reads bottom to top.)
"Bold talk from someone who sees advertising as a sunset industry." Think of me as an angry fist holding a small megaphone standing in the middle of Madison Avenue at 4am trying to wake the dead. The lights are on, but nobody's home.
"I had two post-WWII mentors both journalism graduates (Columbia and Minnesota) who held your beliefs, but alas they too are dead." I am not post-WWII, I am Post-Advertising. As for the dead part, that's still up for debate.
"Advertising is a paid, mass mediated attempt to persuade." "Attempt" is the key word here. How can you attempt to persuade anyone to do anything if they have you on "ignore?" And why should anyone pay for a service that has lost the power to engage its audience?
"But the bottom line is none the less achieving quantifiable results for brand managers that hire you." No one has yet been able to tie advertising to sales. Now they can't even tie it to awareness. And forget about tying it to persuasion. –HARRY WEBBER, LOS ANGELES, CA
Dear Harry, Bold talk from someone who sees advertising as a sunset industry.
I agree with Bernbach, even though he is long dead. Advertising is persuasion and it is an art, as is brand management, thus the MBA. I had two post-WWII mentors both journalism graduates (Columbia and Minnesota) who held your beliefs, but alas they too are dead. Advertising is a paid, mass mediated attempt to persuade. And advertising as it is now used is synonymous with all sorts of promotional methods - not exclusively print and broadcast media.
I too believe that more clients are dependent upon agencies for the art of their ideas then the empirical evidence of their business theories -- however I was stating that the two (agency and client) need to become more cooperative and avoid duplication and overlapping to work in better harmony - and not against one another. But the bottom line is none the less achieving quantifiable results for brand managers that hire you. I particularly enjoy your naysayer view of advertising and predictions of doom for what you call a sunset industry. Harry I am one of your fans. However, advertising in its new context is bigger today then it has ever been. And it is not going away, even though you may try to wish it away. Advertising works and is much more relevant to people's lives today then the TVC-Print era of yesterday. That era is passing away. And my brand of metrics is producing results for clients using creativity, using Integrated Brand Promotion and teaming with clients to be in sync with them to create a synergy not otherwise possible.
I recently returned from China where I had consulted businesses and organizations on advertising and promotion. In 1949 advertising was banned as a Western evil. Since 1992 joint ventures controlled by the government have dominated advertising in China. And the joint ventures worked well enough to convince the Chinese officials that advertising works and will assist China in achieving its objectives to make it a world economic power. Not only do I not think advertising is not dead, but it is in fact in a metamorphosis now transitioning to a new phase of adver-marketing. Adver-marketing will take advantage of interactive media to persuade consumers to buy and build brand preferences. This is witnessed by adding a new billion people audience an d consumer base. Advertising is the number one expense of all businesses' marketing. As much as they (business) would like it to disappear, advertising is in fact becoming more important in brand promotion, creation, and marketing.
So while a fan, I couldn't disagree with you more. Voodoo advertising methods don't cut it in 2008, nor will they in the future. Advertising is a growth industry and Adver-marketing will require quantitative evidence that the promotional effort is effective. Quantifiable and qualitative results have become an inherent part of the new advertising, that I call adver-marketing. –daryl orris, Minnetonka, MN
Tom,
I feel kind of bad about not adding something deeper, but I would bet a lot of money that you could run this exact same post every 12-months and receive almost identical responses.
The creative/producer model isn't going to happen, it's already happened. The keiretsu/TAAN/Worldwide Partners Model isn't developing, it's been going on for 60+ years. And as for the ubersuit, they are going to look and sound a whole lot like the uber account folk of advertising lore.
So the good news, everything you have predicted has already happened. The bad news: I'm not 100% sure our industry realizes it. –Paul Davidson, Denver, CO
Mr. Orris,
Your dependence on emperical evidence is consistant with the so-called common wisdom that put both the advertising and media industries in the current doldrums both find themselves in. The Nielsens were once considered empirical evidence, as were any other research findings that were/are dependent upon projected results.
A 1,500 sample does not speak for a million frames of mind.
William Bernbach once said, "Advertising is fundamentally persuasion, and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art." Mr. Bernbach, would applaud Mr. Martin's Chrystal Ball gazing before he would support your dismissive request for evidence.
What more evidence do you require than sliding audiences and diminishing advertising budgets. Your brand of metric worship has become a dog that won't hunt. 1,775 words don't make your point of view any more relevant.
_I certainly believe that more clients are dependent upon agencies for the art of their ideas then the empirical evidence of their business theories. I also believe that Mr. Bernbach's Art has been responsible for more cash register rings than Mr. Yankelovich's metrics.
Most certainly you are entitled to your point of view about Mr. Martin's writing. But it is after all just an opinion and therefor subjective. Which is hardly conclusive, lacking any emperical data to support it. http://MadisonAveNew.com –HARRY WEBBER, LOS ANGELES, CA
Hi Daryl...allow me to clarify; you are correct - WOM and influence communications in general have been around forever. The shift I refer to is one in which technology has fostered a new level of dynamic participation amongst consumers and their collaborations with other content/product creators. Thanks for calling this out!
As for your comments to Tom...I actually think you guys are on a similar page, just perhaps caught up more in a semantic debate. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the particulars of the model he discusses, he makes an astute observation about the role agencies play and will play in the future. –Gunther Sonnenfeld, Los Angeles, CA
Dear Tom, Yes I disagree with you, but no, I do not believe you are unfit to write these posts. In fact I admire your courage.
But my meaning was clear if re-read my comments. Perhaps with that input your articles will gain a little something. The ideas you present are great but your focus on your own emotions devoid of any empirical evidence — operating solely on the primacy of your "feelings" — rather than on analysis supported by some type of evidence, is a problem easily cured. Do a little research prior to writing. Then I'll be critical of your sources instead of being critical of you. It is your personalized writing style that gets my ire more than your theories. Some call it navel gazing. –daryl orris, Minnetonka, MN
So Daryl,
If I understand your 1,775 word treatise correctly... you disagree with me and think me unfit to write these posts.
Oh if only the comment field had the same 700 word limit my posts have...
www.tommartin.typepad.com –TOM MARTIN, NEW ORLEANS, LA
P.S. Dear Gunther, Thanks for the new reading list. As for (...) "influence communications", agencies will likely become (whether they like it or not) collaborators with consumer technograhic groups that are not only key brand stakeholders, but product creators. In fact, we're already seeing this shift in a major way." (...) It isn't new. Astute marketers have been practicing this for decades. General Mills for example, has collaborated with consumers from the time of Betty Crocker. Its consumer comments have fueled new products, categories and markets. Agencies have traditionally given substance to their 'visions,' and have developed promotions to achieve stakeholder input through such devices as the Pillsbury Bake-off. Other marketers are becoming better listeners -- as should agencies. –daryl orris, Minnetonka, MN
Dear Tom, Your statement: (...)"What will the world of advertising look like for small agencies in five years? More important, what will your agency look like in five years? My crystal ball says many of us are in for a rude awakening."(...) Is indicative of someone primarily focused on their own emotions devoid of any empirical evidence — operating solely on the primacy of their "feelings" — rather than on analysis supported by some type of evidence. You are clearly uncertain as to what constitutes reliable evidence, thus tend to use the most easily found sources uncritically -- by using the Keiretsu Model that has never appeared outside Japan, it appears you have applied it to the larger agency models but they lack the 'bank factor' to finance and bail-out members along with the cooperative nature of Keiretsu involving established and unrelated businesses. Characterizing large agency networks as Chinese Triads might be more appropriate, but still a stretch. But using an esoteric foreign organization to predict agencies of the future is goofy. It is a bizarre analogy to explain why large agencies acquire smaller ones and why larger businesses use them. The obvious reason is to buy the agency's clients and talent in a given market, and for large businesses, it is to take advantage of economies created by such large advertising organization.
And it appears you are convinced that no opinion is worth more than another after your recent discoveries: All views are equal after yours. Looking into your crystal ball is a good indicator that you are not really embarrassed at your lack of knowledge and skills for addressing key issues in advertising but instead offer hyperbole and opinion to feed on the fears of clueless individuals caught in the current flux in media advertising. Industry analysts collectively see the advertising industry in a period of change caused by the aftereffects of 9/11, consumer media use, and media fragmentation, which is when this downturn began. At that time advertisers cut their media advertising while increasing their trade promotions and while many mediums have rebounded clearly there is a shift in spending. This is well documented by Ad Age statistics. This coincides with a dramatic industry shift from manufacture to retailer dominance where more and more marketing dollars go to retailer promotions. Your "C" and "P" agency models exist now and are functioning just fine, as are other models such as the large holding networks to small creative boutiques. The models that work are the ones that answer their client's needs.
Scholars of advertising see a cooperative merger of the Marketing Director/or Senior executive and the Advertising Agency where they work cooperatively utilizing the knowledge and skills of each discipline rather than many of the overlapping and duplication of efforts seen now. Corporate CMOs understand that trade promotion is not enough to strategically differentiate their brand(s) within their operating category and unique local markets. One size does not fit all and they increasingly rely on agencies with local market or niche marketing expertise. For example, you could tell P&G of your local market knowledge and experience in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. Assist it in marketing to the market you serve. Businesses have reams of historic data documenting media use and its effectiveness for their brands broken down by markets. Seldom does the Marketing Director share this information with its agency. It is their 'Holy Grail' and held as a secret. It is strategic and it is something they wouldn't want in their competitor's hands. More cooperative arrangements with marketer and agency and understanding of each will improve the effectiveness of both.
Clearly media is in a transition period and New Media is muddying-up the waters because no one has yet found a workable compensation model that equates to measurable results for marketers and agencies – especially advertising agencies. The well-documented fragmentation of media has put all mediums in a state of change. This transition period will include New Media as an important part for the promotional mix and marketing of brands. A good example of this was last year's Super Bowl. Here agencies used a mix of traditional TVC, promotions, with New Media to get more bang for the buck. In the near future New Media will be central to all brand promotion. In the very near future communication experts say that New Media will become the central marketing and promotion medium because of continued technological advances, consumer use growth and platform mergers/convergence. AT&T and several other companies have began marketing a single platform product for telecommunications, cable/broadcast entertainment and broadband/high speed Internet connection – it is being promoted as a consumer convenience that costs less – when convergence occurs, each will share content. Networks are streaming shows on-line and can show actual website hits as opposed to AC Nielsen voodoo metrics. As the transition between platforms becomes more seamless with technological advances, multimedia communications will become the standard for communications. With New Media's emergence as a primary lead promotional vehicle and with convergence, it is important that new media is integrated into the marketing/promotional mix of all brands now. Convergence will deliver once again, that critical mass that TV once did. Traditional Media fragmentation is making it more difficult to reach mass target audiences; and its costs are increasing as its effectiveness is decreasing. Traditional Media is feverously working to develop an Internet presence and for ways to interconnect the two for added revenues. Businesses have responded with more niche market products and services that can be reached and affected by niche media. Thus, media is in a transition period. Traditional advertising agencies have lost media revenues from the shift of media advertising to trade promotions and to advertisers who have switched their media buys to specialized Media Agencies who offer better planning, results and economy because of their huge buying capabilities. And then durables, packaged goods manufacturers, retailers and service businesses have taken control of their own websites with internal IT jealously guarding their domain to the chagrin of advertising agencies. All of these organizations need creative content and promotional methods to attract an audience - and that is the perfect entrée for agencies.
So not using a 'crystal ball' but instead looking at the realities around us, I'd say that the best strategy for any agency is to focus on their creative product and client responsiveness as well as their local market expertise and touting that to marketers and advertisers. Perhaps align themselves with a Media Agency that offers a commission, and utilize their expert planners and big buy economies for measurable results for medium and large clients. Retailers are threatening every aspect of consumer product and service brands by offering their own retailer generic brands. Marketers and advertising agencies need to work in concert to fend off this assault by practicing strategic branding to differentiate their brands within their category and market(s). With both understanding the realities of media in transition, and emerging New Media opportunities, together they need to develop metrics that assess both media and creative strategy effectiveness and work together to deliver quantifiable results.
The agency that is the most responsive to the needs of the businesses it serves, and can develop strategic creative that differentiates the brand and delivers sales, volume and profits to quantify it, will win in the future. Just as they are winning now. Those looking in crystal balls and not at the realities around them are sure to lose. Advertising has always been a custom-built approach for every client and market. Even though it may appear that everyone is doing the same thing, the reality is that winners in the marketing wars are quickly copied. So marketers have to be one step ahead of the competition. The same is true of agencies. Today, with the Internet and agencies needing to divulge everything about themselves and their innermost secret strategies, it isn't too difficult to see what the competition is up to. Prior to the Internet, agencies would get proposals from clients to help them understand what is out there. When I represented a client as agency of record, I told them that they should refer all promotional inquiries to me, and I would assess them and make monthly reports back to my clients if anything looked viable – thus saving my client's time. It worked too. They saved time and I learned what my competition was pitching. It is fairly easy to do the same now by surfing the web.
So your ideas on Role, Staffing, Compensation, seem pretty pedestrian to me. Role: the traditional generalist agency is coming to an end – if the traditional generalist agency has any size, it will do what it has always done: wait until a smaller agency develops it so they can suck it up like a big vacuum cleaner, and so on it goes to the largest agencies who have been known to share clients. They are going no where, it is business as usual for them – they just hire the expertise needed to keep relevant. Staffing: all agencies need what you describe now, not in the future. One-size-fits-all doesn't work in a custom design business. Each strategy is tailored for that unique client, as is the strategy. Compensation: Traditional fees and commissions will always be the rule. Compensation on a fee or percentage of profit basis is the reality of sophisticated marketing agencies that specialize in an particular industry and in branding within that industry. These Marketing Agencies bring new business segment expertise to business on a flat fee or percentage basis now. But I have not heard of an advertising agency that has taken a percentage of its client's revenues. Many wished they could.
So again, I think you have fairly described the current state of affairs in advertising offering little new insights or information. Theory and conjecture not backed up with some sort of empirical evidence, facts, or reference is little more than lip service and wishful thinking. Your Advertising 5.0 is as generic and as general as it can get. Good advice for an agency trying to remain relevant is to go to its clients and ask them where they'd like to be in five years and then design plans to meet their goals and objectives. Tell them how you can assist them in attaining these thresholds using your Role, Staffing, Compensation, as a start point to develop a strategic plan. If it is breakthrough, perhaps then you could get a piece of their pie. My belief was and is that this isn't about us, it is all about them – the client. –daryl orris, Minnetonka, MN
_Dear Tom,
I disagree with everything you have said.
First, Time. There was a time when agencies set the agenda and schedules. As brand managers became better at statistical analysis and method management techniques they began to track and quantify their advertising results. They determined which media was effective, which creative strategy distinguished their brand(s) and moved product and services. Their quantitative management gave them the right to call all of the shots and take the power that agencies once had in post-war America. This brand history kept by them gives them the right to call the shots. So why fight them, why not join them?
When an agency works in concert or unison with Brand Directors and Managers timing can be progressive where several creative strategies are tested in trial or test markets before the effort is implemented on a larger and more costly basis. When agency and advertiser work in unison, the timeline can be from a quarter to an ongoing five-year plan where each year the creative strategy is assessed, adjusted and evaluated for the next year. Doing this, agencies have all the time in the world to come up with "the big idea," as you put it.
In the fifties ad agencies developed unique selling propositions using features and benefits to distinguish the product. Where selling and telling dominated advertising.
Remember Ogilvy's Hathaway Man with his black eye patch? This is the "Image Era" where agencies used features and benefits, and unique selling propositions to differentiate the product in its category and to make the product memorable.
Then in the seventies came the "Positioning Era" fostered by Al Ries and Jack Trout where finding a place in the consumer's mind that bring relationship mindsets to the Brand.
In the mid-seventies, Brands became popular, replacing widgets in U.S. business schools. This extended into the eighties and became known as the "Branding Era" that was pushed by Brand Managers on agencies who would have them leverage their brand in the category and in time reducing the perceived differences between brands. Agencies were still stuck on "Positioning" trying to merge the two.
The "Branding Era" continued into the nineties and into the 21st century where somehow positioning and branding merged into a new hybrid form. In 2008 it is the "Mindset Era," where branding is not about telling and selling but about making positive associations with the brand and strategically positioning the brand in its category to create a consumer-brand relationship where the brand is a lifestyle statement. It is just as Ries and Trout envisioned it only now with a distinct brand purpose tied to brand management. For example, take automobiles: what are the mindset relationships between a Honda Hybrid and a Mercedes Benz C Class? Each brand targets the same consumer and each is positioned differently in its respective category making positive brand associations with the target consumer's lifestyle. When it is time to purchase which way will the target consumer go – to the brand that made the positive Mindset Associations and had developed two-way communication with the consumer instead of one-way telling and selling. How do we get in the consumer's mindset first, or get them to switch? Being first is everything. Being second, is well, second best.
Time is a tool that when used to in conjunction with the brand manager's goals and objectives and the creative strategy of the agency can be an ongoing testing and modification of the creative strategy to affect sales, volume and profits. Advertising agencies like brand manager want the same thing, so find the time both need and dovetail strategic planning and creative strategy activities – by making them coordinated, controlled and timed. This way both have the time they need.
Technology. Form outweighs function? Do you mean poor message strategy or creative strategy can't be glossed over with production technology? To me, technology refers not to production but to mass communications. New Media is changing all media placing it in a state of transition while the Internet becomes more and more important to marketers. I was impressed by the convergence of media witnessed by broadcast to Internet assessments and the results that the more sophisticated marketers and advertisers got using a multi-media approach to the spectacle. One could only use terms such as "spectacular, spectacular, in evaluating the successes of the broadcast to Internet success stories. Technology in the form of production provided plenty of dazzling effects that kept viewer attention while luring them to the Internet. Technology rules.
Then your take on "Favor Impact over Impressions," statement. Where you said imagine today asking a client to spend over a million and then telling them is would only run once ... seems to me that was exactly what every agency did asked of advertisers. Hopefully they get more mileage out of the spots then the one time broadcast event provides, that with the Internet they'll on into infinity. I really scratched my head on this one. Not only could I imagine it, it is what every agency that produced spots did. To me it was a testimonial that advertising really does work.
Then "Leadership." Sounds like you're the one whining. Advertising is a growing industry. When looked at as a whole, it is an international growth industry. And all indicators suggest that it will continue to grow. It is mass communications primarily media that is in transition and in the midst of change that is changing how advertising agencies promote brands. But your comment about Agencies framing their work in terms business and not creative terms is surely the kiss of death. Advertising Agencies are about creativity. It is that creative product that they produce that catapults businesses to higher ground. And it is there ability to continually find this new ground through the methods and techniques previously stated that separates good agencies from bad. Ads are big ideas, and the concept of 'just an ad' is abhorrent to all of the creative advertising people I know. I don't know if I'd care to trust your 'informed' opinion unless you have a track record of success in my industry. This harkens back to what I said earlier about working in unison with Advertisers. Unless the client is new to the business they are in, they have the information you need – forming cohesive relationship with marketing and sales and finding the data they have amassed and harvesting it to yield new strategies is far better evidence than me-too recommendations with a creative spin.
Finally, Training. The best form of organization from a training standpoint is what the U.S. Army uses. When one leader takes one in the head, the next dummy jumps in to take their place. It is a pure form of communism where everyone has a place and everyone is being trained to assume the duty of the next in the chain of command. I'd hate to work at your agency where 'pushing' is the preferred method of encouraging creativity. Dr. Demmings book on management taught the Japanese in what is now called the Japanese miracle. Simply put it promoted working in groups where everyone makes contributions. Thus feeling an integral part of the group thus becoming more productive. Advertising agencies should be cohesive groups of "Individuals" who each bring ideas and solutions to the group, the creative teams or account services and creative production should be better than the suits and sandals sets. It is a known fact that today everyone at an advertising agency has to be "creative," looking for the next big idea and creative strategy to change our clients business or keep it where they want it – no matter where it comes from.
I believe that agencies should develop better relationships with higher education institutions that teach advertising – by providing two-way communication with them agencies can provide input as to the candidates that they want and in the process help educators and students better understand the realities of the advertising business. How many dreamy-eyed newcomers have entered the twilight zone when faced with agencies realities – this could be eliminated by better intern programs and with more two-way relationships between higher education and advertising agencies. –daryl orris, Minnetonka, MN
(DIalogue reads bottom to top.)
"Bold talk from someone who sees advertising as a sunset industry." Think of me as an angry fist holding a small megaphone standing in the middle of Madison Avenue at 4am trying to wake the dead. The lights are on, but nobody's home.
"I had two post-WWII mentors both journalism graduates (Columbia and Minnesota) who held your beliefs, but alas they too are dead." I am not post-WWII, I am Post-Advertising. As for the dead part, that's still up for debate.
"Advertising is a paid, mass mediated attempt to persuade." "Attempt" is the key word here. How can you attempt to persuade anyone to do anything if they have you on "ignore?" And why should anyone pay for a service that has lost the power to engage its audience?
"But the bottom line is none the less achieving quantifiable results for brand managers that hire you." No one has yet been able to tie advertising to sales. Now they can't even tie it to awareness. And forget about tying it to persuasion. –HARRY WEBBER, LOS ANGELES, CA
Dear Harry, Bold talk from someone who sees advertising as a sunset industry.
I agree with Bernbach, even though he is long dead. Advertising is persuasion and it is an art, as is brand management, thus the MBA. I had two post-WWII mentors both journalism graduates (Columbia and Minnesota) who held your beliefs, but alas they too are dead. Advertising is a paid, mass mediated attempt to persuade. And advertising as it is now used is synonymous with all sorts of promotional methods - not exclusively print and broadcast media.
I too believe that more clients are dependent upon agencies for the art of their ideas then the empirical evidence of their business theories -- however I was stating that the two (agency and client) need to become more cooperative and avoid duplication and overlapping to work in better harmony - and not against one another. But the bottom line is none the less achieving quantifiable results for brand managers that hire you. I particularly enjoy your naysayer view of advertising and predictions of doom for what you call a sunset industry. Harry I am one of your fans. However, advertising in its new context is bigger today then it has ever been. And it is not going away, even though you may try to wish it away. Advertising works and is much more relevant to people's lives today then the TVC-Print era of yesterday. That era is passing away. And my brand of metrics is producing results for clients using creativity, using Integrated Brand Promotion and teaming with clients to be in sync with them to create a synergy not otherwise possible.
I recently returned from China where I had consulted businesses and organizations on advertising and promotion. In 1949 advertising was banned as a Western evil. Since 1992 joint ventures controlled by the government have dominated advertising in China. And the joint ventures worked well enough to convince the Chinese officials that advertising works and will assist China in achieving its objectives to make it a world economic power. Not only do I not think advertising is not dead, but it is in fact in a metamorphosis now transitioning to a new phase of adver-marketing. Adver-marketing will take advantage of interactive media to persuade consumers to buy and build brand preferences. This is witnessed by adding a new billion people audience an d consumer base. Advertising is the number one expense of all businesses' marketing. As much as they (business) would like it to disappear, advertising is in fact becoming more important in brand promotion, creation, and marketing.
So while a fan, I couldn't disagree with you more. Voodoo advertising methods don't cut it in 2008, nor will they in the future. Advertising is a growth industry and Adver-marketing will require quantitative evidence that the promotional effort is effective. Quantifiable and qualitative results have become an inherent part of the new advertising, that I call adver-marketing. –daryl orris, Minnetonka, MN
Tom,
I feel kind of bad about not adding something deeper, but I would bet a lot of money that you could run this exact same post every 12-months and receive almost identical responses.
The creative/producer model isn't going to happen, it's already happened. The keiretsu/TAAN/Worldwide Partners Model isn't developing, it's been going on for 60+ years. And as for the ubersuit, they are going to look and sound a whole lot like the uber account folk of advertising lore.
So the good news, everything you have predicted has already happened. The bad news: I'm not 100% sure our industry realizes it. –Paul Davidson, Denver, CO
Mr. Orris,
Your dependence on emperical evidence is consistant with the so-called common wisdom that put both the advertising and media industries in the current doldrums both find themselves in. The Nielsens were once considered empirical evidence, as were any other research findings that were/are dependent upon projected results.
A 1,500 sample does not speak for a million frames of mind.
William Bernbach once said, "Advertising is fundamentally persuasion, and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art." Mr. Bernbach, would applaud Mr. Martin's Chrystal Ball gazing before he would support your dismissive request for evidence.
What more evidence do you require than sliding audiences and diminishing advertising budgets. Your brand of metric worship has become a dog that won't hunt. 1,775 words don't make your point of view any more relevant.
_I certainly believe that more clients are dependent upon agencies for the art of their ideas then the empirical evidence of their business theories. I also believe that Mr. Bernbach's Art has been responsible for more cash register rings than Mr. Yankelovich's metrics.
Most certainly you are entitled to your point of view about Mr. Martin's writing. But it is after all just an opinion and therefor subjective. Which is hardly conclusive, lacking any emperical data to support it. http://MadisonAveNew.com –HARRY WEBBER, LOS ANGELES, CA
Hi Daryl...allow me to clarify; you are correct - WOM and influence communications in general have been around forever. The shift I refer to is one in which technology has fostered a new level of dynamic participation amongst consumers and their collaborations with other content/product creators. Thanks for calling this out!
As for your comments to Tom...I actually think you guys are on a similar page, just perhaps caught up more in a semantic debate. Regardless of whether or not you agree with the particulars of the model he discusses, he makes an astute observation about the role agencies play and will play in the future. –Gunther Sonnenfeld, Los Angeles, CA
Dear Tom, Yes I disagree with you, but no, I do not believe you are unfit to write these posts. In fact I admire your courage.
But my meaning was clear if re-read my comments. Perhaps with that input your articles will gain a little something. The ideas you present are great but your focus on your own emotions devoid of any empirical evidence — operating solely on the primacy of your "feelings" — rather than on analysis supported by some type of evidence, is a problem easily cured. Do a little research prior to writing. Then I'll be critical of your sources instead of being critical of you. It is your personalized writing style that gets my ire more than your theories. Some call it navel gazing. –daryl orris, Minnetonka, MN
So Daryl,
If I understand your 1,775 word treatise correctly... you disagree with me and think me unfit to write these posts.
Oh if only the comment field had the same 700 word limit my posts have...
www.tommartin.typepad.com –TOM MARTIN, NEW ORLEANS, LA
P.S. Dear Gunther, Thanks for the new reading list. As for (...) "influence communications", agencies will likely become (whether they like it or not) collaborators with consumer technograhic groups that are not only key brand stakeholders, but product creators. In fact, we're already seeing this shift in a major way." (...) It isn't new. Astute marketers have been practicing this for decades. General Mills for example, has collaborated with consumers from the time of Betty Crocker. Its consumer comments have fueled new products, categories and markets. Agencies have traditionally given substance to their 'visions,' and have developed promotions to achieve stakeholder input through such devices as the Pillsbury Bake-off. Other marketers are becoming better listeners -- as should agencies. –daryl orris, Minnetonka, MN
Dear Tom, Your statement: (...)"What will the world of advertising look like for small agencies in five years? More important, what will your agency look like in five years? My crystal ball says many of us are in for a rude awakening."(...) Is indicative of someone primarily focused on their own emotions devoid of any empirical evidence — operating solely on the primacy of their "feelings" — rather than on analysis supported by some type of evidence. You are clearly uncertain as to what constitutes reliable evidence, thus tend to use the most easily found sources uncritically -- by using the Keiretsu Model that has never appeared outside Japan, it appears you have applied it to the larger agency models but they lack the 'bank factor' to finance and bail-out members along with the cooperative nature of Keiretsu involving established and unrelated businesses. Characterizing large agency networks as Chinese Triads might be more appropriate, but still a stretch. But using an esoteric foreign organization to predict agencies of the future is goofy. It is a bizarre analogy to explain why large agencies acquire smaller ones and why larger businesses use them. The obvious reason is to buy the agency's clients and talent in a given market, and for large businesses, it is to take advantage of economies created by such large advertising organization.
And it appears you are convinced that no opinion is worth more than another after your recent discoveries: All views are equal after yours. Looking into your crystal ball is a good indicator that you are not really embarrassed at your lack of knowledge and skills for addressing key issues in advertising but instead offer hyperbole and opinion to feed on the fears of clueless individuals caught in the current flux in media advertising. Industry analysts collectively see the advertising industry in a period of change caused by the aftereffects of 9/11, consumer media use, and media fragmentation, which is when this downturn began. At that time advertisers cut their media advertising while increasing their trade promotions and while many mediums have rebounded clearly there is a shift in spending. This is well documented by Ad Age statistics. This coincides with a dramatic industry shift from manufacture to retailer dominance where more and more marketing dollars go to retailer promotions. Your "C" and "P" agency models exist now and are functioning just fine, as are other models such as the large holding networks to small creative boutiques. The models that work are the ones that answer their client's needs.
Scholars of advertising see a cooperative merger of the Marketing Director/or Senior executive and the Advertising Agency where they work cooperatively utilizing the knowledge and skills of each discipline rather than many of the overlapping and duplication of efforts seen now. Corporate CMOs understand that trade promotion is not enough to strategically differentiate their brand(s) within their operating category and unique local markets. One size does not fit all and they increasingly rely on agencies with local market or niche marketing expertise. For example, you could tell P&G of your local market knowledge and experience in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. Assist it in marketing to the market you serve. Businesses have reams of historic data documenting media use and its effectiveness for their brands broken down by markets. Seldom does the Marketing Director share this information with its agency. It is their 'Holy Grail' and held as a secret. It is strategic and it is something they wouldn't want in their competitor's hands. More cooperative arrangements with marketer and agency and understanding of each will improve the effectiveness of both.
Clearly media is in a transition period and New Media is muddying-up the waters because no one has yet found a workable compensation model that equates to measurable results for marketers and agencies – especially advertising agencies. The well-documented fragmentation of media has put all mediums in a state of change. This transition period will include New Media as an important part for the promotional mix and marketing of brands. A good example of this was last year's Super Bowl. Here agencies used a mix of traditional TVC, promotions, with New Media to get more bang for the buck. In the near future New Media will be central to all brand promotion. In the very near future communication experts say that New Media will become the central marketing and promotion medium because of continued technological advances, consumer use growth and platform mergers/convergence. AT&T and several other companies have began marketing a single platform product for telecommunications, cable/broadcast entertainment and broadband/high speed Internet connection – it is being promoted as a consumer convenience that costs less – when convergence occurs, each will share content. Networks are streaming shows on-line and can show actual website hits as opposed to AC Nielsen voodoo metrics. As the transition between platforms becomes more seamless with technological advances, multimedia communications will become the standard for communications. With New Media's emergence as a primary lead promotional vehicle and with convergence, it is important that new media is integrated into the marketing/promotional mix of all brands now. Convergence will deliver once again, that critical mass that TV once did. Traditional Media fragmentation is making it more difficult to reach mass target audiences; and its costs are increasing as its effectiveness is decreasing. Traditional Media is feverously working to develop an Internet presence and for ways to interconnect the two for added revenues. Businesses have responded with more niche market products and services that can be reached and affected by niche media. Thus, media is in a transition period. Traditional advertising agencies have lost media revenues from the shift of media advertising to trade promotions and to advertisers who have switched their media buys to specialized Media Agencies who offer better planning, results and economy because of their huge buying capabilities. And then durables, packaged goods manufacturers, retailers and service businesses have taken control of their own websites with internal IT jealously guarding their domain to the chagrin of advertising agencies. All of these organizations need creative content and promotional methods to attract an audience - and that is the perfect entrée for agencies.
So not using a 'crystal ball' but instead looking at the realities around us, I'd say that the best strategy for any agency is to focus on their creative product and client responsiveness as well as their local market expertise and touting that to marketers and advertisers. Perhaps align themselves with a Media Agency that offers a commission, and utilize their expert planners and big buy economies for measurable results for medium and large clients. Retailers are threatening every aspect of consumer product and service brands by offering their own retailer generic brands. Marketers and advertising agencies need to work in concert to fend off this assault by practicing strategic branding to differentiate their brands within their category and market(s). With both understanding the realities of media in transition, and emerging New Media opportunities, together they need to develop metrics that assess both media and creative strategy effectiveness and work together to deliver quantifiable results.
The agency that is the most responsive to the needs of the businesses it serves, and can develop strategic creative that differentiates the brand and delivers sales, volume and profits to quantify it, will win in the future. Just as they are winning now. Those looking in crystal balls and not at the realities around them are sure to lose. Advertising has always been a custom-built approach for every client and market. Even though it may appear that everyone is doing the same thing, the reality is that winners in the marketing wars are quickly copied. So marketers have to be one step ahead of the competition. The same is true of agencies. Today, with the Internet and agencies needing to divulge everything about themselves and their innermost secret strategies, it isn't too difficult to see what the competition is up to. Prior to the Internet, agencies would get proposals from clients to help them understand what is out there. When I represented a client as agency of record, I told them that they should refer all promotional inquiries to me, and I would assess them and make monthly reports back to my clients if anything looked viable – thus saving my client's time. It worked too. They saved time and I learned what my competition was pitching. It is fairly easy to do the same now by surfing the web.
So your ideas on Role, Staffing, Compensation, seem pretty pedestrian to me. Role: the traditional generalist agency is coming to an end – if the traditional generalist agency has any size, it will do what it has always done: wait until a smaller agency develops it so they can suck it up like a big vacuum cleaner, and so on it goes to the largest agencies who have been known to share clients. They are going no where, it is business as usual for them – they just hire the expertise needed to keep relevant. Staffing: all agencies need what you describe now, not in the future. One-size-fits-all doesn't work in a custom design business. Each strategy is tailored for that unique client, as is the strategy. Compensation: Traditional fees and commissions will always be the rule. Compensation on a fee or percentage of profit basis is the reality of sophisticated marketing agencies that specialize in an particular industry and in branding within that industry. These Marketing Agencies bring new business segment expertise to business on a flat fee or percentage basis now. But I have not heard of an advertising agency that has taken a percentage of its client's revenues. Many wished they could.
So again, I think you have fairly described the current state of affairs in advertising offering little new insights or information. Theory and conjecture not backed up with some sort of empirical evidence, facts, or reference is little more than lip service and wishful thinking. Your Advertising 5.0 is as generic and as general as it can get. Good advice for an agency trying to remain relevant is to go to its clients and ask them where they'd like to be in five years and then design plans to meet their goals and objectives. Tell them how you can assist them in attaining these thresholds using your Role, Staffing, Compensation, as a start point to develop a strategic plan. If it is breakthrough, perhaps then you could get a piece of their pie. My belief was and is that this isn't about us, it is all about them – the client. –daryl orris, Minnetonka, MN
_Dear Tom,
I disagree with everything you have said.
First, Time. There was a time when agencies set the agenda and schedules. As brand managers became better at statistical analysis and method management techniques they began to track and quantify their advertising results. They determined which media was effective, which creative strategy distinguished their brand(s) and moved product and services. Their quantitative management gave them the right to call all of the shots and take the power that agencies once had in post-war America. This brand history kept by them gives them the right to call the shots. So why fight them, why not join them?
When an agency works in concert or unison with Brand Directors and Managers timing can be progressive where several creative strategies are tested in trial or test markets before the effort is implemented on a larger and more costly basis. When agency and advertiser work in unison, the timeline can be from a quarter to an ongoing five-year plan where each year the creative strategy is assessed, adjusted and evaluated for the next year. Doing this, agencies have all the time in the world to come up with "the big idea," as you put it.
In the fifties ad agencies developed unique selling propositions using features and benefits to distinguish the product. Where selling and telling dominated advertising.
Remember Ogilvy's Hathaway Man with his black eye patch? This is the "Image Era" where agencies used features and benefits, and unique selling propositions to differentiate the product in its category and to make the product memorable.
Then in the seventies came the "Positioning Era" fostered by Al Ries and Jack Trout where finding a place in the consumer's mind that bring relationship mindsets to the Brand.
In the mid-seventies, Brands became popular, replacing widgets in U.S. business schools. This extended into the eighties and became known as the "Branding Era" that was pushed by Brand Managers on agencies who would have them leverage their brand in the category and in time reducing the perceived differences between brands. Agencies were still stuck on "Positioning" trying to merge the two.
The "Branding Era" continued into the nineties and into the 21st century where somehow positioning and branding merged into a new hybrid form. In 2008 it is the "Mindset Era," where branding is not about telling and selling but about making positive associations with the brand and strategically positioning the brand in its category to create a consumer-brand relationship where the brand is a lifestyle statement. It is just as Ries and Trout envisioned it only now with a distinct brand purpose tied to brand management. For example, take automobiles: what are the mindset relationships between a Honda Hybrid and a Mercedes Benz C Class? Each brand targets the same consumer and each is positioned differently in its respective category making positive brand associations with the target consumer's lifestyle. When it is time to purchase which way will the target consumer go – to the brand that made the positive Mindset Associations and had developed two-way communication with the consumer instead of one-way telling and selling. How do we get in the consumer's mindset first, or get them to switch? Being first is everything. Being second, is well, second best.
Time is a tool that when used to in conjunction with the brand manager's goals and objectives and the creative strategy of the agency can be an ongoing testing and modification of the creative strategy to affect sales, volume and profits. Advertising agencies like brand manager want the same thing, so find the time both need and dovetail strategic planning and creative strategy activities – by making them coordinated, controlled and timed. This way both have the time they need.
Technology. Form outweighs function? Do you mean poor message strategy or creative strategy can't be glossed over with production technology? To me, technology refers not to production but to mass communications. New Media is changing all media placing it in a state of transition while the Internet becomes more and more important to marketers. I was impressed by the convergence of media witnessed by broadcast to Internet assessments and the results that the more sophisticated marketers and advertisers got using a multi-media approach to the spectacle. One could only use terms such as "spectacular, spectacular, in evaluating the successes of the broadcast to Internet success stories. Technology in the form of production provided plenty of dazzling effects that kept viewer attention while luring them to the Internet. Technology rules.
Then your take on "Favor Impact over Impressions," statement. Where you said imagine today asking a client to spend over a million and then telling them is would only run once ... seems to me that was exactly what every agency did asked of advertisers. Hopefully they get more mileage out of the spots then the one time broadcast event provides, that with the Internet they'll on into infinity. I really scratched my head on this one. Not only could I imagine it, it is what every agency that produced spots did. To me it was a testimonial that advertising really does work.
Then "Leadership." Sounds like you're the one whining. Advertising is a growing industry. When looked at as a whole, it is an international growth industry. And all indicators suggest that it will continue to grow. It is mass communications primarily media that is in transition and in the midst of change that is changing how advertising agencies promote brands. But your comment about Agencies framing their work in terms business and not creative terms is surely the kiss of death. Advertising Agencies are about creativity. It is that creative product that they produce that catapults businesses to higher ground. And it is there ability to continually find this new ground through the methods and techniques previously stated that separates good agencies from bad. Ads are big ideas, and the concept of 'just an ad' is abhorrent to all of the creative advertising people I know. I don't know if I'd care to trust your 'informed' opinion unless you have a track record of success in my industry. This harkens back to what I said earlier about working in unison with Advertisers. Unless the client is new to the business they are in, they have the information you need – forming cohesive relationship with marketing and sales and finding the data they have amassed and harvesting it to yield new strategies is far better evidence than me-too recommendations with a creative spin.
Finally, Training. The best form of organization from a training standpoint is what the U.S. Army uses. When one leader takes one in the head, the next dummy jumps in to take their place. It is a pure form of communism where everyone has a place and everyone is being trained to assume the duty of the next in the chain of command. I'd hate to work at your agency where 'pushing' is the preferred method of encouraging creativity. Dr. Demmings book on management taught the Japanese in what is now called the Japanese miracle. Simply put it promoted working in groups where everyone makes contributions. Thus feeling an integral part of the group thus becoming more productive. Advertising agencies should be cohesive groups of "Individuals" who each bring ideas and solutions to the group, the creative teams or account services and creative production should be better than the suits and sandals sets. It is a known fact that today everyone at an advertising agency has to be "creative," looking for the next big idea and creative strategy to change our clients business or keep it where they want it – no matter where it comes from.
I believe that agencies should develop better relationships with higher education institutions that teach advertising – by providing two-way communication with them agencies can provide input as to the candidates that they want and in the process help educators and students better understand the realities of the advertising business. How many dreamy-eyed newcomers have entered the twilight zone when faced with agencies realities – this could be eliminated by better intern programs and with more two-way relationships between higher education and advertising agencies. –daryl orris, Minnetonka, MN
Core Issues in Advertising Education:
Core Issues in Advertising Education:
There is no One-Size-Fits-All Advertising Education. Educators need to understand that all students are different save the fact that they have enrolled in your university and declared Advertising as an intended major. As such, a broad general education needs to be given that allows them to acquire the vocabulary and general understanding of advertising to participate in it. Beyond that, faculty need to understand the individual student's strength and weakness and work with them to develop their own unique voice. They need to be taken to actual agencies and client businesses to understand the environment in which they'll work. They need to understand that advertising is a 'team sport' and that seldom are lone wolf creatives free to operate within the realities of both the agency and the client's business. Creativity is a team sport.
At the end of the educational process the student should have a 'book' that demonstrates to perspective employers what they can contribute to the agency. That book, be it copy, design, account work, or any other aspect of advertising, needs to demonstrate to the employer that this individual has something to contribute to the agency. 21st century agencies require that everyone is creative, and that everyone contributes.
Better cooperation between higher education and local agencies/businesses/organizations need to be developed where two-way communication shapes the content of academic programs so that resulting graduates come equipped with solutions and the ability to contribute immediately. The idea that business is somehow required to offer on-the-job-training is absurd. Educators need to prepare well-rounded individuals who can hit the ground running. Each local market has primary businesses and agencies that higher education can open a dialogue with. The idea that together, each gains when students become the winners - better perspective employees and a better educational system.
Student’s Critical Thinking processes, and their Creative Thinking processes need to be developed so they can think on their feet and solve strategic business problems. Advertising solutions are not one-size-fits-all, nor should students be -- advertising is a custom design, and custom approach business where creativity is highly prized. Why you ask? Because Critical Thinking and Creative Thinking in the context of Branding along with what all creative advertising people know: Know the Product; Know the Competition; Position the Brand; and most importantly – Know the Consumer, is the “creative side” of the advertising industry. A must know for those aspiring to be part of it. And there is no single way to solve strategic business problems. Advertising is not that we have solved others problems, but instead, it is a business that continuously solves strategic business problems for each unique client and their unique business situation - not what we've done, but what we do. Students need to be trained in critical and creative thinking and become adept at solving business problems, and be able to show others how they do that through their 'book.'
Student assessment is subjective. And of course it is qualitative. Both of which is best done by individuals who have considerable industry experience with the creative side of the business – who have done exactly what they are asking of students: to think critically and creatively. People with the professional background qualified to be subjective, and a good judge of creativity as it applies to the advertising industry today.
The Core Issues in Advertising Education are to prepare students individually to think critically and creatively, to develop a book demonstrating how they think and approach strategic business problems; and, having educators who understand the realities of the industry students are about to enter, who can work with students on an individual basis to bring out these illusive qualities in the students they teach.
Dear Eric, Interesting to be sure.
Weighing the costs and benefits of ideas before implementing them is what clients pay for in Public Relations. Unlike advertising, publicity does not entail media costs. It is accurately gauged by non-paid media responses and direct business responses that are qualitative and quantifiable by the client, just as your effort did.
In your case, the PR effort did indeed gain a publicity response but not a direct sale. The value of the free publicity may be $2MM but it is an arbitrary figure because you cannot control the media response, only influence it if you are very good at this.
The media did more to scoff at the Town, then to promote its sale by persuading anyone to buy it. Obviously the town has more value today then it did prior to the effort. Cost factors in this case overlook your time, not just the $50 ebay expense.
Generally evaluation criteria should be established prior to the project with the client not after the fact – because you can concoct any evaluation you want to justify your effort. Public Relations has traditionally relied on effects, not on results.
Value on educating buyers, developing a market, and using non-paid media to tell the Town's story does have an objective outcome to assist in its sale, which it did. But you didn't persuade anyone to buy it.
Perhaps that is the difference between Advertising and Public Relations: the ability of each to persuade. You got Publicity, but didn't get the sale. Now Advertising could develop upon that by creating a persuasive advert to close the deal. This is why integrated marketing communications is always the best choice for business, as it brings the power of all marketing communication tools to make the sale.
Public Relations has a reputation for taking the ambiguous and giving it form, and for changing impressions and attitudes in an almost imperceptible way, advertising too – but one has a bigger price tag then with the other. I'd say your partner's friend owes you a commission when the sale occurs. Much of Public Relations is separating the subjective from the objective, and objectively speaking, Public Relations does know what it is doing and how to evaluate its worth. They prepare and establish evaluation criteria prior to the effort, not after the fact. – daryl orris | Minnetonka, MN
There is no One-Size-Fits-All Advertising Education. Educators need to understand that all students are different save the fact that they have enrolled in your university and declared Advertising as an intended major. As such, a broad general education needs to be given that allows them to acquire the vocabulary and general understanding of advertising to participate in it. Beyond that, faculty need to understand the individual student's strength and weakness and work with them to develop their own unique voice. They need to be taken to actual agencies and client businesses to understand the environment in which they'll work. They need to understand that advertising is a 'team sport' and that seldom are lone wolf creatives free to operate within the realities of both the agency and the client's business. Creativity is a team sport.
At the end of the educational process the student should have a 'book' that demonstrates to perspective employers what they can contribute to the agency. That book, be it copy, design, account work, or any other aspect of advertising, needs to demonstrate to the employer that this individual has something to contribute to the agency. 21st century agencies require that everyone is creative, and that everyone contributes.
Better cooperation between higher education and local agencies/businesses/organizations need to be developed where two-way communication shapes the content of academic programs so that resulting graduates come equipped with solutions and the ability to contribute immediately. The idea that business is somehow required to offer on-the-job-training is absurd. Educators need to prepare well-rounded individuals who can hit the ground running. Each local market has primary businesses and agencies that higher education can open a dialogue with. The idea that together, each gains when students become the winners - better perspective employees and a better educational system.
Student’s Critical Thinking processes, and their Creative Thinking processes need to be developed so they can think on their feet and solve strategic business problems. Advertising solutions are not one-size-fits-all, nor should students be -- advertising is a custom design, and custom approach business where creativity is highly prized. Why you ask? Because Critical Thinking and Creative Thinking in the context of Branding along with what all creative advertising people know: Know the Product; Know the Competition; Position the Brand; and most importantly – Know the Consumer, is the “creative side” of the advertising industry. A must know for those aspiring to be part of it. And there is no single way to solve strategic business problems. Advertising is not that we have solved others problems, but instead, it is a business that continuously solves strategic business problems for each unique client and their unique business situation - not what we've done, but what we do. Students need to be trained in critical and creative thinking and become adept at solving business problems, and be able to show others how they do that through their 'book.'
Student assessment is subjective. And of course it is qualitative. Both of which is best done by individuals who have considerable industry experience with the creative side of the business – who have done exactly what they are asking of students: to think critically and creatively. People with the professional background qualified to be subjective, and a good judge of creativity as it applies to the advertising industry today.
The Core Issues in Advertising Education are to prepare students individually to think critically and creatively, to develop a book demonstrating how they think and approach strategic business problems; and, having educators who understand the realities of the industry students are about to enter, who can work with students on an individual basis to bring out these illusive qualities in the students they teach.
Dear Eric, Interesting to be sure.
Weighing the costs and benefits of ideas before implementing them is what clients pay for in Public Relations. Unlike advertising, publicity does not entail media costs. It is accurately gauged by non-paid media responses and direct business responses that are qualitative and quantifiable by the client, just as your effort did.
In your case, the PR effort did indeed gain a publicity response but not a direct sale. The value of the free publicity may be $2MM but it is an arbitrary figure because you cannot control the media response, only influence it if you are very good at this.
The media did more to scoff at the Town, then to promote its sale by persuading anyone to buy it. Obviously the town has more value today then it did prior to the effort. Cost factors in this case overlook your time, not just the $50 ebay expense.
Generally evaluation criteria should be established prior to the project with the client not after the fact – because you can concoct any evaluation you want to justify your effort. Public Relations has traditionally relied on effects, not on results.
Value on educating buyers, developing a market, and using non-paid media to tell the Town's story does have an objective outcome to assist in its sale, which it did. But you didn't persuade anyone to buy it.
Perhaps that is the difference between Advertising and Public Relations: the ability of each to persuade. You got Publicity, but didn't get the sale. Now Advertising could develop upon that by creating a persuasive advert to close the deal. This is why integrated marketing communications is always the best choice for business, as it brings the power of all marketing communication tools to make the sale.
Public Relations has a reputation for taking the ambiguous and giving it form, and for changing impressions and attitudes in an almost imperceptible way, advertising too – but one has a bigger price tag then with the other. I'd say your partner's friend owes you a commission when the sale occurs. Much of Public Relations is separating the subjective from the objective, and objectively speaking, Public Relations does know what it is doing and how to evaluate its worth. They prepare and establish evaluation criteria prior to the effort, not after the fact. – daryl orris | Minnetonka, MN
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
The Management of Advertising Agencies
QUANTITATIVE MANAGEMENT TECHNIQUES
FOR ADVERTISING AGENCIES
Background
Advertising Agency Organizations woefully neglect Quantitative Management Methods (QMM - - defined as using quantitative measures to make organizational and management decisions). Historically this has always been so. Agency Heads point to the creative and many times abstract nature of what they do – and the creative talent they manage; as well as and subjective outcomes as the reason that the management function is relegated to program planning, budgeting and cost-accounting instead of quantitative management methods as used in other business models. Quantitative Management Methods use finite measures to determine plans and to measure outcomes, and to make quantitative management decisions. Comparative analysis and assessment between programs and other competitive organizations is non-existent because of claims of varied organization purposes and historical precedence – unlike most business organizations which use comparative analysis as its means for strategic planning and strategic outcomes management. No one argues with Advertising Agencies about the creative disciplines, knowledge and creative products they impart, but instead with the efficient delivery of and the quantifiable outcomes they purportedly yield.
Advertising Agencies that have clearly defined goals, objectives, and mission that are communicated and known by all employees operate better than those that do not. Agencies that use Management By Objectives to manage and assess employees operate better than agencies that do not.
Business relies on Quantitative Management Methods for its decision-making processes. The best known is Management By Objectives (MBO). MBO was first outlined in Peter Drucker’s 1954 management book ‘The Practice of Management.’ MBO is the systematic and organized approach that allows management to focus on achievable goals and to obtain the best possible results from available resources. The aim is to increase organizational performance by aligning goals and subordinate objectives throughout the organization. Ideally, employees identify their objectives, time lines for completion, and projected outcomes: the evaluation then focuses on the accomplishment of planned outcomes and a comparative analysis of this year’s outcomes versus last years.
MBO then is used by organizations as a management system to identify desired outcomes (Objectives) designed to meet organizational mission through planning; using management methods and techniques (Goals) to accomplish Objectives that realize Mission. The educational outcomes are then measured based upon their successful accomplishment and compared to other such organizations (strategic) and/or last year’s outcomes versus this years. Mission is the organization’s primary purpose of being.
Managers mindful of organizational mission identify operational Objectives. Objectives are long-term operational concepts cast to accomplish mission. Goals are then shorter- term operational concepts devised to accomplish objectives.
Setting Objectives
Using MBO systems managers write objectives for each level of the organization where individuals are given specific aims and targets. People need to know what the organization is trying to achieve and what their part is to meet those aims, and how, as individuals, they are expected to contribute.
In organizations such as ours where the programs and methods have been fully considered it is relatively easy to construct organizational objectives, and then team objectives. Goals are then devised to accomplish objectives. This process provides for organizational focus and direction – where each member of the organization understands the organization’s mission, their unit’s objectives, and their individual purpose in accomplishing objectives and organizational mission.
Written objectives, and mission should be concise and precise. And their numbers should be kept small. For MBO to be effective each individual manager must understand specific objectives of their individual job and how those objectives fit in with the overall functional objectives set by the Agency President. Each subordinate administrator should be directed and controlled by the objectives of performance rather than by his boss. The managers of the various units or sub-units, or sections of an organization should not only know the objectives of their unit but should also actively participate in setting these objectives and take responsibility for accomplishing them.
The quantitative review mechanisms then enables leaders to measure the performance of their managers, especially in key results areas: creative outcomes; innovation; human organization; financial resources; physical resources; productivity; social responsibility; and profit/service requirements. Quantitative review is done simply by having each manager/administrator identifying and stating their organizational objectives, goals, resources, and time-lines. These then are evaluated based upon there accomplishment.
Based upon these quantitative measures of mission, objectives, and goals – and how well they have been accomplished, quantitative management methods can be employed in decision-making. Administrators/managers performance is based upon their ability to accomplish their objectives/goals to achieve mission.
MBO is perfect for creative organizations. MBO builds management and leadership skills by encouraging creativity, tacit knowledge and initiative.
In the present case then (Advertising Agencies) the mission statement in concise terms is:
To maintain excellence and leadership in Marketing Communication: Advertising, Promotion, Public Relations – as directed by client’s mission and stated objectives.
Or the mission statement can be more client driven. Generally it is better to have concise broader mission statements, and set more narrowly focused outcomes in the organizational objectives. For example:
Our Mission is to become the number one billing agency in our market area.
This is an example of a client driven mission statement. However, it could more easily be stated as an objective of the organization, and not its mission statement.
Describing the mission in terms of the expertise or services you provide is a better mission statement. For example:
To maintain excellence and leadership in Marketing Communication: Advertising, Promotion, Public Relations – as directed by client’s mission and stated objectives.
This mission statement clearly states what the agency does, and concludes with the inclusion of the Client(s) it serves. The mission statement without – ‘as directed by client’s mission and stated objective‘ is effective and the client concern could easily become an objective.
To achieve mission objectives are determined. There are three types of objectives: Routine Objectives; Innovation Objectives; Improvement Objectives. Objectives must be: focused on a result, not an activity. Goals, focus on activities designed to accomplish objectives. Objectives must be consistent, specific, measurable, related to time, and attainable.
Routine Objectives:
These objectives are devised to maintain operations: they are functional, what the agency does routinely such as details about client work, or how the ongoing agency functions are defined.
Innovation Objectives;
These objectives are devised to maintain or improve operations, departments, and the overall agency. Designed to keep the agency state-of-the-art, these are objectives that define continual innovation methods and techniques with methods that identify and then adopt innovative initiatives that keep the agency current and informed.
Improvement Objectives
These objectives are solicited through CRM methods: Customer Relationship Management, where continued feedback from clients and potential clients are used to improve agency operations. CRM also includes employee comments and criticisms.
All the individuals within the organization are assigned a specific set of goals and objectives that they are asked to reach during a normal operating period. These objectives are mutually set and agreed upon by individuals and their managers to attain the organization’s mission.
All objectives, goals, and the organizational mission itself,
are based upon measurable outcomes.
Once objectives are determined and set, then goals are created to achieve these objectives. Goals are more immediate or timed with finite dates for when they are to be accomplished. Goals are devised to achieve objectives.
Six MBO Stages
1. Definition of organizational objectives at the agency board of directors/senior management level. (Devised to achieve agency mission).
2. Analyze management tasks and devise formal job specifications, desired outcomes, which allocate responsibilities and decisions to individual managers.
3. Set performance standards.
4. Agree and set specific objectives. Devise goals to accomplish objectives.
5. Align individual targets with agency objectives.
6. Establish a management information system to monitor achievements against objectives.
Eight Key Areas where Managers Must Pursue Clear Objectives
Marketing
Managers must be mindful of the Agency they operate and that its functions are current and are in demand by clients that they are aligned with – and with the industry (s) which they purport to represent. Agencies should have an identifiable strategic difference and brand promise that they can easily communicate with clients and potential clients.
Each manager must ensure that their department is current to industry standards and has suitable industry endorsements and that it is achieving its stated objectives. This capabilities information is presented to clients as a capabilities statement.
Marketing budgets must be in place for business development marketing.
Innovation
Strategic Marketing Programs, creative methods and techniques, must all be cutting edge and state of the art. All personnel should be encouraged to explore innovative methods and techniques to enhance delivery and outcomes.
Human Resources/Organization
Human Resources and Organization should be based on a realistic employee-projects ratio.
Organizational systems should be focused on facilitating the strategic marketing, creative concepting, production and planning functions of the organization’s mission statement.
Financial Resources
Financial Resources must be in place to execute creative programs and functions based upon stated business and client outcomes.
Physical Resources
Physical facilities should compliment the agency and facilitate the creative processes as defined in the mission statement.
Productivity
Managers set productivity standards, evaluations, and methods/techniques to accomplish objectives that satisfy mission. In creative organizations, creativity is a difficult concept to assess and is very subjective. As such, it is best that skilled creative practitioners who have done creative work themselves make subjective assessments. Ultimately it is the agency’s ability to develop creative marketing solutions that are strategic and develop quantifiable changes in the client’s business is closely tied to the agency’s ability to maintain client business and grow new business.
Social Responsibility
Is two-fold. First to its business constituents, clients and to the industry; and, second to the broader community and country. The agency’s management and its employees determine how this social responsibility is defined and executed.
Profit Requirements
Profit requirements imply a desired surplus generated from the administrative operation of the agency. In profit organizations end-of-year surplus is used for bonuses or moved forward to next year’s budget or into an investment fund intended to ultimately make the organization self-sufficient.
Profit is a business concept. Outcome is a business concept where customers are satisfied and that their objectives were met, and the desirable outcome for the agency is continued representation and a profit from the work they have executed. Both represent a positive progression of the organization’s objectives and goals in meeting its stated organizational mission.
In business, budget cuts result in a corresponding cut across personnel; outcomes; innovation; human organization; financial resources; physical resources; productivity; social responsibility; research; profit/service requirements – and loss in the resulting end product or service which the organization’s mission dictates: it produces less. Logically, if an agency receives a 10% budget reduction – it should in turn reduce its organization to correspond with the budgetary shortfall. To do otherwise is to demonstrate managerial incompetence.
Management of creative people is sometimes equated with herding cats, each having a mind of its own. Creative people are no different than anyone else who works for an employer. They have agreed upon hours, job responsibilities, and defined rules and regulations that they are expected to follow to allow the agency to function effectively.
Ideally, each position title is defined as to functions and responsibilities. With clearly defined expectations and identifiable goals and objectives, creative employees can be managed with quarterly, semi-annual, or annual reviews. The review serves as a managerial tool to adjust behavior or to increase productivity. Its success as a management tool is closely tied to the ability of the manager to write and communicate clear goals and objectives, and then to use them in reviews to adjust behavior or increase productivity.
The same criteria are then used to assess departments, and ultimately the entire Agency Organization.
©2009 Daryl Orris - http://orris-speaks.blogspot.com/ All Rights Reserved.
*****
FOR ADVERTISING AGENCIES
Background
Advertising Agency Organizations woefully neglect Quantitative Management Methods (QMM - - defined as using quantitative measures to make organizational and management decisions). Historically this has always been so. Agency Heads point to the creative and many times abstract nature of what they do – and the creative talent they manage; as well as and subjective outcomes as the reason that the management function is relegated to program planning, budgeting and cost-accounting instead of quantitative management methods as used in other business models. Quantitative Management Methods use finite measures to determine plans and to measure outcomes, and to make quantitative management decisions. Comparative analysis and assessment between programs and other competitive organizations is non-existent because of claims of varied organization purposes and historical precedence – unlike most business organizations which use comparative analysis as its means for strategic planning and strategic outcomes management. No one argues with Advertising Agencies about the creative disciplines, knowledge and creative products they impart, but instead with the efficient delivery of and the quantifiable outcomes they purportedly yield.
Advertising Agencies that have clearly defined goals, objectives, and mission that are communicated and known by all employees operate better than those that do not. Agencies that use Management By Objectives to manage and assess employees operate better than agencies that do not.
Business relies on Quantitative Management Methods for its decision-making processes. The best known is Management By Objectives (MBO). MBO was first outlined in Peter Drucker’s 1954 management book ‘The Practice of Management.’ MBO is the systematic and organized approach that allows management to focus on achievable goals and to obtain the best possible results from available resources. The aim is to increase organizational performance by aligning goals and subordinate objectives throughout the organization. Ideally, employees identify their objectives, time lines for completion, and projected outcomes: the evaluation then focuses on the accomplishment of planned outcomes and a comparative analysis of this year’s outcomes versus last years.
MBO then is used by organizations as a management system to identify desired outcomes (Objectives) designed to meet organizational mission through planning; using management methods and techniques (Goals) to accomplish Objectives that realize Mission. The educational outcomes are then measured based upon their successful accomplishment and compared to other such organizations (strategic) and/or last year’s outcomes versus this years. Mission is the organization’s primary purpose of being.
Managers mindful of organizational mission identify operational Objectives. Objectives are long-term operational concepts cast to accomplish mission. Goals are then shorter- term operational concepts devised to accomplish objectives.
Setting Objectives
Using MBO systems managers write objectives for each level of the organization where individuals are given specific aims and targets. People need to know what the organization is trying to achieve and what their part is to meet those aims, and how, as individuals, they are expected to contribute.
In organizations such as ours where the programs and methods have been fully considered it is relatively easy to construct organizational objectives, and then team objectives. Goals are then devised to accomplish objectives. This process provides for organizational focus and direction – where each member of the organization understands the organization’s mission, their unit’s objectives, and their individual purpose in accomplishing objectives and organizational mission.
Written objectives, and mission should be concise and precise. And their numbers should be kept small. For MBO to be effective each individual manager must understand specific objectives of their individual job and how those objectives fit in with the overall functional objectives set by the Agency President. Each subordinate administrator should be directed and controlled by the objectives of performance rather than by his boss. The managers of the various units or sub-units, or sections of an organization should not only know the objectives of their unit but should also actively participate in setting these objectives and take responsibility for accomplishing them.
The quantitative review mechanisms then enables leaders to measure the performance of their managers, especially in key results areas: creative outcomes; innovation; human organization; financial resources; physical resources; productivity; social responsibility; and profit/service requirements. Quantitative review is done simply by having each manager/administrator identifying and stating their organizational objectives, goals, resources, and time-lines. These then are evaluated based upon there accomplishment.
Based upon these quantitative measures of mission, objectives, and goals – and how well they have been accomplished, quantitative management methods can be employed in decision-making. Administrators/managers performance is based upon their ability to accomplish their objectives/goals to achieve mission.
MBO is perfect for creative organizations. MBO builds management and leadership skills by encouraging creativity, tacit knowledge and initiative.
In the present case then (Advertising Agencies) the mission statement in concise terms is:
To maintain excellence and leadership in Marketing Communication: Advertising, Promotion, Public Relations – as directed by client’s mission and stated objectives.
Or the mission statement can be more client driven. Generally it is better to have concise broader mission statements, and set more narrowly focused outcomes in the organizational objectives. For example:
Our Mission is to become the number one billing agency in our market area.
This is an example of a client driven mission statement. However, it could more easily be stated as an objective of the organization, and not its mission statement.
Describing the mission in terms of the expertise or services you provide is a better mission statement. For example:
To maintain excellence and leadership in Marketing Communication: Advertising, Promotion, Public Relations – as directed by client’s mission and stated objectives.
This mission statement clearly states what the agency does, and concludes with the inclusion of the Client(s) it serves. The mission statement without – ‘as directed by client’s mission and stated objective‘ is effective and the client concern could easily become an objective.
To achieve mission objectives are determined. There are three types of objectives: Routine Objectives; Innovation Objectives; Improvement Objectives. Objectives must be: focused on a result, not an activity. Goals, focus on activities designed to accomplish objectives. Objectives must be consistent, specific, measurable, related to time, and attainable.
Routine Objectives:
These objectives are devised to maintain operations: they are functional, what the agency does routinely such as details about client work, or how the ongoing agency functions are defined.
Innovation Objectives;
These objectives are devised to maintain or improve operations, departments, and the overall agency. Designed to keep the agency state-of-the-art, these are objectives that define continual innovation methods and techniques with methods that identify and then adopt innovative initiatives that keep the agency current and informed.
Improvement Objectives
These objectives are solicited through CRM methods: Customer Relationship Management, where continued feedback from clients and potential clients are used to improve agency operations. CRM also includes employee comments and criticisms.
All the individuals within the organization are assigned a specific set of goals and objectives that they are asked to reach during a normal operating period. These objectives are mutually set and agreed upon by individuals and their managers to attain the organization’s mission.
All objectives, goals, and the organizational mission itself,
are based upon measurable outcomes.
Once objectives are determined and set, then goals are created to achieve these objectives. Goals are more immediate or timed with finite dates for when they are to be accomplished. Goals are devised to achieve objectives.
Six MBO Stages
1. Definition of organizational objectives at the agency board of directors/senior management level. (Devised to achieve agency mission).
2. Analyze management tasks and devise formal job specifications, desired outcomes, which allocate responsibilities and decisions to individual managers.
3. Set performance standards.
4. Agree and set specific objectives. Devise goals to accomplish objectives.
5. Align individual targets with agency objectives.
6. Establish a management information system to monitor achievements against objectives.
Eight Key Areas where Managers Must Pursue Clear Objectives
Marketing
Managers must be mindful of the Agency they operate and that its functions are current and are in demand by clients that they are aligned with – and with the industry (s) which they purport to represent. Agencies should have an identifiable strategic difference and brand promise that they can easily communicate with clients and potential clients.
Each manager must ensure that their department is current to industry standards and has suitable industry endorsements and that it is achieving its stated objectives. This capabilities information is presented to clients as a capabilities statement.
Marketing budgets must be in place for business development marketing.
Innovation
Strategic Marketing Programs, creative methods and techniques, must all be cutting edge and state of the art. All personnel should be encouraged to explore innovative methods and techniques to enhance delivery and outcomes.
Human Resources/Organization
Human Resources and Organization should be based on a realistic employee-projects ratio.
Organizational systems should be focused on facilitating the strategic marketing, creative concepting, production and planning functions of the organization’s mission statement.
Financial Resources
Financial Resources must be in place to execute creative programs and functions based upon stated business and client outcomes.
Physical Resources
Physical facilities should compliment the agency and facilitate the creative processes as defined in the mission statement.
Productivity
Managers set productivity standards, evaluations, and methods/techniques to accomplish objectives that satisfy mission. In creative organizations, creativity is a difficult concept to assess and is very subjective. As such, it is best that skilled creative practitioners who have done creative work themselves make subjective assessments. Ultimately it is the agency’s ability to develop creative marketing solutions that are strategic and develop quantifiable changes in the client’s business is closely tied to the agency’s ability to maintain client business and grow new business.
Social Responsibility
Is two-fold. First to its business constituents, clients and to the industry; and, second to the broader community and country. The agency’s management and its employees determine how this social responsibility is defined and executed.
Profit Requirements
Profit requirements imply a desired surplus generated from the administrative operation of the agency. In profit organizations end-of-year surplus is used for bonuses or moved forward to next year’s budget or into an investment fund intended to ultimately make the organization self-sufficient.
Profit is a business concept. Outcome is a business concept where customers are satisfied and that their objectives were met, and the desirable outcome for the agency is continued representation and a profit from the work they have executed. Both represent a positive progression of the organization’s objectives and goals in meeting its stated organizational mission.
In business, budget cuts result in a corresponding cut across personnel; outcomes; innovation; human organization; financial resources; physical resources; productivity; social responsibility; research; profit/service requirements – and loss in the resulting end product or service which the organization’s mission dictates: it produces less. Logically, if an agency receives a 10% budget reduction – it should in turn reduce its organization to correspond with the budgetary shortfall. To do otherwise is to demonstrate managerial incompetence.
Management of creative people is sometimes equated with herding cats, each having a mind of its own. Creative people are no different than anyone else who works for an employer. They have agreed upon hours, job responsibilities, and defined rules and regulations that they are expected to follow to allow the agency to function effectively.
Ideally, each position title is defined as to functions and responsibilities. With clearly defined expectations and identifiable goals and objectives, creative employees can be managed with quarterly, semi-annual, or annual reviews. The review serves as a managerial tool to adjust behavior or to increase productivity. Its success as a management tool is closely tied to the ability of the manager to write and communicate clear goals and objectives, and then to use them in reviews to adjust behavior or increase productivity.
The same criteria are then used to assess departments, and ultimately the entire Agency Organization.
©2009 Daryl Orris - http://orris-speaks.blogspot.com/ All Rights Reserved.
*****
Advertising Agencies and The New Interactive TV Commercial
Advertising Agencies and The New Interactive TV Commercial: why not use your website using Voice and Video?
Several years ago in an interview with Peter Jennings (Jennings now deceased) on ABC World News Tonight with Bill Gates the world changed forever:
JENNINGS: Can you tell me two things that you have changed your mind about in the last year about -- in the last year, about technology?
GATES: Well let’s see. There are some things that we are always thinking about. For example, when will speech recognition be good enough for everybody to use that? And what we have made a lot more progress this year on that. I think we will surprise people a bit on how well we will do on speech recognition. Also the idea of how the phone and the PC are coming together. Where you will be able to see the calls that you missed, or even when your phone rings see immediately who that is, that’s calling, or control how that is forwarded, or even set it up so that the screen is part of your interaction. We are seeing that as increasingly important and we are putting a lot of research into that.
The future is here today. As witness by Bill Gates statement. Speech Recognition will allow Advertising Agencies to do what they do best, make TV Commercials for the Internet that respond to the target consumer. No longer will Commercials be passive, but now with new technology they will be interactive. That, combined with Broadband, and even the smallest PC can become a giant, even a small hand-held cell phone will be able to access huge software files and provide accessing unlimited processor power, and unlimited memory for storage – all without keyboard entry, but instead all with voice. A cell phone or PC pointed at the family Plasma Television make them powerful new tools for Advertisers and for Advertising Agencies. Cell phone will be the computers of the future, and the family plasma TV its monitor – able to access the internet, telephone service, and entertainment, all with the use of the smallest cell phone. Interactive TV Commercials are now possible too. Voice activated, these new commercials anticipate target consumer responses. With Voice Recognition, the TV commercial asks the consumer questions, and then based upon the consumer response, the TV Commercial answers with the correct selling message. It is the future of advertising, Voice Recognition Interactive Commercials. Two-way conversations with the target consumer. Voice Recognition will end to passive viewer forever. Voice will replace the hand-held tuner, and Voice will allow everyone to operate a computer. Telecommunications that access the computer will make them powerful tools and an integral part of the new communication system. By giving the small hand-held cell phone access to powerful software via the Internet and your home PC, you will always have access to telecommunications, Internet, entertainment, and your own personal files. Input is now verbal. Using your cell phone you tell your computer what you want to do. You can do virtually anything anywhere with voice. The confines of walls for accessing information or entertainment are gone forever. The era of voice has begun, and truly it will change the world forever, because now, the entire world can access and use the Internet – all because of voice and advanced technology.
So what happened?
Why didn’t Advertisers and Advertising Agencies begin to utilize voice on Websites? Talking head command attention, and a talking head that leads someone who is surfing the web to stick, seems like the ideal way to attract and keep viewers/users.
What are the opportunities for Websites: first, to engage viewers; and second, to utilize both voice and video together to animate the static website to make it dynamic.
Voice Recognition and Broadband will cause a blur between Television and the Internet, and blur Telecommunications as well. The three will merge to become a powerful new way advertisers can communicate with consumers. Consumers plugged-in to Internet with Broadband will be able to access larger and larger servers that when coupled with Voice Recognition will make the computer of the Star Ship Enterprise a reality in every home in the world. Voice is the missing ingredient to make computer use as global as television. The PC may well be replaced by your cell phone because with voice and broadband, nothing else is required. The huge memories and power needed for most software programs will be in huge servers that your small hand-held device accesses.
Many now talk of ‘three screen technology,’ big TV screen, medium Computer screen and small Cellphone screens.
With Telecommunications, the small hand-held phone can access the personal computer, and entertainment programs too. Anytime, anywhere, you will be able to communicate with your computer or your personalized files held on a server. When not in front of a huge Plasma Screen we will have a small one, our plasma cell phone, and be connected to it, on our person at all times. Now we can talk with anyone, access information, and entertain ourselves anywhere, and at any given time. It is Dick Tracy and the Star Ship enterprise combined. Computer, do you hear me?
For Advertisers and Advertising Agencies, the task is simple. Begin planning for the future today. Combining the Internet with Television, with Telecommunications is an advertising opportunity that will change advertising in the same way that television changed advertising upon its introduction. Imagine walking into your dark home after work and your computer welcomes you home. Asks about your day and what you would like to do tonight. First, dinner. The menu pops up of all of your favorite dinner spots and after you tell your computer what you want to eat, it orders it for you automatically with food at your door in minutes. Then, program the entertainment for the evening, what programs you want to watch, and then of course some homework from the office for an hour or so. You may want to take telephone calls or not. Or program to tell your computer to allow calls but tape the program so you won’t miss a moment of your favorite television show or movie – or pause the action of your interactive computer game to take the call, and then resume after you end the call. This new interactive telecommunications, Internet, entertainment center is the new turf for advertising.
Voice recognition will change computers from data storage input devices into personal assistants who can really pay your bills, take and make messages, get your dinner or lunch, make your appointments, organize your day -- life and life’s work. Voice is a bigger breakthrough in technology then television. It will truly change the world. And we in advertising have to begin preparing now.
The Television Commercial of the future is voice interactive. The opening segment asks for a response. With the voice-activated response, the commercial tailors its response to that particular target consumer’s inquiry, enhancing the selling process, increasing the effectiveness of all commercials. The future is here now with Bill Gates’ statement. We in advertising won’t be surprised, just surprised it took so long. We have long lamented the difficulties inherent with new media, but with voice, now the Internet is open for business with the entire world. And we in advertising will create the marketing tools that utilize the combined power and effectiveness of the new Voice Recognition Internet, Television, and Telecommunication System. With Voice we can truly orchestrate Integrated Brand Promotion utilizing Advertising, Promotion and Public Relations all through one media source, the new Voice Recognition Computer that combines it all. And ties it all together for more powerful marketing: Computer based, Voice Recognition entertainment, personal assistant, telecommunications with pictures – message capture, forwarding and work station – all in one system that combines both work and home life.
Television is watched throughout the entire world, perhaps throughout the universe. The Internet’s limitation has always been literacy. Voice Recognition gives accessibility to the entire world. Broadband allows a single cable to carry the internet, television and telecommunication to our home, and for them to interact together. As software programs become larger and larger, broadband access will allow smaller and smaller devices to access huge servers that will power the smallest device enabling everyone to utilize a new combined media comprised of the internet, television, and telecommunications. This new advance will truly make globalization a reality and change forever the way we live, and the way we advertisers promote goods and services to the world. The world with one voice will never be the same.
Marketers, Advertisers, and Advertising Agencies need to begin utilizing Voice and Video on websites to increase content from static text and pictures, to interactive sites that use Video Content to entice viewers and Voice to reinforce and direct viewers.
Website voice and video are being underutilized and present an enormous opportunity for Marketers to add relevant content to enhance their websites and marketing potential.
The Flash Websites used by the Motion Picture Industry are almost state of the art. They employ video, sound, occasionally voice, to attract consumers/viewers and to entice them into their content, then motivate them to want to see the featured movie. Isn’t that exactly what Marketers want to do? Go to: http://www.goldenglobes.org/
And find the movie links and see for yourself.
The same methodology and techniques used to promote movies can easily be used for products and services. Websites with Voice and Video content are more dynamic and engaging than static text and picture sites.
Marketers, Advertisers, Advertising Agencies should be using Voice and Video as content and as a way to engage consumers/viewers while providing promotional and entertainment content that promotes the brand.
©2009 Daryl Orris: Advertising 101. All Rights Reserved.
Several years ago in an interview with Peter Jennings (Jennings now deceased) on ABC World News Tonight with Bill Gates the world changed forever:
JENNINGS: Can you tell me two things that you have changed your mind about in the last year about -- in the last year, about technology?
GATES: Well let’s see. There are some things that we are always thinking about. For example, when will speech recognition be good enough for everybody to use that? And what we have made a lot more progress this year on that. I think we will surprise people a bit on how well we will do on speech recognition. Also the idea of how the phone and the PC are coming together. Where you will be able to see the calls that you missed, or even when your phone rings see immediately who that is, that’s calling, or control how that is forwarded, or even set it up so that the screen is part of your interaction. We are seeing that as increasingly important and we are putting a lot of research into that.
The future is here today. As witness by Bill Gates statement. Speech Recognition will allow Advertising Agencies to do what they do best, make TV Commercials for the Internet that respond to the target consumer. No longer will Commercials be passive, but now with new technology they will be interactive. That, combined with Broadband, and even the smallest PC can become a giant, even a small hand-held cell phone will be able to access huge software files and provide accessing unlimited processor power, and unlimited memory for storage – all without keyboard entry, but instead all with voice. A cell phone or PC pointed at the family Plasma Television make them powerful new tools for Advertisers and for Advertising Agencies. Cell phone will be the computers of the future, and the family plasma TV its monitor – able to access the internet, telephone service, and entertainment, all with the use of the smallest cell phone. Interactive TV Commercials are now possible too. Voice activated, these new commercials anticipate target consumer responses. With Voice Recognition, the TV commercial asks the consumer questions, and then based upon the consumer response, the TV Commercial answers with the correct selling message. It is the future of advertising, Voice Recognition Interactive Commercials. Two-way conversations with the target consumer. Voice Recognition will end to passive viewer forever. Voice will replace the hand-held tuner, and Voice will allow everyone to operate a computer. Telecommunications that access the computer will make them powerful tools and an integral part of the new communication system. By giving the small hand-held cell phone access to powerful software via the Internet and your home PC, you will always have access to telecommunications, Internet, entertainment, and your own personal files. Input is now verbal. Using your cell phone you tell your computer what you want to do. You can do virtually anything anywhere with voice. The confines of walls for accessing information or entertainment are gone forever. The era of voice has begun, and truly it will change the world forever, because now, the entire world can access and use the Internet – all because of voice and advanced technology.
So what happened?
Why didn’t Advertisers and Advertising Agencies begin to utilize voice on Websites? Talking head command attention, and a talking head that leads someone who is surfing the web to stick, seems like the ideal way to attract and keep viewers/users.
What are the opportunities for Websites: first, to engage viewers; and second, to utilize both voice and video together to animate the static website to make it dynamic.
Voice Recognition and Broadband will cause a blur between Television and the Internet, and blur Telecommunications as well. The three will merge to become a powerful new way advertisers can communicate with consumers. Consumers plugged-in to Internet with Broadband will be able to access larger and larger servers that when coupled with Voice Recognition will make the computer of the Star Ship Enterprise a reality in every home in the world. Voice is the missing ingredient to make computer use as global as television. The PC may well be replaced by your cell phone because with voice and broadband, nothing else is required. The huge memories and power needed for most software programs will be in huge servers that your small hand-held device accesses.
Many now talk of ‘three screen technology,’ big TV screen, medium Computer screen and small Cellphone screens.
With Telecommunications, the small hand-held phone can access the personal computer, and entertainment programs too. Anytime, anywhere, you will be able to communicate with your computer or your personalized files held on a server. When not in front of a huge Plasma Screen we will have a small one, our plasma cell phone, and be connected to it, on our person at all times. Now we can talk with anyone, access information, and entertain ourselves anywhere, and at any given time. It is Dick Tracy and the Star Ship enterprise combined. Computer, do you hear me?
For Advertisers and Advertising Agencies, the task is simple. Begin planning for the future today. Combining the Internet with Television, with Telecommunications is an advertising opportunity that will change advertising in the same way that television changed advertising upon its introduction. Imagine walking into your dark home after work and your computer welcomes you home. Asks about your day and what you would like to do tonight. First, dinner. The menu pops up of all of your favorite dinner spots and after you tell your computer what you want to eat, it orders it for you automatically with food at your door in minutes. Then, program the entertainment for the evening, what programs you want to watch, and then of course some homework from the office for an hour or so. You may want to take telephone calls or not. Or program to tell your computer to allow calls but tape the program so you won’t miss a moment of your favorite television show or movie – or pause the action of your interactive computer game to take the call, and then resume after you end the call. This new interactive telecommunications, Internet, entertainment center is the new turf for advertising.
Voice recognition will change computers from data storage input devices into personal assistants who can really pay your bills, take and make messages, get your dinner or lunch, make your appointments, organize your day -- life and life’s work. Voice is a bigger breakthrough in technology then television. It will truly change the world. And we in advertising have to begin preparing now.
The Television Commercial of the future is voice interactive. The opening segment asks for a response. With the voice-activated response, the commercial tailors its response to that particular target consumer’s inquiry, enhancing the selling process, increasing the effectiveness of all commercials. The future is here now with Bill Gates’ statement. We in advertising won’t be surprised, just surprised it took so long. We have long lamented the difficulties inherent with new media, but with voice, now the Internet is open for business with the entire world. And we in advertising will create the marketing tools that utilize the combined power and effectiveness of the new Voice Recognition Internet, Television, and Telecommunication System. With Voice we can truly orchestrate Integrated Brand Promotion utilizing Advertising, Promotion and Public Relations all through one media source, the new Voice Recognition Computer that combines it all. And ties it all together for more powerful marketing: Computer based, Voice Recognition entertainment, personal assistant, telecommunications with pictures – message capture, forwarding and work station – all in one system that combines both work and home life.
Television is watched throughout the entire world, perhaps throughout the universe. The Internet’s limitation has always been literacy. Voice Recognition gives accessibility to the entire world. Broadband allows a single cable to carry the internet, television and telecommunication to our home, and for them to interact together. As software programs become larger and larger, broadband access will allow smaller and smaller devices to access huge servers that will power the smallest device enabling everyone to utilize a new combined media comprised of the internet, television, and telecommunications. This new advance will truly make globalization a reality and change forever the way we live, and the way we advertisers promote goods and services to the world. The world with one voice will never be the same.
Marketers, Advertisers, and Advertising Agencies need to begin utilizing Voice and Video on websites to increase content from static text and pictures, to interactive sites that use Video Content to entice viewers and Voice to reinforce and direct viewers.
Website voice and video are being underutilized and present an enormous opportunity for Marketers to add relevant content to enhance their websites and marketing potential.
The Flash Websites used by the Motion Picture Industry are almost state of the art. They employ video, sound, occasionally voice, to attract consumers/viewers and to entice them into their content, then motivate them to want to see the featured movie. Isn’t that exactly what Marketers want to do? Go to: http://www.goldenglobes.org/
And find the movie links and see for yourself.
The same methodology and techniques used to promote movies can easily be used for products and services. Websites with Voice and Video content are more dynamic and engaging than static text and picture sites.
Marketers, Advertisers, Advertising Agencies should be using Voice and Video as content and as a way to engage consumers/viewers while providing promotional and entertainment content that promotes the brand.
©2009 Daryl Orris: Advertising 101. All Rights Reserved.
Monday, March 2, 2009
Correction - What is Advertising.
Let me correct the definition of what is Advertising.
Advertising is a paid, mass-mediated attempt to persuade.
Small difference, but an important one. Anything that is paid, and mass-mediated, is advertising.
Advertising is a paid, mass-mediated attempt to persuade.
Small difference, but an important one. Anything that is paid, and mass-mediated, is advertising.
What is Advertising in 2009?
Recently an Advertising Friend and I argued about what constitutes Advertising in 2009. I told him that I believed anything that qualifies as - "A mass-mediated attempt to persuade," is advertising. Even if it is just two billboards.
HE looks at Media Advertising more as traditional print and broadcast. My belief was that with New Media traditional media is in a period of transition and while it is not going away, it is none the less, never going to be what it once was.
I wrote this proposal for an In-Store Advertising Company (excuse the way it broke up being transferred from Word into this blog:
Proposal for:
Insignia Total Store Marketing
Insignia Systems, Inc.
Prepared by:
Daryl J. Orris, Ph.D.
Marketing Consultant
September 1, 2008
©2008 Viking Creative Concepts Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Creating lasting impressions in the food and beverage industry since 1960.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SECTION PAGE
Overview ………………………………………………………………………… 3
When manufacturers promote or feature a
PGM brand they are likely to look at ………………………. 5
Types of Trade Discounts …………………………………………… 5
Strategy ………………………………………………………………………… 8
Implementation ………………………………………………………………. 9
Insignia Total Store Marketing …………………………………. 13
Insignia Total Store Marketing Elements ……………………….. 18
The Insignia Format for Success …………………………………. 23
Insignia Total Store Marketing
Promotional Elements …………………………………………………….. 28
The Insignia Promotional Management Program ………………. 31
Insignia Total Store Marketing and CRM ………………………… 32
Insignia Systems Total Store Promotional Management
Summary …………………………………………………………………………. 36
APPENDIX A
Insignia Interactive Marketing …………………………………. 46
Overview
Insignia Systems, Inc., currently markets and promotes in-store advertising and promotional products, programs and services designed to provide retailers and consumer goods manufacturers with highly effective in-store programs and point-of-purchase display materials. It is the leader in the science of In-Store Advertising for influencing and controlling consumer behavior to enhance retailer-merchandising and marketing opportunities for packaged goods manufacturer (PGM). The Insignia Total Store Marketing program manages promotional marketing for retailers to increase trade promotion from PGMs to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM.
This proposal is concerned with expanding Insignia’s in-store advertising and promotional products, programs and services to provide retailers and PGMs with a breakthrough concept of highly effective storewide added-value promotions instead of the current discount only promotions. ‘In-store advertising programs with total store marketing programs,’ to add more expansive merchandising and brand promotion for both the retailer and for the PGM. In order to maximize customer sales on each store visit through ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ a total store experience for customers is created. The value of impulse sales to retailers is of immense importance, and over the years retailers have learned how to leverage impulse sales and to attract consumers into the stores with loss leaders – no matter what store format, be it everyday-low-pricing, or deep discounts on loss leaders to attract traffic, the Insignia Total Store Marketing program can compliment it by encouraging the customers to shop the entire store following an integrated promotional event that builds the retail brand while developing a franchise for PGMs. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program uses tried and true impulse methods and techniques on a store-wide basis, making the shopper’s experience a coordinated total store event to maximize impulse sales to increase rings on each customer’s order; thus enhancing in-store marketing of available store traffic. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program assists retailers in increasing PGM promotional involvement by leveraging total-store merchandising opportunities for increased sales, volume and profits.
Given all retailer variables, three remain most important: a.) Store Traffic, b.) Volume – how much on average each shopper buys on that order, and, c.) Profit Margin, how much money on average that the retailer makes on what is sold. Increasingly, incremental profits have become important because many times promoting products within a category merely has customers exchanging one category item for another, and often at a discounted price that reduces the retailer’s gross margin. It is like taking one dollar out of your left pocket and placing it in your right – a nothing-gained outcome. Retailers are increasingly looking for promotions that yield incremental sales, volume and profits, not promotions that net equal exchanges.
When retailers promote or feature a PGM brand they are likely to look at:
1.) Will the item bring more traffic into the store?
1.) What will the promotion do to category sales?
1.) Warehousing considerations for stocking extra inventory to avoid out-of-stocks, which anger customers.
1.) How much should I discount this product, or should the manufacturer allowance suffice?
1.) What brands build my retail store brand?
When manufacturers promote or feature a PGM brand they are likely to look at:
1.) Short-term volume increases to improve their profits over last year/quarter or to meet sales expectations for the period.
1.) To increase viability of the brand over the long term – to remain competitive within the category.
1.) For immediate volume boosts to improve or augment strategic category rankings or data.
1.) To keep allotted shelf space of SKUs and assortment. Perhaps a brand variety or flavor is slow selling – in order to keep the allotted SKUs they use promotions to maintain volume.
1.) As a marketing method used in integrated brand promotion.
1.) Fight brand fragmentation – to fight off private label pirating. Brand imitations hurt PGMs by cheapening their brand.
Types of Trade Discounts:
1.) Buying allowances – general case discounts applied to invoice for buying a brand at a certain time, and/or with specific quantities, merchandising, or promotional functions, to satisfy the case allowance, or deal terms of the PGM.
1.) Off-Invoice Allowances – generally good for a period of time without case requirements or limits.
1.) Free Goods – free goods are offered on a minimum quantity purchase, such as a baker’s dozen: 13 for the price of twelve, or BOGO, buy ten cases, get one free, or large pack deals.
1.) Dating – goods purchased at a point-in-time and billed over an extended period of time in installments. Cannot be used with beverage alcohol products where net 30 rules apply.
1.) Cash Rebate – PGM gives a rebate when retailer satisfies a mutually agreed upon task. Can be volume inducements, stocking programs, display activities, etc.
1.) Advertising or Display Allowances – or both. The retailer is required to show invoices to cover display product and proof of display and timing. Generally a contractual agreement that is not paid until proof of performance is submitted. Both are based upon size of advance order and size of display.
1.) Scan Downs / Scan Backs – where retailers receive an allowance only on during a particular time and on scanned items. Meaning that timed scanner movement is used to calculate the rebate, check or billback. Popular with PGMs because promotional discounts are only paid on items sold.
1.) Spiffs – PGMs pay for total brand sales over a promotional period that exceeds projections. It is an added incentive bonus to gain total store involvement to exceed previous sales periods and to motivate employees.
1.) Slotting Allowances and Failure Fees – retailers incur administrative and labor costs for adding, changing, or reserving a slot in the retailer’s warehouse and on individual store shelves. With constant new product introductions and scanner data – retailers have enacted shelf-management and category management software that tells them when to add or drop products within a given category. It is also a way that retailers’ account for indirect costs associated with a product SKU, category, section, department, and store. Typically per SKU, slotting allowances cost between $15. - $100. Failure fees are allotted when a PGMs product fails sales objectives and these fees are higher than slotting allowances causing double-jeopardy for PGMs should their product fail – now they pay to have it placed as well as for having it removed. Increasingly retailers are demanding both slotting and failure fee contractual agreements before buying new products. It is said that this encourages PGMs not to use retailer shelf space for new product R&D and discovery.
1.) Trade Coupons – distributed by retailers they are account specific and good only at the store offering the coupons during the stated time period. In-ads are PGMs coupons placed within the retailer’s flyer or advertising vehicle.
Limitations on trade deals: it is illegal for manufacturers to require that retailers pass on any part of trade allowances to consumers. PGMs must also offer the same trade deals – or proportionately equal offers, to other retailers within a given region. Volume discounts are legal.
Trade Deals are advantageous for PGMs because retailers can implement them quickly and easily. They encourage trial, cause brand-change in hopes to make the customer brand-loyal, develop sales and volume changes, and are predictable for PGM marketers. The disadvantage for retailers is that customers begin to expect discounted prices and adjust purchases accordingly by stocking up and making the same amount of purchases over a given period – eroding the retailer’s brand. Large retailers have an advantage over smaller retailers by gaining larger volume discount levels that smaller retailers have to counter with service and local market selection. However, price-shoppers look only for price and are strategically important to combat every-day-low-pricing large discount retailers.
Strategy
Retail food stores have lost sight of the fact that they sell delicious and appetizing foods – many ingredients, and many prepared. Retailers have long since been showing packaged goods instead of the appetite appealing prepared foods found within the store. People eat prepared foods, not packages. While many packages do have appetite appeal, a larger, electronically LED lit dramatic food shot will sell more food. PGMs have long since used appetite appeal food shots to sell their products – but at the point-of-purchase where foods are sold, retailers feature packages instead of the prepared foods themselves. Appetite Appeal at the point of purchase will significantly increase sales, volume and profits for retailers. Showing prepared food photos is akin to department stores showing mannequins to assist it in merchandising and as a way to create impulse purchases. So too will appetite appealing food shots setting a mood for the store event and beautiful food shots to create customer impulse to buy, and buy more. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program is about making customers hungry for more: sales, volume and resulting retailer and PGM profits. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program merchandises the foodstuffs found within the retail grocery store. All Insignia Total Store Marketing Programs are about making the most of available store traffic by creating an environment where customers want to buy more and prepare the foods that they see. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program is turning shelves of products into a place where delicious meals and foodstuffs are purchased. This strategy competes directly with food service and fast-food restaurants.
Too often retail grocery stores look like warehouses with stacks and stacks of packaged goods instead of touting and promoting the foods that they sell.
The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program changes graphic items and food shots on a rotating basis and new merchandising cycles to keep the shopping experience always fresh and interesting for their customers. Each week or two, the customer encounters an entirely new environment from their favorite retail store.
Simply put, Insignia is merchandising retail food stores with themed appetite appealing food shots that encourage customer shopping and increased purchases. Turning retail grocery stores into sales floors to sell food products instead of warehouses with shelving.
Implementation
The current economic downturn caused by oil is an ideal time to begin the Insignia Total Store Marketing program and the Insignia Total Store management program, as retailers, PGMs, and consumers are all directly feeling the price squeeze. Recessions are the best time to initiate breakthrough and innovative promotion programs. Consumers are more predictable during recessions and open to impulse purchases and persuasion of In-Store Advertising. Oil was responsible for inflation and the recession of the seventies, just as it is again today. Arab producing nations put pressure on the U.S. to force Israel to withdraw from the Middle East just as they are doing today to get U.S. solders out. Oil has affected all retail prices and is causing a worldwide depression affecting the poorest nations the worst. Skyrocketing gas prices are here to stay, as are higher food prices. The timing for this program couldn’t be better. ‘Stock-Up: Save Fuel,’ touts popular fuel savings and other ‘Green’ strategies to use less energy is timely and effective when increasingly customers feel the sting of rising prices.
Obviously all consumers are more price-sensitive now, and leveraging that concern is the best way to attract retailers, PGMs, and consumers. 1.) Energy-saving shopping trips, green marketing, and other concepts to economize and save are popular with all consumer segments. Recession strategies include: 2.) Total grocery bill Rebates: the more you spend, the greater the savings: all intended to reduce expensive shopping trips – buy more all at once at one retail location (especially useful for grocery with pharmacy). By promoting these energy-savings ideas for the consumer, retailers actually increase overall store traffic.
3.) Family Meal Deals – that calculate the cost-per-serving of featured Meal Deals. Websites custom-built for individuals to stretch family Food Budgets: Consumers indicate family size, allotted preparation time, and weekly food budget, our retailer’s Home Economists (supplied by Insignia) will build your recommended shopping list that provides maximum saving and nutrition for a minimal cost. The menu-plan comes complete with weekly shopping list and recipes for nutritionally balanced menus for the week – ongoing for each week, month, quarter, and year all delivered each week on the consumer’s preferred shopping day – not only are these menus budget-stretchers, they include savings on featured products. Savings can be scanned in with the weekly menu on a shopping list and if it is adhered to for all recommended purchases, consumers receive all of the posted ‘Family-Meal-Deal’ savings. This is a value-added promotion that assists customers who are struggling and those who are concerned about maximizing individual and family nutrition in a cost-effective way. The Value and Nutrition Menu Planning is customized for the individual consumer’s likes and dislikes, preferred shopping day, and total shopping budget. 4.) Programs where local community contributions are based upon sales in the local grocery store with a portion going directly back into the community. Help us get a new Fire Engine, Playground, Books for Schools or other School Related Materials, Library contributions in new books, employee salaries, all geared at rewarding the local community for local retail support. Cause-marketing programs are popular especially when it goes to the local community – where neighbors can see the contributions at work for themselves. It helps to make the local retailer a bigger part of the community. 5.) Tie-in Promotions with Airlines, Hotels, Vacations, Sporting Events, Performing Art Events, Cultural Events, other unrelated retailers, where frequent shopping receives points towards discounts for big ticket or entertainment items. 6.) Tie-ins for Recreational Gear, Products and locations, with store orders customers receive points for free and discounted products. 7.) High priced product offers for Free with shopping orders that reach a higher threshold – done by retail store departments. For example: Two Lobster Meal Deal – free lobster when you purchase XY & Z in each of these store departments. The goal is to get the consumer to shop all of the store departments. This promotion is especially good for individuals and couples to increase their order size by getting to all store sections and departments. 8.) Private Label Promotions touting huge savings for consumers during recessionary times. Never do we say ‘savings compared to national brands’ as it undercuts PGMs and upsets promotional relationships. But it is a fact that stores have private label products in every category and several retailers such as ALDI have developed a retail business model around private label product savings. 8.) Brand Sales – large food manufacturers such as General Mills, Kraft and ConAgra have products in many categories throughout the store – having a Brand Sale featuring a single manufacturer could be a good way to dovetail store promotion with retailer’s corporate sales for added customer savings. 9.) Harvest Sales with massive displays of seasonal bounty encouraging customers to stock-up – sales such as Pantry-Builders, Pantry Stockers, Pantry Sale, help to move large amounts of product from select categories. 10.) Annual Events where customers are treated to special loyalty savings – especially during slower sales months and prior to peak holiday sales periods. It is a way to begin peak seasonal sales periods even earlier: Get Ready for the Holidays – Stock-Up Sale. Extra Savings on Holiday Favorites. Save Now on Family Favorites for the Holiday Season. 11.) Commodities Marketing Boards – The American Dairy Association, The California Almond Growers, Avocado Board – boards for fruits, tree nuts, wine, beer, vegetables, and melons are all ideal tie-in promotion opportunities. 12.) Thematic Promotions such as Sports Tie-In Promotions – NFL, MLB, NHL, Golf, Tennis and other sports especially with local teams and events are ideal opportunities for merchandising promotions to bring sports into the store.
Be they for a meal opportunity (Minute-Meals, Easy-Meals, Fast-Foods, Health-Foods) a seasonal event such as Halloween, Thematic Promotions can be successfully used to bring a multitude of dislocated and unrelated products together for a single, total store promotional event.
These twelve promotional concepts are only a small example of the account-specific, value-added, promotions that can be used for the Insignia Total Store Marketing Program. How this marketing program is managed is the method by which Insignia can develop a symbiotic relationship with retailers and PGMs to gain their trust and to take command of their In-Store Advertising and Promotional Marketing Programs. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program manages promotional marketing for retailers to increase trade promotion from PGMs to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM. Breakthrough, value-added promotional programs are welcomed by retailers, PGMs, and consumers during recessions.
Consumers are looking for value and service, and want and expect more during difficult economic times. Shopping becomes more important and takes on a new meaning during tough times, for all.
Insignia Total Store Marketing
We have seen promotional spending continually growing while media advertising is in a downward spiral. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program is uniquely positioned for total store unified marketing management – a unified, coordinated system of messaging and interventions that are all coordinated to exploit customer needs and a precise sales orchestration for shopping the entire store; and, for every store category/department—and deployed through a centralized retailer command-and-control merchandising program designed to encourage PGMs participation through total store merchandising events. The most important store marketing is to reinforce the retail store’s unique brand and to enhance the customer’s shopping experience: The store logo and message strategy should be reinforced on all marketing efforts. All designed to differentiate the store brand and image; with this retail-marketing program designed to maximize the retailer’s sales from available store traffic and for total store shopping. To accomplish this an interactive store entrance Kiosk that shows in-store featured items along with items featured in-ad is the first of several interventions. This Electronic kiosk is large with a stand-alone touch pad device that features featured products, store sections, all showcased using the current merchandising theme.
Seasonal, holidays, themed, and other opportunities are applied to the store branding: Christmas – Hanukah, New Years – Martin Luther King’s Birthday, National Diet Month, National Frozen Food Month, Walk America March of Dimes, Superbowl, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, Lent, American Heart Month, Canned Foods Month, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, National Frozen Foods Month, National Nutrition Month, Walk America March of Dimes, Mother’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Memorial Day, FMI Show, National Osteoporosis Prevention Month, Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month, Flag Day, Father’s Day, National Dairy Month, Children’s Miracle Network, Independence Day, National Ice Cream Month, National Picnic Month, Back to School, Labor Day, Jerry Lewis Telethon, National Cholesterol Education Month, Cold and Flu Campaign, National Eat Dinner Together Week, Columbus Day, World Series, Halloween, Frozen Food Festival, American Heart Walk, Family and Child Health Month, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, National Diabetes Month, etc. – are all Total Store Merchandising opportunities for retailers to offer multiple category and complete store events. Also, local market cause-marketing events, or local events can be developed for the account. Insignia is marketing the retailer and all of its brands.
Besides the preceding timed sales opportunities, strategic marketing opportunities of especially themed sales events for food retailers help retailers to strategically complete against key competitors: Other retailers, food-service, fast-food, C-Stores, and the like; Marketing ‘Green’ products throughout the store, that touts the retail brand’s concern with environmental issues; Complete Meal Deals (multiple category sales designed to take away foodservice sales), Ready to Serve (multiple category of prepared foods and snacks that are ready to serve to compete against fast-food outlets); Warehouse Sale, Penny-Pinchers, (where retailer features lower prices for warehouse or spring cleaning days – you clean up, when we do); Health Foods Sales, a mix of ‘healthy foods’ are featured throughout the store with the produce department as the featured department as it is a virtual health foods store; Dieting Ideas that feature low-calorie dietary foods – complete with menu ideas, fast-meals, and supporting shopping lists; Meal-Ideas Recipes, where recipes using featured products developed sales from featured and non-featured products and featured on the shopping list print-out. Recipes can be developed or solicited from participating PGMs. Strategic promotions can assist in building the brand, customer loyalty and in building sales, volume and profits. 30 and 60 minute meal preparation is a popular way to attract traffic touting the savings over fast foods or formal sit-down restaurants – giving the customer a complete package, easy to prepare with huge savings. No one ever wants to eat alone; Meals-for-One is a great way to attract singles. Picking a Singles-Shopping-Night can build traffic.
Then there is an entirely new marketing area of gourmet cooking for pleasure. Cooking as a hobby. Featuring gourmet items, ingredients, menus, recipes, and complete meal ideas, as a hobby to experiment with new ethnic foods from around the world – for entertaining and for creating excitement at meal time. Themes such as: Turn your Kitchen into a Five-Star Restaurant; Easy-Entertaining with (retailer’s name); Gourmet Recipes for the Home Kitchen; Explore the World’s Finest Foods; Your Gourmet Cooking Center; (Retailer Name) World Foods; Family Menu Adventures. Shopping and menu ideas that tout the selection and wide variety of foods for gourmet or regular daily cooking are going to become more important in coming years as meal preparation becomes viewed as a hobby as well as a necessity.
In-Store Advertising is a lower cost tactical strategy when compared to media advertising methods – using themed promotional format changes to manage and shape customer’s visits to effectively make the most of available store traffic for total store shopping, is a better return on investment compared to costly media advertising and other forms of marketing. With promotional dollars increasing – and with its effectiveness decreasing because of the image of discounters and price reductions, Insignia manages promotional marketing for reversing the thinking of short-term sale inducements of discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM.
Retailers have long since used flyers that tout feature prices, and price shelf signs to promote their stores and their store image or unique brand to bring in customers and to maximize rings. Utilizing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to make the most of available store traffic is the leading change in current retail grocery store marketing. The Insignia program dovetails into existing CRM programs by increasing the customer’s in-store experience and can develop data to support existing CRM programs and provides continuity programs to bring customers back, utilizing and generating CRM information. Increasing the customer’s service expectations to increase brand trust and loyalty, realizing full-purchasing demand, and increasing rings – all are strategic differences that can be managed down to the store level, involving all employees, to create overall corporate branding strategies to differentiate retail store brands. All of this is to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of discounts, to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM. All programs follow the rules and regulations established by the FTC’s promotional guidelines as stated in CFR 16: chapter 1, part 502.100 – cents-off representations by PGMs or retail labelers. Many retail price inducements follow local and state laws. What is most important is that a real brand is created for the retailer that customers relate can to. Customers will always look for value and service, but the overall shopping experience cannot be overlooked. Insignia Systems develop a comprehensive promotional marketing experience that creates a more enjoyable experience for consumers for realizing the most of available store traffic, increasing rings, and providing for real growth from promotional marketing and In-Store Advertising.
Customer visits should be approached with a marketing mind-set, with a focus on lower-budget tactical methods designed to build the retailer’s brand image, and image of quality, to market each category and department with the ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ program.
Insignia Total Store Marketing Elements:
1.1) Merchandising campaign that begins on the outside façade to draw customers in. Light post banners, light wraps, building signs, door window graphics, and other exterior materials, all contribute to attracting new customers into the store.
1.) Better understand customer’s needs: CRM. Using the Insignia Total Store Merchandising System, loyalty programs, retailers can develop buying intelligence to apply to marketing.
2.) Components of a customer visit: Viewing the store outside as entering the building; Entering and taking a cart or basket (usually outside of the main store entrance); store entrance; store aisles beginning with produce and ending with frozens and bakery; checkout area between store end-caps and aisles and cash registers; exit between checkout and store exit; exit area; parking lot and lot exit – will now all be thematically bound together for total store marketing.
3.) For each of the above components retailers should have marketing objectives to maximize the income generating potential for each: Viewing the store outside as entering the building – lot themed signage and store façade and window graphics, to attract more traffic; Entering and taking a cart or basket (usually outside of the main store entrance) themed banners, ceiling hangers, shopping cart graphics, basket holder graphics, entrance door signs; Store entrance – ceiling hangers wall mounted graphics, electronic interactive kiosks; Themed store aisles/department graphics beginning with produce and ending with frozens and bakery; Department’s electronic kiosk (Dairy, Meat, Produce, Bakery); Themed checkout area between store end-caps and aisles and cash registers; Themed exit area between checkout and store exit; exit area; parking lot and lot exit – all to encourage customers to come in, building more traffic, encouraging total store shopping, continuity programs to ensure repeat visits touting next week’s theme and features.
4.) Segmenting customers: ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ can assist in segmenting and understanding customer needs by developing customer information through store loyalty programs that offer spiffs or discounts on select items – where customers provide profile data, enter concerns – likes and dislikes, and other desirable data. Customers apply for themed scanner cards that give them added bonuses and special privileges. And New Media websites can also address special niche consumers’ needs and wants.
5.) Exploiting sales opportunities to maximize rings. ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ is designed to maximize sales from available store traffic while giving inducements to encourage repeat visits through the ‘Themed Events’ that create shopping excitement.
6.) Maximizing sales to each customer. ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ encourages shopping the entire store for more sales from each, to make the most of available store traffic.
7.) Analytical and merchandising: ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ customer marketing programs and merchandising events develops strategic customer buying data CRM, unique to that store and customer base – of interest to PGM marketers.
8.) On-line Video - The Insignia Total Store Marketing program offers an interactive promotional overlay to bring customers to retail stores. Insignia Interactive Marketing is an Interactive website that touts product features by retailers designed to compliment and grow the current business of in-store point of purchase by adding an Interactive promotional overlay to expand sales, volume and profits. The Insignia website presence attracts consumers who want to save, as an overlay to the in-store program to make the Insignia Marketing program Interactive. By featuring the Insignia retailers, and then the manufacturer’s featured items, consumers can shop for savings interactively giving them total store savings items, on-line added spiffs such as account specific manufacturer/retailer supported savings-coupons on select items; and all of this with an easy Interactive Shopping List, and the extra savings offered only on-line. The Retailer Shopping List has featured items at the top of the list for each category, and for easy shopping in each store category the list follows the store flow to ensure complete store shopping of each category. Shopping lists can be later analyzed and quantified to customer profiles for CRM and promotional methods and analysis of customer buying habits.
The interactive website is promoted on the Insignia In-Store Advertising signs to bring customers to the site to shop for added savings. Once there, on-line video creates an account-specific commercial customized with the retail store image and featured products in a video format with a follow-up shopping list for total store shopping. Links to and from retailer websites can also be established for increased traffic.
(Video theme is consistent with In-Store Advertising theme.)
9.) The Insignia Total Store Marketing - Management Program: This is a comprehensive management tool that allows retailers to take control of total store marketing to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of promotional discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM by increasing a.) Store Traffic, b.) Volume – how much on average each shopper buys on that order, and, c.) Profit Margin, how much money on average that the retailer makes on each item.
10.) Electronic Components – Kiosk with LCD display and touchpad for interacting with it. Kiosk re-enforces featured items, and is themed like the In-Store Advertising materials throughout the store. Kiosk runs an appetite appeal montage of foods featured for that themed event – almost like a TVC (television commercial. It has featured items, meal ideas, and other specialized items found on the website and throughout the store on a touchpad that allows the customer to interact with it. Customers interact with the touchpad. Smaller interactive kiosks can be placed in each department or section of the store and do the same, only being department specific.
11.) Menu/Recipe Board – Display of recipes found within the store near major ingredients. A recipe service touting featured items, easy meals, economy meals, and the like are found throughout the store. Female consumers are attracted to recipes and will purchase the ingredients needed for them. The recipe service can be recipes that tout retailer departments: produce, dairy, meat and bakery. And, recipes that tout PGMs products. Recipes can be tied to themed events: seasonal/holidays, or to Meal Deal promotions.
12.) Electronic Displays: Aisle ads/transparencies – adverts from PGMs that show appetite appeal and product serving suggestions, prepared food photos and creative packaged goods displays that create an environment conducive to want to buy more foodstuffs. To literally make the customer hungry. Standing on the top center of each aisle is a translux lit photo-board of appetite appealing food shots related to the product’s found in that aisle. Each aisle side would have an electronic oversized lit aisle sign with appetite appeal food shots, advert reprints, and serving suggestions. For example: the ethnic foods section could have Mexican Fiesta meal scenes with an assortment of foods found within the section. Perhaps aisle signs can have a center food shot of many prepared items with a PGM advert on each end.
The Insignia Format for Success:
Retail food stores have lost sight of the fact that they sell delicious and appetizing foods. Restaurants have used menu boards and appetite appealing shots to create a mood and to motivate their customers to buy certain menu items. Retailers have long since been showing packaged goods instead of the appetite appealing prepared foods within the store. Insignia Systems uses food photographs to motivate customers to shop each section, to buy more, and to shop the entire store. PGMs have long since used appetite appeal food shots to sell their products – but at the point-of-purchase where foods are sold, retailers feature packages instead of the prepared foods themselves. Appetite Appeal at the point of purchase and throughout the store will significantly increase sales, volume and profits for retailers. Showing prepared food photos is akin to department stores showing mannequins to assist it in merchandising and as a way to create impulse purchases. So too will appetite appealing food shots setting a mood for the store event and beautiful food shots to create customer impulse to buy, and buy more. When these shots are not static, changing on a regular schedule, customers find new excitement every time they are engaged by a new themed event, touting the multitude of foods found throughout the store. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program is about making customers hungry for more: sales, volume and resulting retailer and PGM profits. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program merchandises the variety of foods found within the retail grocery store. All Insignia Total Store Marketing Programs are about making the most of available store traffic by creating an environment where customers want to buy more and want to prepare the foods that they see. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program is turning shelves of products into a place where delicious meals and foodstuffs are easily, and conveniently purchased. This strategy competes directly with food service and fast-food restaurants to win back sales lost to them. Customers can prepare delicious foods at home for less, that are fast and easy to prepare.
Too often retail grocery stores look like warehouses with stacks and stacks of packaged goods instead of touting and promoting the foods that they sell. Featuring prepared foods within the store creates more excitement and opportunity for sampling that re-enforces the theme.
The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program changes graphic items and food shots on a rotating basis and new merchandising cycles to keep the shopping experience always fresh, interesting and exciting for customers. Each week or two, the customer encounters an entirely new environment from their favorite retail store, a food adventure instead of a task. By bringing excitement back into the stores, retailers bring profits back as well – and yet another reason why PGMs should use In-Store Advertising to promote their products at the point-of-purchase, through Insignia System’s In-Store Advertising Program.
• The Insignia program is able to consistently achieve quantifiable objectives using tested and reliable methods and techniques to increase sales, volume and profits. All product data, customer data can be compared this year versus last year by product, category, and total store sales and with customer count, continually demonstrates the return on investment. Insignia assists retailers and PGMs in leveling out sales peaks and valleys for more even sales, volume and profits by using In-Store Advertising and off-season promotional methods.
• The Insignia strategic programming for strategic-branding, increases branding effectiveness by re-enforcing message strategies and giving another impression of an advert message at the point of purchase to complete the cycle. The Insignia management program is not just a price promotion, but instead a promotional event that is coordinated, controlled and promoted by Insignia’s Integrated Promotions that combine all In-Store Advertising and promotional efforts in a way that builds synergy, to create brand image for a real strategic difference: not just sell PGMs products at a discounted price, but instead total store shopping fun, excitement and surprise. Almost like a hunt for treasures, with values to be found in every aisle and throughout the store. Themed with the retailer’s branding strategy and Insignia’s total store marketing, maximizing sales, volume, and profits, from each order. Who doesn’t like food? And when promoted properly who can resist?
• Insignia Systems Targets precise customers: a regional, local market comprised of a wide variety of grocery shoppers. As PGM products are becoming increasingly niche marketing, Insignia programs are tailored to specific accounts and their unique customers’ likes and dislikes. Promotions within a promotion, can target niche-consumers with products that appeal to just them. For example, singles versus family sales – these niche-marketing targets are identified calling-out products unique to them, their unique needs, and holistic methods that appeal to all. For Local Markets, where the customer base is skewed toward an ethnic demographic, or a certain age segment, these can be accommodated by the ‘Insignia Systems In—Store Advertising Program,’ account specific programs designed for these situations.
• The Insignia System allows retailers to co-op promotional efforts with PGMs to increase the overall promotions’ effectiveness and cost, and to even co-op costs for Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising using promotional partners. Buying into events special to their brands.
• Insignia Promotions are designed to be meaningful to customers by using tried and true creative devices to gain customer attention, desire, interest and action. Insignia impactful promotions get customers actively involved in shopping the entire store. (Store section, department, themes can also be developed. Such as Quick Trip Specials – located at the storefront. Or Brand Name Deli merchandising and in-store promotion.)
• Insignia creates promotions designed to sell image, the retail brand, and to create account-specific promotions that don’t just rely on borrowed interest ideas such as holidays or seasons – but instead, promotions that tout the retailer’s unique brand image as applied to the promotional opportunities of prepared food dramatic images themed to promotional events. Promotions with the retailer’s image and message strategy included, associates the retailer’s image to food.
• With more and more PGMs demanding sales, volume and profit results for their promotional dollars, the Insignia promotional management program consistently delivers quantifiable results to build not only the retailer brand, but the PGM brand as well – encouraging ongoing promotional schedules to establish or maintain a consumer franchise by selling image and unique product benefits. With Insignia’s strategy, PGMs are able to build their brand and category franchise.
• Insignia Promotional Management can assist retailers in combining PGM sponsorships with in-store promotions and advertising. Allowing event-related premiums, mail-in or bounce-back discounts, admission discounts with proofs, or category involvement events such as drawings, sweepstakes and contest. As well as sampling events with coupons or bounce-back purchase incentives, can all be coordinated and maximized for the added synergy for both retailers and PGMs using the Insignia Promotional Management. It is the perfect conduit for developing category partner programs and promotional synergy.
Consumers are bombarded with messages and media clutter. And in-store each package fights the other. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program reduces clutter by containing packages within the section or department and giving each product a broader overall context to the promotional theme. By engaging shoppers with a single unified and coordinated promotional image and effort, it makes shopping more enjoyable and exciting. The program involves all employees down to the store level, making their experience more rewarding as well. Their individual contribution and effectiveness to assisting in the event can be seen by them as a positive contribution to increase their overall job satisfaction.
‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ provides the perfect segue for developing proprietary retailer customer relationship management data, unique to that retailer’s store and customers. Using CRM data collection about customer behavior and product movement, and the holistic approach for improving services provided for and directed at customer retention and loyalty, this information is used for targeted marketing and sales purposes. Each Insignia Total Store Event generates data on customer buying habits and targeted data from customer loyalty programs giving proprietary information on individual customers that shop at that store, what they purchased, along with personal information from their unique customer profile they provide from continuity programs such as rebates or best-customer programs. This information assists retailers and PGMs in developing strategies to better serve their unique customers for that unique store location.
‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ Program Promotional Elements
Outdoor promotional materials: Lot materials and storefront – banners, wraps, sign, window signs, etc., that promote the retail brand and themed promotional event from the outside to attract consumers into the store itself – beginning the total shopping experience.
Electronic Interactive Kiosk: Over-sized for store entrance, with floor-standing touchpad for customers to interact with the display. Smaller interactive electronic kiosks are found in store departments – produce, dairy, meat, bakery, deli, etc. Each able to dispense recipes, menu suggestions, added coupon savings, and other customer promotions that encourage the customer to shop each store section for increased sales, volume and profits from available store traffic.
Interior Wall Signs/Banners: Large electronic wall/aisle/section signs carrying promotional event themes to promote the event, store sections and departments – to sell and market foods.
End-Aisle Vertical Sign Entrance Markers: (Tall themed signs that are attached to each aisle entrance with slots to slide in the very same signs that appear at the shelf location – butted up against end-caps displays, these serve as aisle entrance merchandisers of the featured shelf products.) End-Aisle section signs reinforce shelf locations and encourage shoppers to shop the aisle for values and to shop each featured product found in the aisle.
End-Cap Displays: Header, stack signs, base-wrap, etc., all themed for the current promotional event and to promote the featured product(s).
Shelf Signs: Insignia In-Store shelf signs to encourage impulse, and have stopping power to engage the customer so they shop the entire section.
Refrigerated Signs: Designed for refrigerated equipment – door coolers/freezers, coffins, reach-ins, etc., all to increase whole-case shopping to increase impulse and multiple section purchases. Signage designed for the refrigerated equipment – i.e., right angle signs mounted atop door freezers.
Aisle Hangers: (Wire hanging signs and ceiling danglers/mobiles) signage carrying the promotional event theme.
Employee costume: caps/paper hats, buttons, aprons, jackets, matching colors, costumes to themed promotional event.
Themed Event Graphics - DVDs: Promotional Event Graphics that can be customized by retailers for their promotional marketing materials – media advertising, flyers, etc. DVD – video of event theme for use in developing TV commercials with account-specific information and featured products, created by Insignia. Themed video runs in-store on LCDs and on-line at the Insignia Interactive retailer’s site.
On-line Video – on the Insignia website - The Insignia Total Store Marketing program offers an interactive promotional overlay to bring customers into retail stores. Insignia Interactive Marketing is an Interactive Website that promotes product features by retailers designed to compliment and grow the current business of in-store point of purchase by adding an Interactive Promotional overlay to expand sales, volume and profits. The Insignia website presence attracts consumers who want to save, as an overlay to the in-store program, making Insignia Marketing program Interactive. By featuring the Insignia retailers, and then the manufacturer’s featured items, consumers can shop for savings interactively from home or work. This site provides consumers with total store savings, but on-line added spiffs such as account specific manufacturer supported double or added-savings-coupons on select items; and all of this with an easy interactive shopping list for the selected retailer where the featured items are at the top of the list for easy shopping in each store category that customers can print out and use for shopping. The on-line Video touts the event and the featured products acting like a TVC (television commercial) for the event and store, and the featured product.
The interactive website is promoted on the Insignia In-Store Advertising signs to bring customers to the site to shop for added savings. Once there, on-line video creates an account-specific commercial customized with your retail store image and featured products in a video format with a follow-up shopping list for total store shopping. It is in fact a commercial that is run prior to entering the site.
(NOTE: www.1&1.com provides economical website hosting of $4.99 per month for 2 domains that could easily be used for account-specific websites that the retailers promotes besides the www.whateverwecallit-addedsavings.com. Website we could offer account specific sites. Costs could be incorporated into the program and co-opted with PGMs.)
The Insignia Promotional Management Program
The Insignia Total Store Marketing - Management Program: This is a comprehensive management tool that allows retailers to coordinate promotional events and to take control of total store marketing to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of promotional discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM. The retailer merely informs Insignia Systems of the participating products and pricepoint, and select or confirm the theme, and the Insignia program does everything else.
Insignia Total Store Marketing and CRM
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the process a retailer uses to relate to their customers. It is a comprehensive process to develop data from customers and to involve all store employees. Insignia Software extracts information about the themed promotions and develops data used for CRM – or utilizes retailers CRM data for in-store advertising development. Employees contribute data and use data about Insignia Total Store Merchandising to make decisions to increase sales, volume and profits. From each employee’s vantage based upon customer behavior from Insignia in-store marketing programs so they can improve the customers’ shopping experience. This is as simple as going to a CRM software developer and asking for a retail grocery specific program under the Insignia brand.
Insignia Total Store Marketing develops data from promotional activities and from customer loyalty programs and incentives to provide retailers with current intelligence on promotional events, category data, product movement, and, customer behavior and feedback – that can be shared with PGMs if warranted.
Insignia Total Store Merchandising Software is designed to extract promotional facts to improve the retailer’s in-store advertising effectiveness. Details on customer contacts are stored in the system to be used to select product mix for future promotions and used by category buyers to increase their promotional effectiveness.
Insignia Total Store Marketing is a holistic approach to CRM that involves all aspects of the retail grocery store – from product offerings, promotion, environment, and a means to involve all personal through the implementation of timed promotional events. All to increase sales, volume and profits from available store traffic, leverage customer seasonal buying habits, to implement strategic retail branding, and to develop better customer loyalty and trust – as well as creating a customer shopping experience filled with wonder, excitement and surprise.
The Insignia Total Store Marketing is a holistic approach to CRM that is a combination of coordinated guidelines, processes, and strategies implemented by a retailer that unite in its interaction with its customers while providing an in-store marketing program that yields a mechanism for tracking customer information as a result of that point-in-time, in-store advertising marketing effort.
The Insignia Total Store Merchandising assists retailers with: Featured product mix and buying decisions, administration and operations; Logistics, warehouse/distribution decisions, and store design; Business relationships with PGMs, distributors and brokers – through The Insignia Total Store Merchandising program, it offers qualitative and quantitative evidence to increase promotional activities for mutual business rewards between retailers and PGMs. All of this is accomplished by retailer and Insignia feedback. By sharing information and improving the system each unique store and retailer improves.
Most importantly is that Insignia System’s strategy of creating a food friendly environment in retail grocery stores that celebrate food and the foods around the world. Grocery Stores have an unlimited bounty of the world’s finest and best foods, with unlimited preparation possibilities. Aside from whole foods and ingredients, a wide variety of prepared foods and ready-to-eat foods exit in grocery stores, these are highly competitive to food service operations. Grocery stores offer thousands of prepared foods compared to limited menu offerings from food service operations.
Insignia’s opportunity is to promote this bounty, and thereby create an environment for customers that enhances their shopping experience, causing them to shop each section, category, and shop the entire store for increased rings for retailers and increased product sales for packaged goods manufacturers.
Transforming retail grocery stores from warehouses for food stuffs into dynamic and engaging shopping environments by touting the foods found within the stores creates a stark contrast between neat and orderly rolls and stacks of packaged goods and large appetite appeal lit photographs of food. Large oversized appetite appealing shots of food contrasts well against the orderly displays of packaged goods. These food photographs are then applied to seasonal opportunities: Fall Harvest Bounty, Christmas treats and main courses, popular foods such as pizza, hamburgers, chicken – all prepared showing appetite appeal in oversized splendor and as a contrast to the neatly stocked packaged goods. The bounty of foods found in grocery stores is what Insignia is promoting to customers with its themed In-Store Advertising materials all to encourage the shopper to shop the entire store, and to create more impulse shopping for higher sales, volume
and profits for grocers and PGMs.
Insignia has been promoting PMGs packaged goods. Now Insignia has the opportunity to promote these packaged goods in the broader context of prepared foods and meal ideas. Its in-store advertising materials opens up new opportunities for PGMs to show their products in a prepared way, showing serving suggestions in large appetite appeal photographs that are backlit to make them more appealing and causing more impulse purchases.
Summary
Technology at store level has opened more promotional doors for retailers. Electronic continuity programs, competitive Couponing, and data collection through scanners have all improved the retailer’s marketing effectiveness. However, while all of this is true, retailers have put it all together in a way that has created more clutter and confusion in-store. Other than using its well-established flow of traffic, improved shelving systems and refrigerated equipment and product offerings – retailers have not effectively implemented new electronic merchandising technologies into their stores. If they have it, it is not cohesive and unified throughout the store, being more hit and miss. Many companies have tried unsuccessfully to capitalize on store traffic and the opportunity to market food products to them in-store. Grocers had in the past, peaking in the sixties, used PGMs supplied promotional materials to increase sales, volume, and profits. While these displays did contribute to increased activity, they created store clutter and diminished the retail store brand while promoting the PGMs brand. Typically point of purchase materials consisted of displays: end-cap, huge stack displays, coffin freezer end-caps, that used point-of-purchase materials: display header, stack signs, base wraps and price signs. When combined with price features carried in the retailer’s flyer or ad, these efforts of display and feature yielded sales increases of up to 550%. Display and feature became the mantra of the sixties through to the eighties. Retailers typically leveraged PGMs for added trade promotion dollars until retailers uniformly began to use their own point-of-purchase materials to promote in-store.
Retailers became aware of branding. Increasingly PGMs used branding techniques to promote their unique brand in-store using the displays to tout their brand. Retailers claimed this PGM brand competition caused in-store clutter. Retailers took charge of the in-store display activity and created a unified in-store image that reflected the store brand image. So during the eighties PGMs used more and more ‘branding’ techniques to merchandise their brands, and shifted from appetite appeal display materials that showed prepared food in serving suggestions for appetite appeal – to in-store promotional materials that touted their brand image. Retailers realized what was happening claiming it caused in-store clutter, adopting instead to promote its own store brand. And that mistake was adopting its corporate image and bringing it to store level to create sterile looking neat shelves framed by the corporate image. It is when this shift from appetite appeal and prepared food displays left retail grocery stores. Retailers nationwide adopted sterile looking corporate image and the loss of the images of prepared foods separated them from the rest of the food industry. They became warehouses where fresh foods and packaged foods were purchased. This coincided with the boom in fast-food restaurants and mid-scale restaurants, causing food retailers to increasingly lose a greater share of the food dollar. This trend continues to today.
At the same time retailers increasingly face a competitive environment among themselves, where everyday low prices compete against retailer’s marketing efforts diminishing their own brand and the PGMs brands. Insignia Total Store Marketing seeks to engage consumers on more than price alone bringing the merchandising of prepared food (eatable food, not food packages) back into grocery stores, while still maintaining the retailer’s corporate image. While store location remains important to customers, many are making more frequent trips to large discounters and club stores to the chagrin of grocery retailers. When Walmart entered the retail grocery business, within its first year it became the world’s largest food retailer, creating even more competition for the retail food industry and leaving them looking for effective methods to compete. Walmart and others within that category have an overall corporate image that transcends each department including grocery. Grocery stores need to compete against this fact: they specialize only in food, not everything under the sun like the huge discounters. By merchandising their primary product, food, retailers can distinguish themselves from mass merchandisers and create an entirely new holistic and cohesive look that promotes the bounty of the foods it sells. It can compete directly against food operators for a greater share of the food dollar, and the large merchandisers to win back lost customers, using the Insignia System Total Store Marketing Program. Simply put, Insignia promotes food first, the retailer’s image next, and finally the PGMs, and all of the foods found within the retail grocery store showing food in its prepared state for appetite appeal, and its bounty, throughout the store, to make the most of store traffic, making the shopping experience exciting for customers. For example: instead of looking at pimply skinned white chickens, imagine the bounty of chicken – fried, roasted, ethic recipes like Yakitori, Chicken Tacos, a bucket of fried chicken, etc., then carrying the store branding, and then a Foster’s Farm® or a Golden Plump® logo on the same display. Instead of cases filled with stacks of vegetables, colorful photos of prepared salads, cooked vegetables, snacks, etc., all with the retailer’s image and then suppliers logos: Dole®, Del Monte®, Green Giant®, etc.
Getting retailers back into the business of promoting food is what the Insignia Systems Total Store Marketing Program is all about: Bringing appetite appealing food photographs back into the store, and shown in seasonal and special holiday context throughout the store for total store merchandising, yet maintaining the retail store image, and promoting the PGMs’ brands. Insignia is helping grocery retailers get back into the ‘Food’ business, assisting it in learning how to motivate its customers to buy more and shop the entire store, to spend more of their food dollars with them.
The Insignia Total Store Marketing program is a holistic approach to CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and utilizes tried and true promotional and merchandising methods and techniques to increase incremental sales, volume, and profits from available store traffic while creating marketing themes for retailer’s media advertising to increase strategic store branding for a holistic retailer marketing program. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program offers PGMs qualitative and quantitative evidence to increase their promotional activities for mutual business rewards. Insignia increases the effectiveness of the retailer’s CRM efforts by involving all personnel in a cohesive and impactful marketing program designed to boost sales, volume, and profits from available store traffic while developing a continuity program of multiple promotional events throughout the year building customer loyalty and strategic brand image by merchandising the entire grocery store; touting the foods and brands it offers to its customers.
Clutter continues to be an issue with customers and PGMs – that customers become resistant to promotion and PGMs believe that their brand is lost in the clutter. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program combats clutter by use of creative themed promotional materials that merchandise the entire store with a strategic retailer brand image and message, an overall merchandising theme for continuous flow and shopping throughout the store – from lot to exit, the customer is engrossed and absorbed in a complete food experience. Expanding and growing that customer experience is Insignia’s business, and in doing so it grows the retailers and PGMs business.
This proposal is concerned with expanding Insignia’s in-store advertising and promotional products, programs and services to provide retailers and PGMs with a breakthrough concept of highly effective storewide added-value promotions that tout ‘Food” instead of the current discount only promotions showing packages instead of prepared foods. ‘In-store advertising programs with total store marketing programs,’ are managed to add more expansive merchandising and brand promotion for both the retailer and for the PGM to build sales, volume and profits. In order to maximize customer sales on each store visit through ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ a total store experience for customers is created to market foods that the retailers offer and the PGMs produce. Unlike hit and miss trendy promotions, Insignia’s program manages all promotional activities in a single coordinated effort to create a strategic brand-building synergy otherwise not available. Simply put, coordinating all promotional efforts yields more and better results than when used separately. Insignia uses tried and true creative point-of-sale methods and techniques that are not copy-heavy to promote increased impulse purchases. It instead relies on appetite appeal food photographs to make customers hungry to buy. Because Insignia Systems is about In-Store Advertising, it does not seek retailer or PGM media advertising, but does offer an Interactive website for video commercials that are account specific to provide for increasing customer traffic and for continuity sales. Insignia does provide themed promotional creative for retailer or PGMs media advertising on DVDs and for use on Insignia account-specific websites.
Sound promotional marketing knowledge goes into the Insignia Total Store Marketing Program, to provide Insignia Systems with an added-value business model for increasing its current business by augmenting it with this program. The entire venture is dependent upon integrating Insignia with the retailer and positioning Insignia as the preeminent promotional In-Store Advertising service in the world. The profit center for Insignia remains the same – printing. Small fees for developing customized promotions beyond account specific, using retailer or PGM ideas or themes, can be created, but the profit comes from producing and placing them. This proposal offers Insignia Systems with a unique-selling-proposition that can deliver promotional synergy to its clients, both retailers and PGMs. Insignia will compete with knowledge of its customers, strong customized proposals, creativity, quality execution, and flawless service.
Once the program is in place, a strong self-promotion campaign of direct mail and trade journals’ articles and ads will grow the program, but ongoing innovation and success will sustain it. Insignia’s sole relationship with its clients is to add value to their business by producing quantifiable and qualitative results, for Insignia to develop the same loyalty it instills in its clients’ customers to build their unique brand. So too with Insignia, it must be constantly improving its products and services to improve theirs.
Many scholars and futurists are calling Advertising a sunset industry that grew because of broadcast media. But now with media fragmentation and the advent of New Media, it has lost its hold on retailers and PGMs. The In-Store Advertising business has fluctuated with retailers maintaining the steady ground using tried and true promotional methods for attracting traffic and using impulse sale methods to increase product sales. Using industry knowledge coupled with innovative new approaches, Insignia’s total marketing approach uses the best of all promotions in a unified and coordinated manner. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program manages promotional marketing for retailers to increase trade promotion from PGMs to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM.
This proposal is concerned with expanding Insignia’s in-store advertising and promotional products, programs and services to provide retailers and PGMs with a breakthrough concept of highly effective storewide added-value promotions instead of the current discount only promotions. ‘In-store advertising programs with total store marketing programs,’ managed to add more expansive merchandising and brand promotion for both the retailer and for the PGM – and for a better shopping experience for consumers. That shift from short-term sale inducements of discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM is Insignia System’s strategic point-of-difference, and is the foundation of the total store marketing concept – the management of this promotional marketing effort for retailers to increase PGMs involvement and promotional dollars and for Insignia to take charge of the holistic In-Store Advertising marketing function.
The very best in strategic, creative, and promotional thinking is required in the 21st Century to achieve the potential of this proposed business model. But based upon Insignia Systems’ previous success, it is all achievable by building upon the current business and employing The Insignia Promotional Management Program to expand the influence over PGMs and retailers’ promotional budgets. Price/value relationships that rely only upon continued fire-sales diminish the brand value of both retailers and PGMs. The Insignia program promotes the retailers brand through its values, service and the shopping excitement it generates. In ever-changing retail store environments Insignia brings an image to the retail brand and value to PGMs brands without constant discounting schemes, but by promoting and creating appropriate merchandising and promotional events to engage consumers in a way to build retailers and PGMs brands while providing a promotional management program to increase sales, volume and profits for each.
The marketing war today is in the retail stores. There is a constant battle between retailers, who are no longer satisfied with local market dominance, now wanting increased business to compete with the nation’s largest distributor-retailers.
Insignia System’s In-Store Advertising ‘Total Store’ program can help to increase store traffic with innovative promotions, increase rings by encouraging total store shopping and complete category shopping, assist in developing quantitative product movement data during promotional events to allow for warehousing considerations for stocking extra inventory to avoid out-of-stocks, providing information on how much to discount products and determining when the manufacturer allowance will suffice – all to determine what branding and promotions strategically build the retail store brand.
Insignia’s In-Store Advertising answers all of these questions with its total store marketing programs. Ultimately retailers compete on service, customer convenience, ambiance, comparative value, and their ability to create loyalty with its customers. PGMs are looking for dependable In-Store Advertising programs that produce quantifiable results. Insignia Systems, In-Store Advertising makes the most of available store traffic by developing customer interest, builds interest in shopping the entire store, and creates loyalty while building the retailer’s brand, extending branding with Insignia In-Store Advertising.
There are no texts, lessons, or information on persuasion in Advertising or for In-Store Advertising specific. No literature exists on persuasion that is tied specifically to advertising. Literature exists about functional areas such as construction of campaigns, media buying, budgeting, management, testing and measurement, analysis of famous campaigns and the ideas of preeminent practitioners. As such there are no specific books on consumer persuasion only examples of what worked for someone else concluding that persuasion was an element in the success equation. The good news is that practitioners with experience in promotional marketing have deduced point-of-sale methods and techniques that persuade consumers to buy with statistically consistent results. The science of In-Store Advertising involves persuasion through creative devices that encourage impulse purchases and increased purchases.
Insignia Systems Total Store Marketing uses tested promotional methods and relies on ‘unified and changing thematic appetite appeal food photographs throughout the store,’ to make customers hungry to buy. ‘Insignia makes customers hungry to buy,’ is a good message strategy, because that it what this program is all about. Showing food that retail grocery customers will want to buy and creating a shopping experience that makes customers spend more of their food dollars in grocery stores – turning the stayed warehouse image to one of sales floor, where food is marketed to a captive audience. There are multiple opportunities for Insignia to offer Packaged Goods Manufacturers In-Store Ad Space beyond its current offering of shelf-signs only. By taking charge of merchandising the entire store, Insignia takes the lead in cutting-edge In-Store Advertising. It is a breakthrough concept in total store merchandising.
By: Daryl J. Orris, Ph.D.
Marketing Consultant
©2008 Viking Creative Concepts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Creating lasting impressions in the food and beverage industry since 1960.
APPENDIX A
INSIGNIA INTERACTIVE MARKETING/PROMOTIONAL PROGRAM
What it is
Insignia Interactive Marketing is an Interactive website that features product features by retailers designed to compliment and grow the current business of in-store point of purchase by adding an Interactive promotional overlay to expand sales, volume and profits.
"Embrace digital media 100%"; "invest in global diversification, "be more integrated in all your marketing activities;" and, "execute research and focus on compelling product benefits." This is the recommendation coming from the world’s top advertising agencies.
The question is how is this done for in-store advertising and for Insignia? I have a few ideas about integrating New Media interactive into the Insignia In-Store Advertising programs that also expands and grows Insignia’s current business while making it integrated with New Media, and therefore making it state-of-the-art: the premier Promotional Advertising Service for PGMs and retailers.
Because Insignia knows what signage it has in what stores, and what products are featured, and what the pricepoints are: developing a website presence to attract consumers who want to save would be the logical way to make Insignia Interactive. By featuring the Insignia retailers, and then the manufacturer’s featured items, consumers can shop for savings interactively. Not only would this site provide consumers with total store savings, but on-line added spiffs such as account specific manufacturer supported double or added-savings-coupons on select items; and all of this with an easy interactive shopping list for the selected retailer where the featured items are at the top of the list for easy shopping in each store category. Also, the interactive website allows the running of 30-60 second commercial spots that tout food and the retailer’s brand image. The website is promoted on the bottom of in-store shelf signs, and through the grocer’s flyers or advertisements.
With this list, Insignia can increase its business by showing how the program works to competitive category PGMs and to competitive retailers, thus growing Insignias business presence and effectiveness. And because Insignia knows that its in-store efforts work, they know that the sign will work to promote the website as well –
For Double/Added-Savings: see www.whateverwecallit.com.
Or: For added values see www.whateverwecallit.com.
The Insignia website can also provide both retail and PGM customers with actual “hits” data, and it also counts downloads, such as account specific, coupons that offer deep discounts off of the already featured price for ‘Double or Added Saving,’ and on-line printable shopping lists. This verifiable data of hits and downloads re-enforces the effectiveness of the Insignia promotional program by generating quantifiable data that Insignia can report to program participants.
Tie-ins between retailers and PGMs can also be created, where Insignia is the conduit for facilitating promotional activity between them: Both with PMGs and Retailers by facilitating these promotions between Category Buyers/Promotional Retail Managers and PGM Brand/Sales Managers. Later, Insignia can initiate category sales and promotions that promote a retailer’s entire section; as well as develop new promotional tools that retailers and PGM Marketers can use to promote sales: themed “Meal Deals,” total store sales for complete meal deals to compete with fast-food and foodservice competitors.
The website is first established and then sold-in to retailers and manufacturers as support for the Insignia In-Store Advertising Program. The program itself is promoted by the POP signage itself with a statement on the bottom of each talker that says: For ‘Double-Savings and Super-Buys,’ come to: www.whateverwecallit.com
The way this Interactive program is introduced to retailers and to PGMs is by telling them that this will increase their reach and promotional activity while increasing their Interactive Marketing with the provided links in the www.whateverwecallit.com website once quantifiable data is available.
How it works
Establish an Interactive website that promotes the featured products, the PMGs and the Retailers. The Insignia in-store POP has a promotional tagline at the bottom of every sign that says: For Double/added-Savings and Super-Buys, come to: www.whateverwecallit.com
The Insignia Interactive program expands Insignia’s current business by integrating an Interactive media component into it, one that can increase Insignia’s current business by increasing sales from existing clients, but by also using the new promotional extension to attract new sales from other PGMs in each category: Insignia Integrated In-Store Advertising.
The program has to be staged, before it rolls out nationally to keep it from being adopted by other PGMs and by retailers and to develop sufficient data to present to them. A large enough presence needs to be developed to have a defensible position to protect copyrights and the business model. By working closely with key PGMs and retailers, the program can expand to the point where it becomes exclusive, proprietary and effective, to grow the business and take it to the next level, as a fully integrated, In-Store and Interactive Promotional/ Marketing Service for PGMs and Retailers.
Website design would include a FLASH video introduction that features prepared food video in an appetite-appealing manner, the retailer’s brand image, and the logos-packages of participating brands. The menu bar is yet to be determined but could include: Store Selector – Featured Foods – Shopping List – Extra Bonus Values – Recipes – Menu Plans – Food Preparation Ideas – New Products - Upcoming Store Events – and the like.
Materials
1.) An Insignia Interactive website designed to engage female consumers who want to save. Imagery touts prepared foods.
1.) Signs, POP prototypes. All photographed in a super market.
1.) Sales/marketing materials – PGM set, and a Retailer set.
1.) Store Front kiosk that touts the program and offers shopping lists with featured products.
1.) New media advertising campaign.
1.) Trade journal advertising.
1.) Public Relations efforts to show the new concept in making retail grocery stores more inviting and less like a warehouse.
1.) Articles written for Women Service Books touting the new look in grocery stores and how the change affects shopping.
1.) Integrating the Interactive with the Insignia In-Store Advertising Program.
1.) Evaluation of programs and staged modifications as needed.
What it does
Creates an Interactive product for Insignia to promote and increase its presence in its current business; expands that business by increasing the scope and presence of its POP and adding a promotional marketing overlay that will attract category competitors from both the PGM and retailer ranks. Above all, it makes Insignia state of the art in In-Store Advertising by adding an Interactive component to its business.
Why it will work
We are at time when both PGMs and retailers are threatened by large discounters and private label products that are defeating the promotional efforts of both. Retailers such as ALDI, COSTCO and Wal-mart, among others, have become a threat to them because of price discounters who in time cheapen their own brand. The immediate threat is an opportunity for Insignia Systems.
With Insignia Interactive Marketing we have two dynamics working for us:
1.) The consumer’s desire to save. Growing consumer use of interactive media.
2.) The Integration of Interactive media to make the company state-of-the-art In-Store Advertising and in promotional marketing services for both retail and PGM customers.
© 2008, Viking Creative Concepts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Contact: Daryl Orris at 952-545-2915 or at daryl.orris@gmail.com
Creating lasting impressions in the food and beverage industry since 1960.
HE looks at Media Advertising more as traditional print and broadcast. My belief was that with New Media traditional media is in a period of transition and while it is not going away, it is none the less, never going to be what it once was.
I wrote this proposal for an In-Store Advertising Company (excuse the way it broke up being transferred from Word into this blog:
Proposal for:
Insignia Total Store Marketing
Insignia Systems, Inc.
Prepared by:
Daryl J. Orris, Ph.D.
Marketing Consultant
September 1, 2008
©2008 Viking Creative Concepts Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Creating lasting impressions in the food and beverage industry since 1960.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
SECTION PAGE
Overview ………………………………………………………………………… 3
When manufacturers promote or feature a
PGM brand they are likely to look at ………………………. 5
Types of Trade Discounts …………………………………………… 5
Strategy ………………………………………………………………………… 8
Implementation ………………………………………………………………. 9
Insignia Total Store Marketing …………………………………. 13
Insignia Total Store Marketing Elements ……………………….. 18
The Insignia Format for Success …………………………………. 23
Insignia Total Store Marketing
Promotional Elements …………………………………………………….. 28
The Insignia Promotional Management Program ………………. 31
Insignia Total Store Marketing and CRM ………………………… 32
Insignia Systems Total Store Promotional Management
Summary …………………………………………………………………………. 36
APPENDIX A
Insignia Interactive Marketing …………………………………. 46
Overview
Insignia Systems, Inc., currently markets and promotes in-store advertising and promotional products, programs and services designed to provide retailers and consumer goods manufacturers with highly effective in-store programs and point-of-purchase display materials. It is the leader in the science of In-Store Advertising for influencing and controlling consumer behavior to enhance retailer-merchandising and marketing opportunities for packaged goods manufacturer (PGM). The Insignia Total Store Marketing program manages promotional marketing for retailers to increase trade promotion from PGMs to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM.
This proposal is concerned with expanding Insignia’s in-store advertising and promotional products, programs and services to provide retailers and PGMs with a breakthrough concept of highly effective storewide added-value promotions instead of the current discount only promotions. ‘In-store advertising programs with total store marketing programs,’ to add more expansive merchandising and brand promotion for both the retailer and for the PGM. In order to maximize customer sales on each store visit through ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ a total store experience for customers is created. The value of impulse sales to retailers is of immense importance, and over the years retailers have learned how to leverage impulse sales and to attract consumers into the stores with loss leaders – no matter what store format, be it everyday-low-pricing, or deep discounts on loss leaders to attract traffic, the Insignia Total Store Marketing program can compliment it by encouraging the customers to shop the entire store following an integrated promotional event that builds the retail brand while developing a franchise for PGMs. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program uses tried and true impulse methods and techniques on a store-wide basis, making the shopper’s experience a coordinated total store event to maximize impulse sales to increase rings on each customer’s order; thus enhancing in-store marketing of available store traffic. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program assists retailers in increasing PGM promotional involvement by leveraging total-store merchandising opportunities for increased sales, volume and profits.
Given all retailer variables, three remain most important: a.) Store Traffic, b.) Volume – how much on average each shopper buys on that order, and, c.) Profit Margin, how much money on average that the retailer makes on what is sold. Increasingly, incremental profits have become important because many times promoting products within a category merely has customers exchanging one category item for another, and often at a discounted price that reduces the retailer’s gross margin. It is like taking one dollar out of your left pocket and placing it in your right – a nothing-gained outcome. Retailers are increasingly looking for promotions that yield incremental sales, volume and profits, not promotions that net equal exchanges.
When retailers promote or feature a PGM brand they are likely to look at:
1.) Will the item bring more traffic into the store?
1.) What will the promotion do to category sales?
1.) Warehousing considerations for stocking extra inventory to avoid out-of-stocks, which anger customers.
1.) How much should I discount this product, or should the manufacturer allowance suffice?
1.) What brands build my retail store brand?
When manufacturers promote or feature a PGM brand they are likely to look at:
1.) Short-term volume increases to improve their profits over last year/quarter or to meet sales expectations for the period.
1.) To increase viability of the brand over the long term – to remain competitive within the category.
1.) For immediate volume boosts to improve or augment strategic category rankings or data.
1.) To keep allotted shelf space of SKUs and assortment. Perhaps a brand variety or flavor is slow selling – in order to keep the allotted SKUs they use promotions to maintain volume.
1.) As a marketing method used in integrated brand promotion.
1.) Fight brand fragmentation – to fight off private label pirating. Brand imitations hurt PGMs by cheapening their brand.
Types of Trade Discounts:
1.) Buying allowances – general case discounts applied to invoice for buying a brand at a certain time, and/or with specific quantities, merchandising, or promotional functions, to satisfy the case allowance, or deal terms of the PGM.
1.) Off-Invoice Allowances – generally good for a period of time without case requirements or limits.
1.) Free Goods – free goods are offered on a minimum quantity purchase, such as a baker’s dozen: 13 for the price of twelve, or BOGO, buy ten cases, get one free, or large pack deals.
1.) Dating – goods purchased at a point-in-time and billed over an extended period of time in installments. Cannot be used with beverage alcohol products where net 30 rules apply.
1.) Cash Rebate – PGM gives a rebate when retailer satisfies a mutually agreed upon task. Can be volume inducements, stocking programs, display activities, etc.
1.) Advertising or Display Allowances – or both. The retailer is required to show invoices to cover display product and proof of display and timing. Generally a contractual agreement that is not paid until proof of performance is submitted. Both are based upon size of advance order and size of display.
1.) Scan Downs / Scan Backs – where retailers receive an allowance only on during a particular time and on scanned items. Meaning that timed scanner movement is used to calculate the rebate, check or billback. Popular with PGMs because promotional discounts are only paid on items sold.
1.) Spiffs – PGMs pay for total brand sales over a promotional period that exceeds projections. It is an added incentive bonus to gain total store involvement to exceed previous sales periods and to motivate employees.
1.) Slotting Allowances and Failure Fees – retailers incur administrative and labor costs for adding, changing, or reserving a slot in the retailer’s warehouse and on individual store shelves. With constant new product introductions and scanner data – retailers have enacted shelf-management and category management software that tells them when to add or drop products within a given category. It is also a way that retailers’ account for indirect costs associated with a product SKU, category, section, department, and store. Typically per SKU, slotting allowances cost between $15. - $100. Failure fees are allotted when a PGMs product fails sales objectives and these fees are higher than slotting allowances causing double-jeopardy for PGMs should their product fail – now they pay to have it placed as well as for having it removed. Increasingly retailers are demanding both slotting and failure fee contractual agreements before buying new products. It is said that this encourages PGMs not to use retailer shelf space for new product R&D and discovery.
1.) Trade Coupons – distributed by retailers they are account specific and good only at the store offering the coupons during the stated time period. In-ads are PGMs coupons placed within the retailer’s flyer or advertising vehicle.
Limitations on trade deals: it is illegal for manufacturers to require that retailers pass on any part of trade allowances to consumers. PGMs must also offer the same trade deals – or proportionately equal offers, to other retailers within a given region. Volume discounts are legal.
Trade Deals are advantageous for PGMs because retailers can implement them quickly and easily. They encourage trial, cause brand-change in hopes to make the customer brand-loyal, develop sales and volume changes, and are predictable for PGM marketers. The disadvantage for retailers is that customers begin to expect discounted prices and adjust purchases accordingly by stocking up and making the same amount of purchases over a given period – eroding the retailer’s brand. Large retailers have an advantage over smaller retailers by gaining larger volume discount levels that smaller retailers have to counter with service and local market selection. However, price-shoppers look only for price and are strategically important to combat every-day-low-pricing large discount retailers.
Strategy
Retail food stores have lost sight of the fact that they sell delicious and appetizing foods – many ingredients, and many prepared. Retailers have long since been showing packaged goods instead of the appetite appealing prepared foods found within the store. People eat prepared foods, not packages. While many packages do have appetite appeal, a larger, electronically LED lit dramatic food shot will sell more food. PGMs have long since used appetite appeal food shots to sell their products – but at the point-of-purchase where foods are sold, retailers feature packages instead of the prepared foods themselves. Appetite Appeal at the point of purchase will significantly increase sales, volume and profits for retailers. Showing prepared food photos is akin to department stores showing mannequins to assist it in merchandising and as a way to create impulse purchases. So too will appetite appealing food shots setting a mood for the store event and beautiful food shots to create customer impulse to buy, and buy more. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program is about making customers hungry for more: sales, volume and resulting retailer and PGM profits. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program merchandises the foodstuffs found within the retail grocery store. All Insignia Total Store Marketing Programs are about making the most of available store traffic by creating an environment where customers want to buy more and prepare the foods that they see. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program is turning shelves of products into a place where delicious meals and foodstuffs are purchased. This strategy competes directly with food service and fast-food restaurants.
Too often retail grocery stores look like warehouses with stacks and stacks of packaged goods instead of touting and promoting the foods that they sell.
The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program changes graphic items and food shots on a rotating basis and new merchandising cycles to keep the shopping experience always fresh and interesting for their customers. Each week or two, the customer encounters an entirely new environment from their favorite retail store.
Simply put, Insignia is merchandising retail food stores with themed appetite appealing food shots that encourage customer shopping and increased purchases. Turning retail grocery stores into sales floors to sell food products instead of warehouses with shelving.
Implementation
The current economic downturn caused by oil is an ideal time to begin the Insignia Total Store Marketing program and the Insignia Total Store management program, as retailers, PGMs, and consumers are all directly feeling the price squeeze. Recessions are the best time to initiate breakthrough and innovative promotion programs. Consumers are more predictable during recessions and open to impulse purchases and persuasion of In-Store Advertising. Oil was responsible for inflation and the recession of the seventies, just as it is again today. Arab producing nations put pressure on the U.S. to force Israel to withdraw from the Middle East just as they are doing today to get U.S. solders out. Oil has affected all retail prices and is causing a worldwide depression affecting the poorest nations the worst. Skyrocketing gas prices are here to stay, as are higher food prices. The timing for this program couldn’t be better. ‘Stock-Up: Save Fuel,’ touts popular fuel savings and other ‘Green’ strategies to use less energy is timely and effective when increasingly customers feel the sting of rising prices.
Obviously all consumers are more price-sensitive now, and leveraging that concern is the best way to attract retailers, PGMs, and consumers. 1.) Energy-saving shopping trips, green marketing, and other concepts to economize and save are popular with all consumer segments. Recession strategies include: 2.) Total grocery bill Rebates: the more you spend, the greater the savings: all intended to reduce expensive shopping trips – buy more all at once at one retail location (especially useful for grocery with pharmacy). By promoting these energy-savings ideas for the consumer, retailers actually increase overall store traffic.
3.) Family Meal Deals – that calculate the cost-per-serving of featured Meal Deals. Websites custom-built for individuals to stretch family Food Budgets: Consumers indicate family size, allotted preparation time, and weekly food budget, our retailer’s Home Economists (supplied by Insignia) will build your recommended shopping list that provides maximum saving and nutrition for a minimal cost. The menu-plan comes complete with weekly shopping list and recipes for nutritionally balanced menus for the week – ongoing for each week, month, quarter, and year all delivered each week on the consumer’s preferred shopping day – not only are these menus budget-stretchers, they include savings on featured products. Savings can be scanned in with the weekly menu on a shopping list and if it is adhered to for all recommended purchases, consumers receive all of the posted ‘Family-Meal-Deal’ savings. This is a value-added promotion that assists customers who are struggling and those who are concerned about maximizing individual and family nutrition in a cost-effective way. The Value and Nutrition Menu Planning is customized for the individual consumer’s likes and dislikes, preferred shopping day, and total shopping budget. 4.) Programs where local community contributions are based upon sales in the local grocery store with a portion going directly back into the community. Help us get a new Fire Engine, Playground, Books for Schools or other School Related Materials, Library contributions in new books, employee salaries, all geared at rewarding the local community for local retail support. Cause-marketing programs are popular especially when it goes to the local community – where neighbors can see the contributions at work for themselves. It helps to make the local retailer a bigger part of the community. 5.) Tie-in Promotions with Airlines, Hotels, Vacations, Sporting Events, Performing Art Events, Cultural Events, other unrelated retailers, where frequent shopping receives points towards discounts for big ticket or entertainment items. 6.) Tie-ins for Recreational Gear, Products and locations, with store orders customers receive points for free and discounted products. 7.) High priced product offers for Free with shopping orders that reach a higher threshold – done by retail store departments. For example: Two Lobster Meal Deal – free lobster when you purchase XY & Z in each of these store departments. The goal is to get the consumer to shop all of the store departments. This promotion is especially good for individuals and couples to increase their order size by getting to all store sections and departments. 8.) Private Label Promotions touting huge savings for consumers during recessionary times. Never do we say ‘savings compared to national brands’ as it undercuts PGMs and upsets promotional relationships. But it is a fact that stores have private label products in every category and several retailers such as ALDI have developed a retail business model around private label product savings. 8.) Brand Sales – large food manufacturers such as General Mills, Kraft and ConAgra have products in many categories throughout the store – having a Brand Sale featuring a single manufacturer could be a good way to dovetail store promotion with retailer’s corporate sales for added customer savings. 9.) Harvest Sales with massive displays of seasonal bounty encouraging customers to stock-up – sales such as Pantry-Builders, Pantry Stockers, Pantry Sale, help to move large amounts of product from select categories. 10.) Annual Events where customers are treated to special loyalty savings – especially during slower sales months and prior to peak holiday sales periods. It is a way to begin peak seasonal sales periods even earlier: Get Ready for the Holidays – Stock-Up Sale. Extra Savings on Holiday Favorites. Save Now on Family Favorites for the Holiday Season. 11.) Commodities Marketing Boards – The American Dairy Association, The California Almond Growers, Avocado Board – boards for fruits, tree nuts, wine, beer, vegetables, and melons are all ideal tie-in promotion opportunities. 12.) Thematic Promotions such as Sports Tie-In Promotions – NFL, MLB, NHL, Golf, Tennis and other sports especially with local teams and events are ideal opportunities for merchandising promotions to bring sports into the store.
Be they for a meal opportunity (Minute-Meals, Easy-Meals, Fast-Foods, Health-Foods) a seasonal event such as Halloween, Thematic Promotions can be successfully used to bring a multitude of dislocated and unrelated products together for a single, total store promotional event.
These twelve promotional concepts are only a small example of the account-specific, value-added, promotions that can be used for the Insignia Total Store Marketing Program. How this marketing program is managed is the method by which Insignia can develop a symbiotic relationship with retailers and PGMs to gain their trust and to take command of their In-Store Advertising and Promotional Marketing Programs. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program manages promotional marketing for retailers to increase trade promotion from PGMs to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM. Breakthrough, value-added promotional programs are welcomed by retailers, PGMs, and consumers during recessions.
Consumers are looking for value and service, and want and expect more during difficult economic times. Shopping becomes more important and takes on a new meaning during tough times, for all.
Insignia Total Store Marketing
We have seen promotional spending continually growing while media advertising is in a downward spiral. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program is uniquely positioned for total store unified marketing management – a unified, coordinated system of messaging and interventions that are all coordinated to exploit customer needs and a precise sales orchestration for shopping the entire store; and, for every store category/department—and deployed through a centralized retailer command-and-control merchandising program designed to encourage PGMs participation through total store merchandising events. The most important store marketing is to reinforce the retail store’s unique brand and to enhance the customer’s shopping experience: The store logo and message strategy should be reinforced on all marketing efforts. All designed to differentiate the store brand and image; with this retail-marketing program designed to maximize the retailer’s sales from available store traffic and for total store shopping. To accomplish this an interactive store entrance Kiosk that shows in-store featured items along with items featured in-ad is the first of several interventions. This Electronic kiosk is large with a stand-alone touch pad device that features featured products, store sections, all showcased using the current merchandising theme.
Seasonal, holidays, themed, and other opportunities are applied to the store branding: Christmas – Hanukah, New Years – Martin Luther King’s Birthday, National Diet Month, National Frozen Food Month, Walk America March of Dimes, Superbowl, Valentine’s Day, President’s Day, Lent, American Heart Month, Canned Foods Month, St. Patrick’s Day, Easter, National Frozen Foods Month, National Nutrition Month, Walk America March of Dimes, Mother’s Day, Cinco de Mayo, Memorial Day, FMI Show, National Osteoporosis Prevention Month, Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month, Flag Day, Father’s Day, National Dairy Month, Children’s Miracle Network, Independence Day, National Ice Cream Month, National Picnic Month, Back to School, Labor Day, Jerry Lewis Telethon, National Cholesterol Education Month, Cold and Flu Campaign, National Eat Dinner Together Week, Columbus Day, World Series, Halloween, Frozen Food Festival, American Heart Walk, Family and Child Health Month, Veteran’s Day, Thanksgiving, National Diabetes Month, etc. – are all Total Store Merchandising opportunities for retailers to offer multiple category and complete store events. Also, local market cause-marketing events, or local events can be developed for the account. Insignia is marketing the retailer and all of its brands.
Besides the preceding timed sales opportunities, strategic marketing opportunities of especially themed sales events for food retailers help retailers to strategically complete against key competitors: Other retailers, food-service, fast-food, C-Stores, and the like; Marketing ‘Green’ products throughout the store, that touts the retail brand’s concern with environmental issues; Complete Meal Deals (multiple category sales designed to take away foodservice sales), Ready to Serve (multiple category of prepared foods and snacks that are ready to serve to compete against fast-food outlets); Warehouse Sale, Penny-Pinchers, (where retailer features lower prices for warehouse or spring cleaning days – you clean up, when we do); Health Foods Sales, a mix of ‘healthy foods’ are featured throughout the store with the produce department as the featured department as it is a virtual health foods store; Dieting Ideas that feature low-calorie dietary foods – complete with menu ideas, fast-meals, and supporting shopping lists; Meal-Ideas Recipes, where recipes using featured products developed sales from featured and non-featured products and featured on the shopping list print-out. Recipes can be developed or solicited from participating PGMs. Strategic promotions can assist in building the brand, customer loyalty and in building sales, volume and profits. 30 and 60 minute meal preparation is a popular way to attract traffic touting the savings over fast foods or formal sit-down restaurants – giving the customer a complete package, easy to prepare with huge savings. No one ever wants to eat alone; Meals-for-One is a great way to attract singles. Picking a Singles-Shopping-Night can build traffic.
Then there is an entirely new marketing area of gourmet cooking for pleasure. Cooking as a hobby. Featuring gourmet items, ingredients, menus, recipes, and complete meal ideas, as a hobby to experiment with new ethnic foods from around the world – for entertaining and for creating excitement at meal time. Themes such as: Turn your Kitchen into a Five-Star Restaurant; Easy-Entertaining with (retailer’s name); Gourmet Recipes for the Home Kitchen; Explore the World’s Finest Foods; Your Gourmet Cooking Center; (Retailer Name) World Foods; Family Menu Adventures. Shopping and menu ideas that tout the selection and wide variety of foods for gourmet or regular daily cooking are going to become more important in coming years as meal preparation becomes viewed as a hobby as well as a necessity.
In-Store Advertising is a lower cost tactical strategy when compared to media advertising methods – using themed promotional format changes to manage and shape customer’s visits to effectively make the most of available store traffic for total store shopping, is a better return on investment compared to costly media advertising and other forms of marketing. With promotional dollars increasing – and with its effectiveness decreasing because of the image of discounters and price reductions, Insignia manages promotional marketing for reversing the thinking of short-term sale inducements of discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM.
Retailers have long since used flyers that tout feature prices, and price shelf signs to promote their stores and their store image or unique brand to bring in customers and to maximize rings. Utilizing Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to make the most of available store traffic is the leading change in current retail grocery store marketing. The Insignia program dovetails into existing CRM programs by increasing the customer’s in-store experience and can develop data to support existing CRM programs and provides continuity programs to bring customers back, utilizing and generating CRM information. Increasing the customer’s service expectations to increase brand trust and loyalty, realizing full-purchasing demand, and increasing rings – all are strategic differences that can be managed down to the store level, involving all employees, to create overall corporate branding strategies to differentiate retail store brands. All of this is to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of discounts, to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM. All programs follow the rules and regulations established by the FTC’s promotional guidelines as stated in CFR 16: chapter 1, part 502.100 – cents-off representations by PGMs or retail labelers. Many retail price inducements follow local and state laws. What is most important is that a real brand is created for the retailer that customers relate can to. Customers will always look for value and service, but the overall shopping experience cannot be overlooked. Insignia Systems develop a comprehensive promotional marketing experience that creates a more enjoyable experience for consumers for realizing the most of available store traffic, increasing rings, and providing for real growth from promotional marketing and In-Store Advertising.
Customer visits should be approached with a marketing mind-set, with a focus on lower-budget tactical methods designed to build the retailer’s brand image, and image of quality, to market each category and department with the ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ program.
Insignia Total Store Marketing Elements:
1.1) Merchandising campaign that begins on the outside façade to draw customers in. Light post banners, light wraps, building signs, door window graphics, and other exterior materials, all contribute to attracting new customers into the store.
1.) Better understand customer’s needs: CRM. Using the Insignia Total Store Merchandising System, loyalty programs, retailers can develop buying intelligence to apply to marketing.
2.) Components of a customer visit: Viewing the store outside as entering the building; Entering and taking a cart or basket (usually outside of the main store entrance); store entrance; store aisles beginning with produce and ending with frozens and bakery; checkout area between store end-caps and aisles and cash registers; exit between checkout and store exit; exit area; parking lot and lot exit – will now all be thematically bound together for total store marketing.
3.) For each of the above components retailers should have marketing objectives to maximize the income generating potential for each: Viewing the store outside as entering the building – lot themed signage and store façade and window graphics, to attract more traffic; Entering and taking a cart or basket (usually outside of the main store entrance) themed banners, ceiling hangers, shopping cart graphics, basket holder graphics, entrance door signs; Store entrance – ceiling hangers wall mounted graphics, electronic interactive kiosks; Themed store aisles/department graphics beginning with produce and ending with frozens and bakery; Department’s electronic kiosk (Dairy, Meat, Produce, Bakery); Themed checkout area between store end-caps and aisles and cash registers; Themed exit area between checkout and store exit; exit area; parking lot and lot exit – all to encourage customers to come in, building more traffic, encouraging total store shopping, continuity programs to ensure repeat visits touting next week’s theme and features.
4.) Segmenting customers: ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ can assist in segmenting and understanding customer needs by developing customer information through store loyalty programs that offer spiffs or discounts on select items – where customers provide profile data, enter concerns – likes and dislikes, and other desirable data. Customers apply for themed scanner cards that give them added bonuses and special privileges. And New Media websites can also address special niche consumers’ needs and wants.
5.) Exploiting sales opportunities to maximize rings. ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ is designed to maximize sales from available store traffic while giving inducements to encourage repeat visits through the ‘Themed Events’ that create shopping excitement.
6.) Maximizing sales to each customer. ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ encourages shopping the entire store for more sales from each, to make the most of available store traffic.
7.) Analytical and merchandising: ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ customer marketing programs and merchandising events develops strategic customer buying data CRM, unique to that store and customer base – of interest to PGM marketers.
8.) On-line Video - The Insignia Total Store Marketing program offers an interactive promotional overlay to bring customers to retail stores. Insignia Interactive Marketing is an Interactive website that touts product features by retailers designed to compliment and grow the current business of in-store point of purchase by adding an Interactive promotional overlay to expand sales, volume and profits. The Insignia website presence attracts consumers who want to save, as an overlay to the in-store program to make the Insignia Marketing program Interactive. By featuring the Insignia retailers, and then the manufacturer’s featured items, consumers can shop for savings interactively giving them total store savings items, on-line added spiffs such as account specific manufacturer/retailer supported savings-coupons on select items; and all of this with an easy Interactive Shopping List, and the extra savings offered only on-line. The Retailer Shopping List has featured items at the top of the list for each category, and for easy shopping in each store category the list follows the store flow to ensure complete store shopping of each category. Shopping lists can be later analyzed and quantified to customer profiles for CRM and promotional methods and analysis of customer buying habits.
The interactive website is promoted on the Insignia In-Store Advertising signs to bring customers to the site to shop for added savings. Once there, on-line video creates an account-specific commercial customized with the retail store image and featured products in a video format with a follow-up shopping list for total store shopping. Links to and from retailer websites can also be established for increased traffic.
(Video theme is consistent with In-Store Advertising theme.)
9.) The Insignia Total Store Marketing - Management Program: This is a comprehensive management tool that allows retailers to take control of total store marketing to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of promotional discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM by increasing a.) Store Traffic, b.) Volume – how much on average each shopper buys on that order, and, c.) Profit Margin, how much money on average that the retailer makes on each item.
10.) Electronic Components – Kiosk with LCD display and touchpad for interacting with it. Kiosk re-enforces featured items, and is themed like the In-Store Advertising materials throughout the store. Kiosk runs an appetite appeal montage of foods featured for that themed event – almost like a TVC (television commercial. It has featured items, meal ideas, and other specialized items found on the website and throughout the store on a touchpad that allows the customer to interact with it. Customers interact with the touchpad. Smaller interactive kiosks can be placed in each department or section of the store and do the same, only being department specific.
11.) Menu/Recipe Board – Display of recipes found within the store near major ingredients. A recipe service touting featured items, easy meals, economy meals, and the like are found throughout the store. Female consumers are attracted to recipes and will purchase the ingredients needed for them. The recipe service can be recipes that tout retailer departments: produce, dairy, meat and bakery. And, recipes that tout PGMs products. Recipes can be tied to themed events: seasonal/holidays, or to Meal Deal promotions.
12.) Electronic Displays: Aisle ads/transparencies – adverts from PGMs that show appetite appeal and product serving suggestions, prepared food photos and creative packaged goods displays that create an environment conducive to want to buy more foodstuffs. To literally make the customer hungry. Standing on the top center of each aisle is a translux lit photo-board of appetite appealing food shots related to the product’s found in that aisle. Each aisle side would have an electronic oversized lit aisle sign with appetite appeal food shots, advert reprints, and serving suggestions. For example: the ethnic foods section could have Mexican Fiesta meal scenes with an assortment of foods found within the section. Perhaps aisle signs can have a center food shot of many prepared items with a PGM advert on each end.
The Insignia Format for Success:
Retail food stores have lost sight of the fact that they sell delicious and appetizing foods. Restaurants have used menu boards and appetite appealing shots to create a mood and to motivate their customers to buy certain menu items. Retailers have long since been showing packaged goods instead of the appetite appealing prepared foods within the store. Insignia Systems uses food photographs to motivate customers to shop each section, to buy more, and to shop the entire store. PGMs have long since used appetite appeal food shots to sell their products – but at the point-of-purchase where foods are sold, retailers feature packages instead of the prepared foods themselves. Appetite Appeal at the point of purchase and throughout the store will significantly increase sales, volume and profits for retailers. Showing prepared food photos is akin to department stores showing mannequins to assist it in merchandising and as a way to create impulse purchases. So too will appetite appealing food shots setting a mood for the store event and beautiful food shots to create customer impulse to buy, and buy more. When these shots are not static, changing on a regular schedule, customers find new excitement every time they are engaged by a new themed event, touting the multitude of foods found throughout the store. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program is about making customers hungry for more: sales, volume and resulting retailer and PGM profits. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program merchandises the variety of foods found within the retail grocery store. All Insignia Total Store Marketing Programs are about making the most of available store traffic by creating an environment where customers want to buy more and want to prepare the foods that they see. The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program is turning shelves of products into a place where delicious meals and foodstuffs are easily, and conveniently purchased. This strategy competes directly with food service and fast-food restaurants to win back sales lost to them. Customers can prepare delicious foods at home for less, that are fast and easy to prepare.
Too often retail grocery stores look like warehouses with stacks and stacks of packaged goods instead of touting and promoting the foods that they sell. Featuring prepared foods within the store creates more excitement and opportunity for sampling that re-enforces the theme.
The Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising Program changes graphic items and food shots on a rotating basis and new merchandising cycles to keep the shopping experience always fresh, interesting and exciting for customers. Each week or two, the customer encounters an entirely new environment from their favorite retail store, a food adventure instead of a task. By bringing excitement back into the stores, retailers bring profits back as well – and yet another reason why PGMs should use In-Store Advertising to promote their products at the point-of-purchase, through Insignia System’s In-Store Advertising Program.
• The Insignia program is able to consistently achieve quantifiable objectives using tested and reliable methods and techniques to increase sales, volume and profits. All product data, customer data can be compared this year versus last year by product, category, and total store sales and with customer count, continually demonstrates the return on investment. Insignia assists retailers and PGMs in leveling out sales peaks and valleys for more even sales, volume and profits by using In-Store Advertising and off-season promotional methods.
• The Insignia strategic programming for strategic-branding, increases branding effectiveness by re-enforcing message strategies and giving another impression of an advert message at the point of purchase to complete the cycle. The Insignia management program is not just a price promotion, but instead a promotional event that is coordinated, controlled and promoted by Insignia’s Integrated Promotions that combine all In-Store Advertising and promotional efforts in a way that builds synergy, to create brand image for a real strategic difference: not just sell PGMs products at a discounted price, but instead total store shopping fun, excitement and surprise. Almost like a hunt for treasures, with values to be found in every aisle and throughout the store. Themed with the retailer’s branding strategy and Insignia’s total store marketing, maximizing sales, volume, and profits, from each order. Who doesn’t like food? And when promoted properly who can resist?
• Insignia Systems Targets precise customers: a regional, local market comprised of a wide variety of grocery shoppers. As PGM products are becoming increasingly niche marketing, Insignia programs are tailored to specific accounts and their unique customers’ likes and dislikes. Promotions within a promotion, can target niche-consumers with products that appeal to just them. For example, singles versus family sales – these niche-marketing targets are identified calling-out products unique to them, their unique needs, and holistic methods that appeal to all. For Local Markets, where the customer base is skewed toward an ethnic demographic, or a certain age segment, these can be accommodated by the ‘Insignia Systems In—Store Advertising Program,’ account specific programs designed for these situations.
• The Insignia System allows retailers to co-op promotional efforts with PGMs to increase the overall promotions’ effectiveness and cost, and to even co-op costs for Insignia Systems In-Store Advertising using promotional partners. Buying into events special to their brands.
• Insignia Promotions are designed to be meaningful to customers by using tried and true creative devices to gain customer attention, desire, interest and action. Insignia impactful promotions get customers actively involved in shopping the entire store. (Store section, department, themes can also be developed. Such as Quick Trip Specials – located at the storefront. Or Brand Name Deli merchandising and in-store promotion.)
• Insignia creates promotions designed to sell image, the retail brand, and to create account-specific promotions that don’t just rely on borrowed interest ideas such as holidays or seasons – but instead, promotions that tout the retailer’s unique brand image as applied to the promotional opportunities of prepared food dramatic images themed to promotional events. Promotions with the retailer’s image and message strategy included, associates the retailer’s image to food.
• With more and more PGMs demanding sales, volume and profit results for their promotional dollars, the Insignia promotional management program consistently delivers quantifiable results to build not only the retailer brand, but the PGM brand as well – encouraging ongoing promotional schedules to establish or maintain a consumer franchise by selling image and unique product benefits. With Insignia’s strategy, PGMs are able to build their brand and category franchise.
• Insignia Promotional Management can assist retailers in combining PGM sponsorships with in-store promotions and advertising. Allowing event-related premiums, mail-in or bounce-back discounts, admission discounts with proofs, or category involvement events such as drawings, sweepstakes and contest. As well as sampling events with coupons or bounce-back purchase incentives, can all be coordinated and maximized for the added synergy for both retailers and PGMs using the Insignia Promotional Management. It is the perfect conduit for developing category partner programs and promotional synergy.
Consumers are bombarded with messages and media clutter. And in-store each package fights the other. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program reduces clutter by containing packages within the section or department and giving each product a broader overall context to the promotional theme. By engaging shoppers with a single unified and coordinated promotional image and effort, it makes shopping more enjoyable and exciting. The program involves all employees down to the store level, making their experience more rewarding as well. Their individual contribution and effectiveness to assisting in the event can be seen by them as a positive contribution to increase their overall job satisfaction.
‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ provides the perfect segue for developing proprietary retailer customer relationship management data, unique to that retailer’s store and customers. Using CRM data collection about customer behavior and product movement, and the holistic approach for improving services provided for and directed at customer retention and loyalty, this information is used for targeted marketing and sales purposes. Each Insignia Total Store Event generates data on customer buying habits and targeted data from customer loyalty programs giving proprietary information on individual customers that shop at that store, what they purchased, along with personal information from their unique customer profile they provide from continuity programs such as rebates or best-customer programs. This information assists retailers and PGMs in developing strategies to better serve their unique customers for that unique store location.
‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ Program Promotional Elements
Outdoor promotional materials: Lot materials and storefront – banners, wraps, sign, window signs, etc., that promote the retail brand and themed promotional event from the outside to attract consumers into the store itself – beginning the total shopping experience.
Electronic Interactive Kiosk: Over-sized for store entrance, with floor-standing touchpad for customers to interact with the display. Smaller interactive electronic kiosks are found in store departments – produce, dairy, meat, bakery, deli, etc. Each able to dispense recipes, menu suggestions, added coupon savings, and other customer promotions that encourage the customer to shop each store section for increased sales, volume and profits from available store traffic.
Interior Wall Signs/Banners: Large electronic wall/aisle/section signs carrying promotional event themes to promote the event, store sections and departments – to sell and market foods.
End-Aisle Vertical Sign Entrance Markers: (Tall themed signs that are attached to each aisle entrance with slots to slide in the very same signs that appear at the shelf location – butted up against end-caps displays, these serve as aisle entrance merchandisers of the featured shelf products.) End-Aisle section signs reinforce shelf locations and encourage shoppers to shop the aisle for values and to shop each featured product found in the aisle.
End-Cap Displays: Header, stack signs, base-wrap, etc., all themed for the current promotional event and to promote the featured product(s).
Shelf Signs: Insignia In-Store shelf signs to encourage impulse, and have stopping power to engage the customer so they shop the entire section.
Refrigerated Signs: Designed for refrigerated equipment – door coolers/freezers, coffins, reach-ins, etc., all to increase whole-case shopping to increase impulse and multiple section purchases. Signage designed for the refrigerated equipment – i.e., right angle signs mounted atop door freezers.
Aisle Hangers: (Wire hanging signs and ceiling danglers/mobiles) signage carrying the promotional event theme.
Employee costume: caps/paper hats, buttons, aprons, jackets, matching colors, costumes to themed promotional event.
Themed Event Graphics - DVDs: Promotional Event Graphics that can be customized by retailers for their promotional marketing materials – media advertising, flyers, etc. DVD – video of event theme for use in developing TV commercials with account-specific information and featured products, created by Insignia. Themed video runs in-store on LCDs and on-line at the Insignia Interactive retailer’s site.
On-line Video – on the Insignia website - The Insignia Total Store Marketing program offers an interactive promotional overlay to bring customers into retail stores. Insignia Interactive Marketing is an Interactive Website that promotes product features by retailers designed to compliment and grow the current business of in-store point of purchase by adding an Interactive Promotional overlay to expand sales, volume and profits. The Insignia website presence attracts consumers who want to save, as an overlay to the in-store program, making Insignia Marketing program Interactive. By featuring the Insignia retailers, and then the manufacturer’s featured items, consumers can shop for savings interactively from home or work. This site provides consumers with total store savings, but on-line added spiffs such as account specific manufacturer supported double or added-savings-coupons on select items; and all of this with an easy interactive shopping list for the selected retailer where the featured items are at the top of the list for easy shopping in each store category that customers can print out and use for shopping. The on-line Video touts the event and the featured products acting like a TVC (television commercial) for the event and store, and the featured product.
The interactive website is promoted on the Insignia In-Store Advertising signs to bring customers to the site to shop for added savings. Once there, on-line video creates an account-specific commercial customized with your retail store image and featured products in a video format with a follow-up shopping list for total store shopping. It is in fact a commercial that is run prior to entering the site.
(NOTE: www.1&1.com provides economical website hosting of $4.99 per month for 2 domains that could easily be used for account-specific websites that the retailers promotes besides the www.whateverwecallit-addedsavings.com. Website we could offer account specific sites. Costs could be incorporated into the program and co-opted with PGMs.)
The Insignia Promotional Management Program
The Insignia Total Store Marketing - Management Program: This is a comprehensive management tool that allows retailers to coordinate promotional events and to take control of total store marketing to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of promotional discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM. The retailer merely informs Insignia Systems of the participating products and pricepoint, and select or confirm the theme, and the Insignia program does everything else.
Insignia Total Store Marketing and CRM
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the process a retailer uses to relate to their customers. It is a comprehensive process to develop data from customers and to involve all store employees. Insignia Software extracts information about the themed promotions and develops data used for CRM – or utilizes retailers CRM data for in-store advertising development. Employees contribute data and use data about Insignia Total Store Merchandising to make decisions to increase sales, volume and profits. From each employee’s vantage based upon customer behavior from Insignia in-store marketing programs so they can improve the customers’ shopping experience. This is as simple as going to a CRM software developer and asking for a retail grocery specific program under the Insignia brand.
Insignia Total Store Marketing develops data from promotional activities and from customer loyalty programs and incentives to provide retailers with current intelligence on promotional events, category data, product movement, and, customer behavior and feedback – that can be shared with PGMs if warranted.
Insignia Total Store Merchandising Software is designed to extract promotional facts to improve the retailer’s in-store advertising effectiveness. Details on customer contacts are stored in the system to be used to select product mix for future promotions and used by category buyers to increase their promotional effectiveness.
Insignia Total Store Marketing is a holistic approach to CRM that involves all aspects of the retail grocery store – from product offerings, promotion, environment, and a means to involve all personal through the implementation of timed promotional events. All to increase sales, volume and profits from available store traffic, leverage customer seasonal buying habits, to implement strategic retail branding, and to develop better customer loyalty and trust – as well as creating a customer shopping experience filled with wonder, excitement and surprise.
The Insignia Total Store Marketing is a holistic approach to CRM that is a combination of coordinated guidelines, processes, and strategies implemented by a retailer that unite in its interaction with its customers while providing an in-store marketing program that yields a mechanism for tracking customer information as a result of that point-in-time, in-store advertising marketing effort.
The Insignia Total Store Merchandising assists retailers with: Featured product mix and buying decisions, administration and operations; Logistics, warehouse/distribution decisions, and store design; Business relationships with PGMs, distributors and brokers – through The Insignia Total Store Merchandising program, it offers qualitative and quantitative evidence to increase promotional activities for mutual business rewards between retailers and PGMs. All of this is accomplished by retailer and Insignia feedback. By sharing information and improving the system each unique store and retailer improves.
Most importantly is that Insignia System’s strategy of creating a food friendly environment in retail grocery stores that celebrate food and the foods around the world. Grocery Stores have an unlimited bounty of the world’s finest and best foods, with unlimited preparation possibilities. Aside from whole foods and ingredients, a wide variety of prepared foods and ready-to-eat foods exit in grocery stores, these are highly competitive to food service operations. Grocery stores offer thousands of prepared foods compared to limited menu offerings from food service operations.
Insignia’s opportunity is to promote this bounty, and thereby create an environment for customers that enhances their shopping experience, causing them to shop each section, category, and shop the entire store for increased rings for retailers and increased product sales for packaged goods manufacturers.
Transforming retail grocery stores from warehouses for food stuffs into dynamic and engaging shopping environments by touting the foods found within the stores creates a stark contrast between neat and orderly rolls and stacks of packaged goods and large appetite appeal lit photographs of food. Large oversized appetite appealing shots of food contrasts well against the orderly displays of packaged goods. These food photographs are then applied to seasonal opportunities: Fall Harvest Bounty, Christmas treats and main courses, popular foods such as pizza, hamburgers, chicken – all prepared showing appetite appeal in oversized splendor and as a contrast to the neatly stocked packaged goods. The bounty of foods found in grocery stores is what Insignia is promoting to customers with its themed In-Store Advertising materials all to encourage the shopper to shop the entire store, and to create more impulse shopping for higher sales, volume
and profits for grocers and PGMs.
Insignia has been promoting PMGs packaged goods. Now Insignia has the opportunity to promote these packaged goods in the broader context of prepared foods and meal ideas. Its in-store advertising materials opens up new opportunities for PGMs to show their products in a prepared way, showing serving suggestions in large appetite appeal photographs that are backlit to make them more appealing and causing more impulse purchases.
Summary
Technology at store level has opened more promotional doors for retailers. Electronic continuity programs, competitive Couponing, and data collection through scanners have all improved the retailer’s marketing effectiveness. However, while all of this is true, retailers have put it all together in a way that has created more clutter and confusion in-store. Other than using its well-established flow of traffic, improved shelving systems and refrigerated equipment and product offerings – retailers have not effectively implemented new electronic merchandising technologies into their stores. If they have it, it is not cohesive and unified throughout the store, being more hit and miss. Many companies have tried unsuccessfully to capitalize on store traffic and the opportunity to market food products to them in-store. Grocers had in the past, peaking in the sixties, used PGMs supplied promotional materials to increase sales, volume, and profits. While these displays did contribute to increased activity, they created store clutter and diminished the retail store brand while promoting the PGMs brand. Typically point of purchase materials consisted of displays: end-cap, huge stack displays, coffin freezer end-caps, that used point-of-purchase materials: display header, stack signs, base wraps and price signs. When combined with price features carried in the retailer’s flyer or ad, these efforts of display and feature yielded sales increases of up to 550%. Display and feature became the mantra of the sixties through to the eighties. Retailers typically leveraged PGMs for added trade promotion dollars until retailers uniformly began to use their own point-of-purchase materials to promote in-store.
Retailers became aware of branding. Increasingly PGMs used branding techniques to promote their unique brand in-store using the displays to tout their brand. Retailers claimed this PGM brand competition caused in-store clutter. Retailers took charge of the in-store display activity and created a unified in-store image that reflected the store brand image. So during the eighties PGMs used more and more ‘branding’ techniques to merchandise their brands, and shifted from appetite appeal display materials that showed prepared food in serving suggestions for appetite appeal – to in-store promotional materials that touted their brand image. Retailers realized what was happening claiming it caused in-store clutter, adopting instead to promote its own store brand. And that mistake was adopting its corporate image and bringing it to store level to create sterile looking neat shelves framed by the corporate image. It is when this shift from appetite appeal and prepared food displays left retail grocery stores. Retailers nationwide adopted sterile looking corporate image and the loss of the images of prepared foods separated them from the rest of the food industry. They became warehouses where fresh foods and packaged foods were purchased. This coincided with the boom in fast-food restaurants and mid-scale restaurants, causing food retailers to increasingly lose a greater share of the food dollar. This trend continues to today.
At the same time retailers increasingly face a competitive environment among themselves, where everyday low prices compete against retailer’s marketing efforts diminishing their own brand and the PGMs brands. Insignia Total Store Marketing seeks to engage consumers on more than price alone bringing the merchandising of prepared food (eatable food, not food packages) back into grocery stores, while still maintaining the retailer’s corporate image. While store location remains important to customers, many are making more frequent trips to large discounters and club stores to the chagrin of grocery retailers. When Walmart entered the retail grocery business, within its first year it became the world’s largest food retailer, creating even more competition for the retail food industry and leaving them looking for effective methods to compete. Walmart and others within that category have an overall corporate image that transcends each department including grocery. Grocery stores need to compete against this fact: they specialize only in food, not everything under the sun like the huge discounters. By merchandising their primary product, food, retailers can distinguish themselves from mass merchandisers and create an entirely new holistic and cohesive look that promotes the bounty of the foods it sells. It can compete directly against food operators for a greater share of the food dollar, and the large merchandisers to win back lost customers, using the Insignia System Total Store Marketing Program. Simply put, Insignia promotes food first, the retailer’s image next, and finally the PGMs, and all of the foods found within the retail grocery store showing food in its prepared state for appetite appeal, and its bounty, throughout the store, to make the most of store traffic, making the shopping experience exciting for customers. For example: instead of looking at pimply skinned white chickens, imagine the bounty of chicken – fried, roasted, ethic recipes like Yakitori, Chicken Tacos, a bucket of fried chicken, etc., then carrying the store branding, and then a Foster’s Farm® or a Golden Plump® logo on the same display. Instead of cases filled with stacks of vegetables, colorful photos of prepared salads, cooked vegetables, snacks, etc., all with the retailer’s image and then suppliers logos: Dole®, Del Monte®, Green Giant®, etc.
Getting retailers back into the business of promoting food is what the Insignia Systems Total Store Marketing Program is all about: Bringing appetite appealing food photographs back into the store, and shown in seasonal and special holiday context throughout the store for total store merchandising, yet maintaining the retail store image, and promoting the PGMs’ brands. Insignia is helping grocery retailers get back into the ‘Food’ business, assisting it in learning how to motivate its customers to buy more and shop the entire store, to spend more of their food dollars with them.
The Insignia Total Store Marketing program is a holistic approach to CRM (Customer Relationship Management), and utilizes tried and true promotional and merchandising methods and techniques to increase incremental sales, volume, and profits from available store traffic while creating marketing themes for retailer’s media advertising to increase strategic store branding for a holistic retailer marketing program. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program offers PGMs qualitative and quantitative evidence to increase their promotional activities for mutual business rewards. Insignia increases the effectiveness of the retailer’s CRM efforts by involving all personnel in a cohesive and impactful marketing program designed to boost sales, volume, and profits from available store traffic while developing a continuity program of multiple promotional events throughout the year building customer loyalty and strategic brand image by merchandising the entire grocery store; touting the foods and brands it offers to its customers.
Clutter continues to be an issue with customers and PGMs – that customers become resistant to promotion and PGMs believe that their brand is lost in the clutter. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program combats clutter by use of creative themed promotional materials that merchandise the entire store with a strategic retailer brand image and message, an overall merchandising theme for continuous flow and shopping throughout the store – from lot to exit, the customer is engrossed and absorbed in a complete food experience. Expanding and growing that customer experience is Insignia’s business, and in doing so it grows the retailers and PGMs business.
This proposal is concerned with expanding Insignia’s in-store advertising and promotional products, programs and services to provide retailers and PGMs with a breakthrough concept of highly effective storewide added-value promotions that tout ‘Food” instead of the current discount only promotions showing packages instead of prepared foods. ‘In-store advertising programs with total store marketing programs,’ are managed to add more expansive merchandising and brand promotion for both the retailer and for the PGM to build sales, volume and profits. In order to maximize customer sales on each store visit through ‘Insignia Total Store Marketing’ a total store experience for customers is created to market foods that the retailers offer and the PGMs produce. Unlike hit and miss trendy promotions, Insignia’s program manages all promotional activities in a single coordinated effort to create a strategic brand-building synergy otherwise not available. Simply put, coordinating all promotional efforts yields more and better results than when used separately. Insignia uses tried and true creative point-of-sale methods and techniques that are not copy-heavy to promote increased impulse purchases. It instead relies on appetite appeal food photographs to make customers hungry to buy. Because Insignia Systems is about In-Store Advertising, it does not seek retailer or PGM media advertising, but does offer an Interactive website for video commercials that are account specific to provide for increasing customer traffic and for continuity sales. Insignia does provide themed promotional creative for retailer or PGMs media advertising on DVDs and for use on Insignia account-specific websites.
Sound promotional marketing knowledge goes into the Insignia Total Store Marketing Program, to provide Insignia Systems with an added-value business model for increasing its current business by augmenting it with this program. The entire venture is dependent upon integrating Insignia with the retailer and positioning Insignia as the preeminent promotional In-Store Advertising service in the world. The profit center for Insignia remains the same – printing. Small fees for developing customized promotions beyond account specific, using retailer or PGM ideas or themes, can be created, but the profit comes from producing and placing them. This proposal offers Insignia Systems with a unique-selling-proposition that can deliver promotional synergy to its clients, both retailers and PGMs. Insignia will compete with knowledge of its customers, strong customized proposals, creativity, quality execution, and flawless service.
Once the program is in place, a strong self-promotion campaign of direct mail and trade journals’ articles and ads will grow the program, but ongoing innovation and success will sustain it. Insignia’s sole relationship with its clients is to add value to their business by producing quantifiable and qualitative results, for Insignia to develop the same loyalty it instills in its clients’ customers to build their unique brand. So too with Insignia, it must be constantly improving its products and services to improve theirs.
Many scholars and futurists are calling Advertising a sunset industry that grew because of broadcast media. But now with media fragmentation and the advent of New Media, it has lost its hold on retailers and PGMs. The In-Store Advertising business has fluctuated with retailers maintaining the steady ground using tried and true promotional methods for attracting traffic and using impulse sale methods to increase product sales. Using industry knowledge coupled with innovative new approaches, Insignia’s total marketing approach uses the best of all promotions in a unified and coordinated manner. The Insignia Total Store Marketing program manages promotional marketing for retailers to increase trade promotion from PGMs to reverse the thinking of short-term sale inducements of discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM.
This proposal is concerned with expanding Insignia’s in-store advertising and promotional products, programs and services to provide retailers and PGMs with a breakthrough concept of highly effective storewide added-value promotions instead of the current discount only promotions. ‘In-store advertising programs with total store marketing programs,’ managed to add more expansive merchandising and brand promotion for both the retailer and for the PGM – and for a better shopping experience for consumers. That shift from short-term sale inducements of discounts to that of branding and franchise building for both retailer and PGM is Insignia System’s strategic point-of-difference, and is the foundation of the total store marketing concept – the management of this promotional marketing effort for retailers to increase PGMs involvement and promotional dollars and for Insignia to take charge of the holistic In-Store Advertising marketing function.
The very best in strategic, creative, and promotional thinking is required in the 21st Century to achieve the potential of this proposed business model. But based upon Insignia Systems’ previous success, it is all achievable by building upon the current business and employing The Insignia Promotional Management Program to expand the influence over PGMs and retailers’ promotional budgets. Price/value relationships that rely only upon continued fire-sales diminish the brand value of both retailers and PGMs. The Insignia program promotes the retailers brand through its values, service and the shopping excitement it generates. In ever-changing retail store environments Insignia brings an image to the retail brand and value to PGMs brands without constant discounting schemes, but by promoting and creating appropriate merchandising and promotional events to engage consumers in a way to build retailers and PGMs brands while providing a promotional management program to increase sales, volume and profits for each.
The marketing war today is in the retail stores. There is a constant battle between retailers, who are no longer satisfied with local market dominance, now wanting increased business to compete with the nation’s largest distributor-retailers.
Insignia System’s In-Store Advertising ‘Total Store’ program can help to increase store traffic with innovative promotions, increase rings by encouraging total store shopping and complete category shopping, assist in developing quantitative product movement data during promotional events to allow for warehousing considerations for stocking extra inventory to avoid out-of-stocks, providing information on how much to discount products and determining when the manufacturer allowance will suffice – all to determine what branding and promotions strategically build the retail store brand.
Insignia’s In-Store Advertising answers all of these questions with its total store marketing programs. Ultimately retailers compete on service, customer convenience, ambiance, comparative value, and their ability to create loyalty with its customers. PGMs are looking for dependable In-Store Advertising programs that produce quantifiable results. Insignia Systems, In-Store Advertising makes the most of available store traffic by developing customer interest, builds interest in shopping the entire store, and creates loyalty while building the retailer’s brand, extending branding with Insignia In-Store Advertising.
There are no texts, lessons, or information on persuasion in Advertising or for In-Store Advertising specific. No literature exists on persuasion that is tied specifically to advertising. Literature exists about functional areas such as construction of campaigns, media buying, budgeting, management, testing and measurement, analysis of famous campaigns and the ideas of preeminent practitioners. As such there are no specific books on consumer persuasion only examples of what worked for someone else concluding that persuasion was an element in the success equation. The good news is that practitioners with experience in promotional marketing have deduced point-of-sale methods and techniques that persuade consumers to buy with statistically consistent results. The science of In-Store Advertising involves persuasion through creative devices that encourage impulse purchases and increased purchases.
Insignia Systems Total Store Marketing uses tested promotional methods and relies on ‘unified and changing thematic appetite appeal food photographs throughout the store,’ to make customers hungry to buy. ‘Insignia makes customers hungry to buy,’ is a good message strategy, because that it what this program is all about. Showing food that retail grocery customers will want to buy and creating a shopping experience that makes customers spend more of their food dollars in grocery stores – turning the stayed warehouse image to one of sales floor, where food is marketed to a captive audience. There are multiple opportunities for Insignia to offer Packaged Goods Manufacturers In-Store Ad Space beyond its current offering of shelf-signs only. By taking charge of merchandising the entire store, Insignia takes the lead in cutting-edge In-Store Advertising. It is a breakthrough concept in total store merchandising.
By: Daryl J. Orris, Ph.D.
Marketing Consultant
©2008 Viking Creative Concepts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Creating lasting impressions in the food and beverage industry since 1960.
APPENDIX A
INSIGNIA INTERACTIVE MARKETING/PROMOTIONAL PROGRAM
What it is
Insignia Interactive Marketing is an Interactive website that features product features by retailers designed to compliment and grow the current business of in-store point of purchase by adding an Interactive promotional overlay to expand sales, volume and profits.
"Embrace digital media 100%"; "invest in global diversification, "be more integrated in all your marketing activities;" and, "execute research and focus on compelling product benefits." This is the recommendation coming from the world’s top advertising agencies.
The question is how is this done for in-store advertising and for Insignia? I have a few ideas about integrating New Media interactive into the Insignia In-Store Advertising programs that also expands and grows Insignia’s current business while making it integrated with New Media, and therefore making it state-of-the-art: the premier Promotional Advertising Service for PGMs and retailers.
Because Insignia knows what signage it has in what stores, and what products are featured, and what the pricepoints are: developing a website presence to attract consumers who want to save would be the logical way to make Insignia Interactive. By featuring the Insignia retailers, and then the manufacturer’s featured items, consumers can shop for savings interactively. Not only would this site provide consumers with total store savings, but on-line added spiffs such as account specific manufacturer supported double or added-savings-coupons on select items; and all of this with an easy interactive shopping list for the selected retailer where the featured items are at the top of the list for easy shopping in each store category. Also, the interactive website allows the running of 30-60 second commercial spots that tout food and the retailer’s brand image. The website is promoted on the bottom of in-store shelf signs, and through the grocer’s flyers or advertisements.
With this list, Insignia can increase its business by showing how the program works to competitive category PGMs and to competitive retailers, thus growing Insignias business presence and effectiveness. And because Insignia knows that its in-store efforts work, they know that the sign will work to promote the website as well –
For Double/Added-Savings: see www.whateverwecallit.com.
Or: For added values see www.whateverwecallit.com.
The Insignia website can also provide both retail and PGM customers with actual “hits” data, and it also counts downloads, such as account specific, coupons that offer deep discounts off of the already featured price for ‘Double or Added Saving,’ and on-line printable shopping lists. This verifiable data of hits and downloads re-enforces the effectiveness of the Insignia promotional program by generating quantifiable data that Insignia can report to program participants.
Tie-ins between retailers and PGMs can also be created, where Insignia is the conduit for facilitating promotional activity between them: Both with PMGs and Retailers by facilitating these promotions between Category Buyers/Promotional Retail Managers and PGM Brand/Sales Managers. Later, Insignia can initiate category sales and promotions that promote a retailer’s entire section; as well as develop new promotional tools that retailers and PGM Marketers can use to promote sales: themed “Meal Deals,” total store sales for complete meal deals to compete with fast-food and foodservice competitors.
The website is first established and then sold-in to retailers and manufacturers as support for the Insignia In-Store Advertising Program. The program itself is promoted by the POP signage itself with a statement on the bottom of each talker that says: For ‘Double-Savings and Super-Buys,’ come to: www.whateverwecallit.com
The way this Interactive program is introduced to retailers and to PGMs is by telling them that this will increase their reach and promotional activity while increasing their Interactive Marketing with the provided links in the www.whateverwecallit.com website once quantifiable data is available.
How it works
Establish an Interactive website that promotes the featured products, the PMGs and the Retailers. The Insignia in-store POP has a promotional tagline at the bottom of every sign that says: For Double/added-Savings and Super-Buys, come to: www.whateverwecallit.com
The Insignia Interactive program expands Insignia’s current business by integrating an Interactive media component into it, one that can increase Insignia’s current business by increasing sales from existing clients, but by also using the new promotional extension to attract new sales from other PGMs in each category: Insignia Integrated In-Store Advertising.
The program has to be staged, before it rolls out nationally to keep it from being adopted by other PGMs and by retailers and to develop sufficient data to present to them. A large enough presence needs to be developed to have a defensible position to protect copyrights and the business model. By working closely with key PGMs and retailers, the program can expand to the point where it becomes exclusive, proprietary and effective, to grow the business and take it to the next level, as a fully integrated, In-Store and Interactive Promotional/ Marketing Service for PGMs and Retailers.
Website design would include a FLASH video introduction that features prepared food video in an appetite-appealing manner, the retailer’s brand image, and the logos-packages of participating brands. The menu bar is yet to be determined but could include: Store Selector – Featured Foods – Shopping List – Extra Bonus Values – Recipes – Menu Plans – Food Preparation Ideas – New Products - Upcoming Store Events – and the like.
Materials
1.) An Insignia Interactive website designed to engage female consumers who want to save. Imagery touts prepared foods.
1.) Signs, POP prototypes. All photographed in a super market.
1.) Sales/marketing materials – PGM set, and a Retailer set.
1.) Store Front kiosk that touts the program and offers shopping lists with featured products.
1.) New media advertising campaign.
1.) Trade journal advertising.
1.) Public Relations efforts to show the new concept in making retail grocery stores more inviting and less like a warehouse.
1.) Articles written for Women Service Books touting the new look in grocery stores and how the change affects shopping.
1.) Integrating the Interactive with the Insignia In-Store Advertising Program.
1.) Evaluation of programs and staged modifications as needed.
What it does
Creates an Interactive product for Insignia to promote and increase its presence in its current business; expands that business by increasing the scope and presence of its POP and adding a promotional marketing overlay that will attract category competitors from both the PGM and retailer ranks. Above all, it makes Insignia state of the art in In-Store Advertising by adding an Interactive component to its business.
Why it will work
We are at time when both PGMs and retailers are threatened by large discounters and private label products that are defeating the promotional efforts of both. Retailers such as ALDI, COSTCO and Wal-mart, among others, have become a threat to them because of price discounters who in time cheapen their own brand. The immediate threat is an opportunity for Insignia Systems.
With Insignia Interactive Marketing we have two dynamics working for us:
1.) The consumer’s desire to save. Growing consumer use of interactive media.
2.) The Integration of Interactive media to make the company state-of-the-art In-Store Advertising and in promotional marketing services for both retail and PGM customers.
© 2008, Viking Creative Concepts, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Contact: Daryl Orris at 952-545-2915 or at daryl.orris@gmail.com
Creating lasting impressions in the food and beverage industry since 1960.
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