Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the author of “Better Brand Health”
talkingpoints
huddle Media Group Announces Launch of Innovative Marketing Platform.
Canadian startup huddle Media Group is excited to announce the official launch of its small business marketing platform, huddle, in Ontario. huddle offers affordable and accessible marketing solutions, including a feature-rich online business directory and community-focused direct mail planner, set to transform how small businesses are found, heard, and connected in their local communities. Developed with a belief that small businesses are the heartbeat of our communities, huddle goes beyond a typical online directory, providing comprehensive solutions to connect small business owners with their customers and making it easier than ever for Ontario residents to discover and support local entrepreneurs.
Benefits of huddle include:
❯ Enhanced Visibility: Small businesses can create rich, detailed profiles to attract more customers. With features like business descriptions, images, location maps, and contact information, businesses can showcase what makes them stand out.
❯ Community Engagement: huddle provides a space for businesses to post deals, events, and job openings, fostering a deeper connection with the community.
Consumers can easily find what’s happening in their area and support local businesses in new ways.
❯ Lead Generation: By enabling businesses to interact directly with their audience through the platform’s custom dashboard, huddle helps generate valuable leads and drive traffic to both brick-and-mortar stores and professional service providers.
“We are excited to introduce huddle to Ontario communities,” said Doug Daymond, Founder and Managing Director of huddle Media Group. “Our goal is to make it easy for people to discover and support the incredible small businesses and charitable organizations that make up our communities. The platform is designed to be user-friendly for both business owners and consumers, ensuring everyone can benefit from the power of local connections.”
huddle’s standout feature is its 11” x 12” Community Dry-Erase Planner distributed in partnership with Canada Post, free of charge to thousands of residences every four months. Tailored to each community, these planners serve as practical organizers while showcasing profile ads for 32 local businesses, each exclusive in their category, and features a unique QR code that links consumers directly to their online huddle profile.
huddle reinforces its dedication to uplifting Canadian communities with a Community Give Back Program, assisting local charities and nonprofits by donating a portion of revenues to support essential causes and enrich the lives of those in need.
huddle Media Group is dedicated to helping small businesses enhance their visibility, attract more customers, and foster meaningful connections within their communities. Its community-driven platform, huddle, connects entrepreneurs with local customers through digital and direct mail marketing solutions. huddle Media Group actively supports local charities, non-profits, and community associations, providing them with resources to promote their causes and initiatives.
Montreal-based Plusgrade, a global leader powering ancillary revenue solutions for the travel industry, has partnered with Lark Hotels, the acclaimed lifestyle hotel company, heralding a new era of hospitality excellence.
The partnership will integrate Plusgrade’s innovative upselling solutions into Lark Hotels’ property management systems to elevate the guest experience. Additionally, it will unlock significant revenue streams for Lark Hotels across its portfolio of boutique properties in iconic locations across the United States.
Lark Hotels will now benefit from Plusgrade’s suite of hospitality solutions, delivering highly personalized and memorable experiences. Guests at Lark Hotels will have access to “Premium Upgrades”, allowing them to bid on or purchase premium room upgrades through a seamless user experience. “StayExtend” offers guests the flexibility to check-in early, check-out later, or extend their stay, providing unmatched convenience and satisfaction. Additionally, “StayPlus” enables guests to customize their stay with a variety of post-booking amenities such as spa sessions, gourmet dinners, and on-property rentals.
“We’re excited to provide Lark Hotels with the tools to delight guests and maximize high-margin opportunities that will drive substantial revenue growth,” said Ken Harris, founder and CEO of Plusgrade. “Our solutions are designed to enhance guest satisfaction through personalized upgrades and customized amenities. Together with Lark Hotels, we will set new standards in the hospitality industry, delivering exceptional experiences that not only boost operational efficiency but also exceed guest expectations, fostering loyalty and driving growth.”
Leveraging data from its extensive global ancillary revenue network, Plusgrade will provide Lark Hotels with valuable market insights, enabling informed decisionmaking and strategic enhancements to guest experiences. Plusgrade’s personalized
approach to customer engagement increases conversion rates, and ensures that Lark Hotels continuously optimizes their revenue strategies.
“Our partnership with Plusgrade emphasizes our commitment to innovation and guestcentric hospitality,” said Nikola Jasprica, VP, Revenue Management, of Lark Hotels. “Their innovative solutions align perfectly with our commitment to hospitality excellence and they will enable us to offer our guests more personalized and flexible stay options.”
For years, Plusgrade has been a global leader in developing and delivering ancillary revenue solutions, helping the world’s largest air, rail, and cruise companies maximize their revenue streams. Plusgrade is now powering the hospitality industry, helping 600+ hotel properties worldwide elevate guest experiences, drive ancillary revenue, and seamlessly digitize and automate their operations.
Plusgrade powers the global travel industry with its portfolio of leading ancillary revenue solutions. Over 200 airline, hospitality, cruise, passenger rail, and financial services companies trust Plusgrade to create new, meaningful revenue streams through incredible customer experiences. As the ancillary revenue powerhouse, Plusgrade has generated billions of dollars in new revenue opportunities across its platform for its partners, while creating enhanced travel experiences for millions of their passengers
and guests. Plusgrade was founded in 2009 with headquarters in Montreal and has offices around the world.
Brandwatch Accelerates into the Social Customer Care Space. Brandwatch, a social media intelligence system, unveiled Case Management within its social media suite.
This innovative feature empowers brands to transition from community management to comprehensive customer care, fostering deeper customer relationships and boosting brand loyalty.
Case Management is arming brands to own the entire customer care journey on social media,” said Michael Amsinck, Chief Product Officer at Cision.
Brandwatch’s new Case Management transforms how social media managers, community managers, and customer care teams handle service requests. With the ability to seamlessly convert customer inquiries into actionable cases, Brandwatch empowers teams to deliver exceptional customer care at the speed of social.
The introduction of Case Management brings several powerful benefits to Brandwatch users:
❯ Effortless Case Creation: Easily convert social media messages into trackable cases, with all relevant information for efficient resolution.
❯ Enhanced Team Collaboration: Seamless team collaboration with features that make it easy to assign cases, delegate tasks, and keep everyone in the loop.
❯ AI Powered Assistance: Improve customer response times with Iris, Brandwatch’s AI writing assistant, which suggests relevant and on-brand responses to customer inquiries.
❯ Comprehensive Case Overview: View all relevant information at a glance, with a comprehensive case overview, powered by AI-based solutions to prevent missed inquiries and ensure clear, timely responses.
“Social media has become such a critical touchpoint for customer service,” said Michael Amsinck, Chief Product Officer. “Customers increasingly expect prompt and personalized responses to their inquiries on social platforms. With Case Management, we’re arming brands with the tools they need to not only listen and respond, but to own the entire customer care journey on social media.”
Brandwatch is dedicated to bringing brands closer to their customers and helping them succeed in the evolving digital landscape. With the launch of Case Management, Brandwatch empowers companies to scale and refine their operations with efficiency and precision.
WPP and IBM announced the launch of a new business-to-business (B2B) solution powered by IBM’s AI and data platform watsonx designed to reinvent how B2B marketers identify and engage clients and prospects across the buying journey.
WPP Open for B2B will help marketers solve complex B2B marketing challenges, accurately identify and engage buying groups, and improve clients’ return on investment.
Buying groups are made up of multiple stakeholders with different priorities who influence key purchasing decisions both inside and outside of organizations, which can make it difficult to deliver a consistent message over a long sales period. Traditionally, understanding how to adjust that message across the right channels to guide buying groups to purchase is challenging and often leads to inefficient marketing spend.
WPP Open for B2B is powered by watsonx — an AI and data platform designed to accelerate the impact of AI across businesses — and will bring together marketleading, proprietary capabilities from both organizations. WPP and IBM will strategically collaborate with LinkedIn to help brands better understand buying groups so they can market more effectively and reach target buyers.
Alan Webber, Program Vice President –Digital Platform Ecosystems at analyst firm IDC believes “this product and partnership have the potential to be an exponential force multiplier for the Fortune 1000.”
Stephan Pretorius, Chief Technology Officer at WPP, said: “Our clients want to get in front of the right people, at the right time, on the right channels, with the right message. However, most solutions in the market today are designed for consumer marketing, targeted at sole decision-makers at a single point of purchase. WPP Open for B2B, and our collaboration with IBM and LinkedIn, will help solve some incredibly complex challenges in the B2B marketing space, using the best of WPP and IBM technology and expertise.”
Jonathan Adashek, Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications at IBM, said: “B2B marketers have been focused on creating truly personalized, relevant and consistent experiences for buying groups at scale for years. Our collaboration with WPP and LinkedIn provides real-time, actionable insights that are based on trusted data. We are excited to create and use these new, powerful and trusted AI solutions to deliver a force multiplier for B2B marketing.”
Penry Price, Vice President at LinkedIn, said: “With success in B2B requiring customers to reach between 6 to 10 stakeholders, building relationships and ‘collective confidence’
talkingpoints
among the entire buyer group is key. We are looking forward to working with WPP and IBM to determine how our unique knowledge of buyer groups can help inform WPP Open for B2B and help clients deliver more effective advertising campaigns.”
WPP and IBM have used watsonx to build capabilities for the platform including:
❯ AI-powered Buying Group Brain™ – a WPP AI model that can more accurately identify target buying groups in a B2B client account, built with IBM watsonx.ai and trained on trustworthy data from the client and third parties through IBM watsonx.data. It can also inform how marketers deliver personalized and consistent experiences across channels and across the duration of a long-term influencer campaign.
❯ Orchestration and optimization – using insights from WPP’s Buying Group Brain™ AI model to optimize engagement and opportunity progression for buying groups. That includes providing recommendations for channel mix and content to ensure buying groups experience a cohesive, consistent and relevant message. It can also help marketers track marketing activity effectiveness with a buying group and adjust messaging or influencer targeting on demand.
Chief Marketing Officer command center – an AI assistant that serves as a command center for CMOs, bringing forward data and insights and connecting underlying systems so senior marketers can plan and model scenarios, predict results, make more data-driven decisions and execute recommended actions. These capabilities are supported by the IBM watsonx.governance toolkit to help clients govern and transparently track the performance of the AI models. IBM has already begun deploying the new platform within its marketing and communications organization. WPP’s creative and technology expertise alongside the joint innovation on the watsonx platform is expected to support IBM’s objective to accelerate growth through AI-driven marketing.
WPP Open for B2B powered by watsonx is designed for enterprise scale, security, governance and easy integration into clients’ existing systems, combining the open capabilities of WPP Open, IBM watsonx and Red Hat OpenShift1.
IBM Consulting is the primary change management consulting partner for the solution. That includes helping clients customize and operate the platform, integrate it into their marketing workflows and build employees’ skills and adoption of the platform, using the collaborative engagement model IBM Garage. IBM consultants can help clients select and deploy the right AI models for the platform based on their requirements, including enterprise grade models like IBM Granite, open source or other third-party models.
HEC Montréal and SAP launch innovative learning platform.
Business Builders, a free and innovative learning platform that aims to prepare future business leaders for a data-driven world is being launched today by HEC Montréal in partnership with SAP. This initiative is a response to the accelerating pace of digital transformation in recent years, which has exposed a global IT skills shortage. The platform provides a gaming experience based on data analysis and visualization techniques to solve real-world business problems, and it empowers students to enhance the criticalthinking and decision-making skills needed for business success.
This innovative learning platform has been designed to develop essential data storytelling and decision-making skills through real-world business scenarios. Three distinct scenarios are currently available: sustainability of the investment portfolio based on ESG criteria, supply chain resilience, and international expansion. Each scenario is designed to challenge students in specific areas of business management that are as varied as data or market analysis, logistics, and product development. The platform welcomes learners at all skill levels, including those with no prior knowledge of data science or programming.
“All business school students, regardless of their specialization, benefit immensely from learning advanced visualization techniques. These skills enable them to manage and interpret vast amounts of data, derive meaningful business insights, and make informed decisions effectively.” – PierreMajorique Léger, Professor, Department of Information Technologies, HEC Montréal.
The platform also equips students with unique and sought-after skills that set them apart in the global job market. Furthermore,
it aims to connect academic learning with industry needs, thereby ensuring the acquisition of practical skills that are essential for successful careers in the future.
“Data visualization is one of the most sought-after skills in the current job market, and our gaming platform equips students with a competitive edge. By merging learning with gaming, we are driving student engagement while building career-relevant skills.” – Karina Edmonds, SVP, Global Head of Academies and University Alliances, SAP.
And finally, one of the cornerstones of this platform is also its commitment to inclusivity. By offering it free of charge to academic institutions worldwide, SAP University Alliances and HEC Montréal aim to ensure that aspiring leaders, regardless of geographic or socioeconomic barriers, have access to stateof-the-art resources that will help them enter the digital professional world.
An internationally renowned Frenchlanguage university, HEC Montréal is open to the world and firmly rooted in the Quebec community. Since 1907, it has been training leaders in all areas of management, who contribute responsibly to the success of organizations and the sustainable transition of society. Its community includes nearly 14,000 students from 146 countries, over 300 faculty members and more than 110,000 graduates, who make their mark here and around the world. The School offers nearly 150 programs at all undergraduate and graduate levels, and welcomes more than 9,000 managers and executives every year.
Traction Complete Launches “The RevOps Data Management Suite for Salesforce.
In an era where artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming business, Traction Complete proudly announces the launch of “The RevOps Data Management Suite for Salesforce,” the first-of-its-kind data management suite of products exclusively designed for Revenue Operations professionals. This innovative suite is engineered to empower users to harness the full potential of their data, ensuring it is clean, connected, and ready for AI adoption.
In today’s data-driven environment, data integrity is paramount. The RevOps Data Management Suite addresses the critical need for high-quality data. “The importance of clean and connected data can’t be overstated, especially in the age of AI. Without a solid foundation of reliable data, businesses are navigating in the dark, unable to make strategic decisions” said David Nelson, CEO of Traction Complete.
Echoing this sentiment, Vice President, Revenue Operations, Stephen Daniels from Cresta adds, “There is a cost to bad data. If we
didn’t have a solution like Traction Complete in the first place to scale off, we would be building on a bad foundation that would cause hundreds of thousands of dollars of headaches in the future.”
Poor data is more than just a nuisance; it’s a significant barrier to success. It leads to distrust in CRM systems and lost productivity, ultimately impacting business revenue.
Traction Complete’s mission is to combat these challenges head-on, ensuring that data is accurate and seamlessly integrated across the Salesforce platform, so businesses can adopt the latest technology when they want to.
Recent findings from McKinsey underscore the critical role of data quality in AI adoption, “Fifty-six percent of companies say “inaccuracy” is the biggest risk posed by adopting generative AI. Yet only 32 percent of companies have systems in place for mitigating such inaccuracies.”
Primed to solve this challenge, Traction Complete, born from the recently Salesforceacquired Traction on Demand, draws from over 1.4 million hours of consulting experience to build trusted data management solutions to improve data quality.
“At the pace that AI and machine learning are expanding and changing how we operate, businesses can’t afford to overlook the importance of data quality. Any businesses not setting their data foundation right now will be left behind,” adds Nelson.
As organizations continue to navigate the complexities of digital transformation, the message is clear: the time to invest in data management is now. With the RevOps Data Management Suite for Salesforce, Traction Complete is leading the way, providing the tools necessary for businesses to thrive in the age of AI and beyond.
Traction Complete’s RevOps Data Management Suite for Salesforce helps revenue operations teams cleanse, connect, and orchestrate data. Since 2019, we’ve been on a mission to automate complex data tasks in Salesforce, empowering organizations like Asana, Zoom, and YMCA to save time and scale faster.
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Your opportunity? Entice our readers into becoming your customers. Test a fixed period of marketing via our channel(s) (print, digital, web, email, in-person, social, content, mail, courier, lights in the night sky) and we’ll provide you with data. Lots of data. Live leads, real contacts, analytics, tracking results and our own suggestions and advice on what to do to build your momentum. We’re known for bundling full programs for an appropriate discount that you can justify confidently and comfortably through measured results and long-range success.
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Watching the Skies:
Tech Developers Pioneering AI Tools Revolutionize Future Productivity and Logistics
How we embrace this surging adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in the economy of the future remains up for debate. Already, we’re seeing the impact of AI adoption in the workplace, in culture, and in finance, but it won’t end there. According to Goldman Sachs, AI is showing “very positive” signs of eventually boosting GDP and productivity, while some experts
are remarking that the generative AI tech wave is sweeping in much faster (maybe 10x) than early internet.
One way to gauge how this impacts the world of the datadriven business and data-powered marketing is to look at the directional choices of some of the world’s largest providers. Clues to how your decisions should be put into context can definitely be revealed and improved from watching the flagships unfurl their sails.
Behind the scenes, tech developers are building AI-powered tools that could potentially revolutionize
productivity and logistics in the future, with recent developments coming from Scope AI Corp., Meta Platforms, Inc., Amazon.com, Inc., Microsoft Corporation, and SoundHound AI, Inc.
These all have implications for data-driven marketers looking to enhance their entire business model through more reliable and powerful logistics, delivery systems and order fulfillment. It also impacts how major vendors see the evolution of learning technology within marketing’s role.
As deep machine learning evolves rapidly, Scope AI Corp. rebranded and shifted its market focus to target sectors such as advertising, gaming, and neural networks with its advanced GEM (General Enterprise Machine Learning) technology.
Scope AI’s ongoing development of GEM aims to assist businesses in creating custom object detection
STAFF
and visual information systems, maximizing the potential of neural networks. The company’s strategic initiatives are set to potentially revolutionize advertising personalization, gaming enhancements, and various applications of neural networks.
Recently, Scope AI unveiled significant enhancements to GEM, designed to better serve advertising agencies and the gaming industry. These updates aim to optimize advertising content and improve gameplay experiences through advanced neural network functionalities.
By the end of May, Scope AI had announced its collaboration with several leading ad agencies and ad networks, to gain insights into the primary challenges these organizations face in analyzing the efficacy of different ad creatives and page layouts, as well as the difficulties and costs associated with testing.
The timing of Scope AI’s assistance in advertising couldn’t be better, as global advertising executives are currently struggling with the injection of AI into their sphere. The worry is that if everyone is using AI for their images, nothing stands out. This is where Scope AI’s potential with GEM rises, in helping these ad execs to better discern their ad campaigns, and how to deliver them.
Our approach is to start with the pain points of our potential users and build solutions based on those insights,” said James Young, CEO of Scope AI Corp.
“We believe in understanding the real-world challenges faced by our partners, rather than falling into the common software trap of ‘build it and they will come.’ This collaboration ensures that GEM is not just another tool, but a solution that addresses the specific needs of the advertising community.”
GEM’s enhanced object visual recognition capabilities are intended to provide businesses with deeper insights and more precise solutions. Consequently, advertisers may potentially analyze consumer behavior more effectively and refine their campaigns, while game developers could create more engaging and immersive user experiences.
“We’re very pleased at how seamless we were able to streamline, enhance, and strengthen our platform with the latest performance and security upgrades made to our infrastructure,” said Sean Prescott, Founder and Non-Executive Chairman of Scope AI. “The next generation of our platform will set us apart in what kind of data and its sensitivity we can process and store. It’s a potential game-changer for the industry.”
Social media platform giant Meta Platforms, Inc. announced an initiative to release new AI research models to accelerate innovation at scale. As per the initiative, Meta’s Fundamental AI Research team is publicly releasing several models to accelerate future research and allow others to innovate and apply AI at scale.
According to the accompanying Meta blog post, the company states, “We believe that access to state-of-the-art AI creates opportunities for everyone.”
Meanwhile, however, Meta has also been asked to delay training its AI on data from users in the European Union. After intervention by the Irish Data Protection Commission, Meta now must delay its plan to train its large language models on Facebook and Instagram content from EU users.
“We’re disappointed by the request from the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), our lead regulator, on behalf of the European DPAs, to delay training our large language models (LLMs) using public content shared by adults on Facebook and Instagram — particularly since we incorporated regulatory feedback and the European DPAs have been informed since March,” wrote Stefano Fratta, Global Engagement Director for Privacy Policy for Meta in a blog post. “This is a step backwards for European innovation, competition in AI development and further delays bringing the benefits of AI to people in Europe.”
Meanwhile, Amazon.com, Inc. seems undeterred in Europe, expanding its generative AI listing tools to sellers across the continent. As per the expansion, sellers in France, German, Italy, Spain, and the UK can now leverage the power of generative AI
to greatly simplify the process of product listing creation as well as enriching existing product listings to better resonate with customers and help drive sales.
“These generative AI-powered tools simplify the listing creation process, allowing sellers to generate compelling product titles, descriptions, and other details by simply providing a few descriptive words or just uploading a product image,” said Amazon in the accompanying blog post.
“We suggest product listings that are high-quality and designed to be engaging for customers in our store. This streamlines operations and allows sellers to focus on other aspects of their business.”
Amazon has long utilized AI to assist its selling partners by pioneering personalized product recommendations based on customer behavior, enabling sellers to highlight relevant products. Advanced machine learning models are used for demand forecasting and inventory management, helping sellers avoid stock shortages. AI-powered pricing tools provide dynamic pricing insights, while recent innovations include generating rich Premium A+ Content and augmented reality visualizations. In fulfillment centers worldwide, AI helps stock products locally to ensure faster deliveries and greater availability of everyday essentials.
In Europe, AI reduced the average package travel distance by 25kms in 2023, enhancing delivery speed and sustainability.
Microsoft Corporation recently decided to delay the release of its Recall AI feature on PCs, based on security concerns. The Recall feature logs activities from web browsing to voice chats, creating a searchable history on the user’s computer. This allows users to easily find and recall actions from months ago.
Experts are already labeling Microsoft as a “frontrunner in the generative AI race”, with analysts expecting big things from the software giant, citing a “strong competitive cloud edge” coming, as they estimate Microsoft’s Copilot deployments could add around $25 billion to the company’s trajectory by fiscal year 2025.
Together with LinkedIn, Microsoft also released the 2024
Work Trend Index on the State of AI at Work, titled “AI at work is here. Now comes the hard part.”
“Generative AI tools have found widespread acceptance in the workplace, and we can see that most employees have placed their trust in AI to help with their daily workloads — without waiting to see if their organization will provide AI tools, services, or directions and guidelines for usage,” said Dhanawat Suthumpun, Managing Director of Microsoft Thailand. “It is critical that business leaders respond to this emerging trend in order to help both the organization and employees make the most beneficial impact from AI – from increased productivity and new capabilities to greater security from well-defined guidance around AI use.”
Meanwhile, Global leader in voice artificial intelligence SoundHound AI, Inc. announced the acquisition of key assets from Allset, an online ordering platform that connects restaurants and local customers, to fast-track its vision of a voice commerce ecosystem. Allset is a food ordering platform designed for local pick-up, providing a seamless, cost-effective dining experience that allows both consumers and restaurants to bypass the high fees charged by delivery apps. SoundHound is already a market leader for restaurant voice AI solutions, working with over 10,000 restaurant locations.
“We are thrilled to join forces with SoundHound to combine our established partnerships and marketplace expertise with SoundHound’s class-leading voice AI solutions and capabilities,” said Stas Matviyenko, CEO and Co-Founder of Allset. “From the beginning, we realized that we share the same vision for the voice commerce ecosystem that elevates the consumer experience. This team-up will accelerate our progress toward the next exciting phase of AI-powered ordering convenience.”
The future of marketing may end up being the future of all enterprise operational success at the hub of the wheel and the spokes all AI-driven with a circular rotation of the other organizational functions.
Brand Health: An Interview with Jenni Romaniuk, Research Professor and Associate Director at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute
Jenni Romaniuk is a lead researcher at the world-famous Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and the author of “Better Brand Health”.
STEPHEN SHAW is the Chief Strategy Officer of Kenna, a marketing solutions provider specializing in delivering a more unified customer experience. He is also the host of the Customer First Thinking podcast. Stephen can be reached via e-mail at sshaw@kenna.ca
BY STEPHEN SHAW
Why do people make the buying choices they do?
That simple question has preoccupied marketing researchers for more than half a century now. They’ve sought to understand what goes on in people’s minds as they make purchase decisions. Using scientific methods of discovery, they’ve probed people’s attitudes, values, habits, beliefs, social mores, motivations, personality quirks, cultural influences and more, looking for common patterns of behaviour that will predict how customers can be expected to respond in given buying situations.
The first breakthrough behavioural model to emerge was published in 1969 by John Howard and Jagdish Sheth in a book called “The Theory of Buyer Behavior”. It was, according to the authors, “an attempt to explain the brand choice behavior of the buyer.” Their model assumed that people are rational decision makers who move deliberately through progressive stages of the purchase process, guided by their past propensities, brand perceptions, and preferences. Their groundbreaking work laid the foundation for the elevation of consumer research into a recognized field of marketing study. Today consumer behaviour research is an applied social science, incorporating theories of behavioural economics, social psychology and cultural anthropology. It has expanded our understanding of the complex interplay of factors that underly consumer buying decisions. And yet most marketers are almost completely oblivious to this body of scholarly research. They might be vaguely familiar with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs from their school days but that’s about the extent of their knowledge. Their world is tightly bound by the exigencies of campaign planning, product promotion and brand advertising. Research only ever enters their line of sight when they need a snapshot of brand health or some fresh insight into consumer trends.
So how is it that one of the most popular marketing books in recent history was penned by a market researcher? In 2010 Bryon Sharp, who heads up the Ehrenberg-Institute for Marketing Science at the
University of South Australia, published a book called “How Brands Grow” which caught the attention of brand marketers everywhere. He introduced them in everyday lingo to a set of empirical generalizations (what he termed “Scientific Laws”) that completely upended many of their long-held assumptions about consumer behaviour. He urged marketers to focus on attracting light category buyers; showed them that greater loyalty amongst heavy users doesn’t necessarily translate into market success; claimed (controversially) that distinctiveness trumps differentiation — and, even more provocatively, that behaviour drives perception, not the other way around. In short he challenged much of conventional marketing wisdom.
The book succeeded in making a convincing, fact-based argument for applying these “scientific laws” to brand building in today’s world of “polygamist consumers”. And now one of his longtime research associates, Jenni Romaniuk has come up with a book of her own, called “Better Brand Health”, explaining how to apply the Laws of Growth to brand health tracking. Tracking studies have always been a standard research tool for marketers keen to know what consumers think about their brand. The problem, according to Jenni Romaniuk, is that a typical tracking study doesn’t tell marketers what they really need to know about their brand: Is their brand consistently top-of-mind for buyers in all relevant buying situations? Is it readily available? Does it appeal to the widest market possible? In her book she lays out a formula for making brand health studies more useful — or as she prefers to call them, “category buyer memory” tracking.
Stephen Shaw: Do you consider yourself a market researcher, a marketing researcher, or a marketing scientist? And what are the differences, if any?
Jenni Romaniuk: All of the above. Coincidentally, the difference between market research and marketing research was the audition question I was asked during my interview to join the Marketing Science Center1 back in the early 90s.
INTERVIEW
A market researcher is someone who solves a specific problem at a point in time, measuring, say, the distinctive strength of brand assets, or identifying category entry points. Whereas the marketing researcher and marketing scientist are two of an ilk. A marketing researcher researches the phenomena of marketing — which is to say, they do the academic research.
The word “marketing science” has been co-opted in a whole heap of ways that are actually unhelpful. Econometric modelling is not classic science, but it is used in marketing to understand the relationship between variables. So it’s an approach to marketing research and market research, but it’s not necessarily scientific research.
SHAW: At the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute your focus is on the study of buying behaviour, is that right?
ROMANIUK: We believe marketing can be investigated through the scientific process of discovery, through empirical observation, by understanding the world around you, then seeking to explain it. You have to remember, marketing as a discipline is very young. We’ve only really been going for less than a century. With a lot of other sciences, like physics and biology and math, they’ve been going for millennia. So being young, we borrowed from other more mature disciplines. And you can see that in our terminology. When we talk about brand equity, we borrowed that from economics. When we talk about things like brand love, brand personality, attitude, we borrowed that from psychology. And now we’ve grown up a bit and going, well, why don’t we develop a marketing theory that comes from facts about how people buy and how brands compete? So not about psychological phenomena, not about economic phenomena, but about buying phenomena.
SHAW: You helped write the second edition of How Brands Grow. When the first edition was published it certainly caught the attention of marketers everywhere. Why do you think the book resonated so strongly with marketers at the time?
ROMANIUK: Well, it actually didn’t catch fire immediately. It was a slow burn before it took off. Gradually it got more and more popular. And I think partly because it is so grounded in facts. The beauty of Byron’s book was it laid the numbers out clear and bare for you to see, looking at things like the relationship between penetration and loyalty. Once you look at that, you can’t unsee it: there’s way more variation in penetration of brands than there is in the loyalty of those brands. So why is my plan saying I’m going to double the loyalty? And so I just think there’s a great power in the simple presentation of numbers, which is something that really we inherited from Andrew Ehrenberg2, because that was one of his great superpowers, the clear communication of numbers: tell a story, to draw conclusions, to then be able to act upon it.
SHAW: One of the Institute’s trademark ideas is this notion of mental availability. Can you explain what it means and why it’s so important?
ROMANIUK: Mental availability is the thing that allows a brand to compete. It’s about your brand being easily thought of in buying situations, so that your brain just naturally considers it an option at a point in time. And then physical availability determines whether or not you’re the best option. For example, I just can’t be bothered walking 50 meters to buy your brand when there’s something here in front of me that will do the job just as well. The big reason why the vast majority of brands don’t get bought in any buying situation is they were not mentally available at the time. And a few of those brands weren’t good enough in the moment. So that’s why we cast it as a really big challenge that marketers are facing.
SHAW: Is it a binary state, my brand is mentally available or not?
ROMANIUK: Yes and no. In the short term, it is a binary: you’re retrieved or not. But over the long term, it’s a function of memory. Our memories do our work for us, and don’t just give us a list of every possible option. So if you’re thinking about lunch today, your brain doesn’t give you every single possible option you could have because it would be way too much
information. You don’t need that. What your brain does is it will shortcut that to a couple of options that are going to be most suitable for you. And that’s going to be based on what we call category entry points. That might include how much time you’ve got, what you feel like eating, what the weather’s like outside, are you dining alone or with someone else. All of those things will intertwine to come up with the short list of what’s relevant today.
We’ll always go to our brains first because it’s the easiest search engine we’ve got. But over time, each time you’re buying lunch, different combinations of those category entry points will come into play. So tomorrow’s lunch will be different, next week’s lunch will be different, next month’s lunch will be different.
Over time, it’s about the probability that if I’ve got a restaurant in your area and I want you to come to lunch, that I get thought of. And the more situations I come up for, for as many people as possible, in as many different circumstances, the greater my chance of being bought more often. So in the long run, it’s a propensity because it’s made up of all of these context driven situations. And as a brand, what I’m trying to do is to attach myself to as many category entry points for as many people as possible in order to increase the probability that no matter what situation, my brand is one of the ones that your brain shortcuts to be suitable at the time.
SHAW: Your Institute is famous for puncturing popular marketing myths and pseudoscience. What’s the biggest myth you still encounter today?
ROMANIUK: They say science advances one death at a time. It’s hard for people to let go of ideas. It’s actually a sign of courage for someone to be able to admit, “I’ve learned something new”, particularly if you’re invested in it. If you’ve been teaching students that loyalty is important, to suddenly turn around and say, guess what, loyalty is not important, that takes a lot of courage to do, and not many people are willing to do it. So we’re constantly playing whack a mole.
I think the biggest one leading people astray is this idea of differentiation being essential for brand growth. There’s never been any evidence to support it. There’s lots of evidence to refute it, but yet — this is what I don’t understand — people are so wedded to an idea. It seems to be a bit more of a faith based argument rather than an evidence based argument. And it’s not the belief in differentiation that is the problem — it’s the actions to support that belief that become the problem. It leads you to do things that are ineffectual and potentially damaging for the brand in the long run, as well as the opportunity cost of the things you don’t do that would be good for growth. So that to me is one of the biggest, persistent areas of marketing faith that people just don’t seem to be willing to let go of. It’s just interesting to me that people are so wedded to this dogma without ever questioning it.
SHAW: Let’s say, just as a scenario, you’re a shopper in your local pharmacy, standing in front of the toothpaste shelves, wondering which brand to buy. What’s going through your mind as a shopper? How do you arrive at a buying choice?
ROMANIUK: There’s a whole heap of random thoughts that go through your brain at different
points in time that lead you to pick one of the options on the shelf. The choices we make in store are a combination of stuff in our heads that’s been accumulated from our own experiences, advertising, observation of others, word of mouth. These all get processed in our brains and then we draw it out at different occasions to help us act in some way, shape or form. Maybe you saw an ad for Crest with whitening and enamel toughening. Great. And I might get that. But then I see that Colgate Optic White is on sale this week and has a promotion and I’ll just get that instead. I make that last minute decision while I’m there. But I would only do that if Colgate Optic White was something I had bought before. We’ve done research showing that price promotions don’t bring in new customers, they tend to just get people to repertoire shuffle. And so a lot of marketing’s job is to get the brain ready, get the memory ready, so that when people go into a buying situation, our brand is advantaged.
So in the long run, it’s a propensity because it’s made up of all of these context driven situations.
to design a proper study?
ROMANIUK: A lot of brand health trackers are just not designed with the knowledge of how brands grow. They’ll say they track mental availability, but if you actually look at what they do, they don’t track mental availability. They’ve just rebadged one of their old measures as mental availability just to keep up. The divorce between the practical world and the academic world I think is most starkly seen when you look at what brand managers actually track in the real world. So it was a lot of discomfiture seeing that no one else in academia was solving the problem. And the big players who are making a lot of money out of brand health trackers were not solving the problem either. They were going off and creating their own measures because that’s what they felt would help them get selected as a supplier. They were trying to differentiate themselves and in the act of doing that created indices and labels for things that just really didn’t make sense.
SHAW: One of the declarative statements you make in your book is, “memories always matter”. And I know that’s an area of specialization for you. You also refer in the book to this concept of mental market share. I think one of the figures in the book, as I recall, is a brand is successful if it has something like a 60 percent association with the common category entry points. Can you just expand on this point?
SHAW: Are people generally cognitive misers? How critical is it to reduce the cognitive load in a buying situation?
ROMANIUK: It’s not that people are cognitive misers. I mean, they are in that they don’t want to think a lot, but they still want to make good choices. So the thing is, what our brain often does, is it just gives us what it feels like are good choices, and they’re usually good enough so we don’t have to think. Now, sometimes we do agonize over a particular decision because it’s important to us for whatever reason. So we will do that when necessary. But, if it’s not needed, our brain can shortcut it for us and still give us a good outcome. If there’s an easier way to do it, we will take it.
SHAW: That’s my personal shopping mantra: Good enough! Let’s dive into the crux of your book, which is about brand health tracking, although you’re not particularly fussy about the term “brand health” — I think you prefer category memory tracking. Did you write the book because you felt you needed to set the record straight as to how
ROMANIUK: So I give an example in the book of a winter’s night when my niece is over for dinner. There’s three different category entry points that come together when we are deciding on dinner. My niece doesn’t really like sushi, so count that out. It leads to things like burgers and fries because that’s what she likes. I don’t have them very often, so it’s a bit of a treat if she’s there. But then we wanted something that would get delivered. So that’s really how the various category entry points work together: they combine to give us a shortcut of all the food options that are out there. Category entry points identify the things that shape our memories.
SHAW: But the key ultimately is that a brand needs to be thought of in those moments, those specific category entry points.
ROMANIUK: If you’re known as a member of the category, that is, you serve food, then you have some chance of being retrieved and it’s about maximizing that chance as much as possible. So that’s the role of marketing is essentially to try and up that chance for you. Because category entry points are about buyers, they’re not about brands. But the brands get attached to them, which is what gives the brand a greater chance of being thought of when they’re relevant to people in buying situations. So category entry points would exist even if brands didn’t. So if any one brand went away, the category entry point would still be there.
SHAW: The key is that the marketer needs to take this into account to be certain that in the various possible contexts they have the best chances of being recalled as an option in those situations.
ROMANIUK: Yeah. A lot of our brand building activities are about building memories. So the question is, what memories are most useful to build given we’ve only got a short amount of time to do that? Because we only have a limited marketing budget. The buyer only has so much time that they’re going to give to us. So how do you not waste that effort? How do you get the most out of it? And so I would argue for getting the brand in the race for as many people as possible. I don’t know what other memory is more important than that.
SHAW: I guess brand experience also factors in to memory as well.
ROMANIUK: But you have to think of the brand to experience it.
SHAW: A somewhat contentious point of conversation is the whole concept of brand loyalty. You argue there’s no such thing as brand loyalty, that you see very little difference in loyalty as it relates to brand market share.
ROMANIUK: Loyalty is about how you act in a repeated way towards a brand. So buying the same brand again after you’ve already bought it, that’s a display of loyalty. It can be displayed in remaining a customer for a long period of time. That’s an example of tenure loyalty. It can also be defined by share loyalty: I might buy the category three times and I buy the same brand each time. So all of those are different ways in which loyalty can be exhibited and observed. The idea of the traditional sort of relationship loyalty, of let’s get married until death do us part, that rarely exists in marketing. So, therefore it’s not a great metaphor for the sorts of behaviours that we want to encourage in buyers. Most people when given the opportunity will buy multiple brands. The more times you buy from a category, the bigger your brand repertoire is — a very well-established empirical generalization. And so it’s not that loyalty doesn’t exist: it’s just not something you can maximize to your own benefit. And efforts to try to do so will lead you making suboptimal choices and suboptimal use of resources.
SHAW: Like investing in loyalty programs.
ROMANIUK: Yeah. And I mean, Byron actually did one of the world’s first empirical studies into the effectiveness of loyalty programs — it was actually his PhD. And what he showed is that loyalty programs don’t engender loyalty, but they did provide a slight defensive mechanism to competitor activity.
SHAW: In other words they serve as a barrier to exit.
ROMANIUK: A little bit. Was it worth the
Loyalty is about how you act in a repeated way towards a brand.
justification of setting up the loyalty program? That’s a totally different conversation. Loyalty programs are a very expensive thing. But to say that loyalty programs engender loyalty, that’s where there’s scant evidence. And a lot of the early evidence was just done naively, going, oh, people in the loyalty program are more loyal than people who aren’t — without thinking about the selection effects. People more likely to join the loyalty program tend to be heavy buyers already.
SHAW: And I think you mentioned in the book that you view Net Promoter Score more as a customer satisfaction metric than anything.
ROMANIUK: It’s not my view, it’s actually the empirical evidence. When compared to customer satisfaction measures, it’s very highly correlated. NPS has cast itself as a word of mouth measure. It’s actually not a word of mouth measure — it’s actually a satisfaction measure dressed up. One of my colleagues, Professor John Dawes, has done a lot of work showing that it’s not a very robust measure. It’s too volatile to actually be useful.
SHAW: You also talk about “Share of Heart” being viewed by most marketers as the hallmark of success. You say that attitudes tend to follow behaviour. This is completely contrary to what most marketers believe. They hang their hats on creative campaigns that drive emotion.
ROMANIUK: The first thing to remember is, attitudes and emotions are different things. Attitudes are an overall evaluation of some things. Now, the thing about it is our evaluations typically happen post experience, because if we haven’t experienced something, how do we evaluate it? Emotions are the feelings that something generates from us. And there is actually evidence that emotions can be quite valuable for us. They help us process other information more deeply, such that it’s easier to retrieve at a later point in time. So emotions and attitudes have different roles to play. Attitudes come after we’ve evaluated something. The only time I can see that attitudes are particularly useful is if they stop you from doing something.
If, for some reason, you develop a strong enough antipathy to something that it prevents you from acting upon it, even if it’s mentally available. But that rarely happens.
SHAW: Yet you can have brand fans who love a product. They have a strong attachment emotionally to a specific brand.
ROMANIUK: Yeah. No, don’t get me wrong, I’m sure every brand would love to have the devotion of Taylor Swift fans, but they don’t. John Dawes looked at whether brands that were considered love marks actually had any difference in the behaviour of their buyers than brands that were not considered love marks. And the answer was no, they did not. Every brand has a few people that love it, a few people that hate it, and most people think it’s just good enough to buy on occasion, and that’s fine, that’s all people need to be able to buy it. We don’t need deep emotions to buy brands. It’s a battle we don’t need to fight. This whole idea of brand love just doesn’t make sense.
SHAW: The other major point you argue is that brand growth isn’t so much about finding an optimal target market as it is about getting category light buyers to buy more. ROMANIUK: The reason that light category buyers are important is because they’re the hard ones to attract. But if your advertising is noticed by light category buyers, chances are everyone else has noticed it too. They’re an indicator that you’ve done a really good job reaching people. So it’s not necessarily that the light category buyers are essential to growth: it’s that they’re an indicator you’ve done everything you need to do to grow. So the actual aim is to get more people buying in any time period. And if you focus on that, and the things that underpin that, you will as a consequence get more of your own buyers buying you more too, because they will have been affected by your marketing activity. It’s all in the service of expanding the size of your customer base because that’s the key path to growth. Remember, there’s not one penetration figure for a brand, there’s penetration within a time period. And that’s what we’re looking to maximize.
SHAW: And that’s ultimately what your Brand Health Tracking Survey is designed to answer: am I achieving brand growth or not?
ROMANIUK: But also, are there any barriers, either from what we’re doing or what competitors are doing, that are in the way of us achieving that. So it’s identifying opportunities, identifying threats, knowing that you’re in a competitive market, that you’re not operating in isolation. So keeping the actions that are working and improving on them and getting rid of the things that are not working.
1 Based at the University of South Australia, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (formerly known as the Marketing Science Centre) is the world’s largest centre for scientific research into marketing.
2 Andrew Ehrenberg was a statistician and marketing scientist who founded the Marketing Science Institute. His NBD-Dirichlet model of brand choice has been described as one of the most famous empirical generalisations in marketing.
BY HEIDI TOLLIVER-WALKER
It’s an age-old debate: direct mail versus email marketing. Supporters of digital media will say why drain your marketing budget on direct mail campaigns that nobody reads when you can contact your customers using the channels they prefer — television, social media, and mobile?
However, the latest data makes a strong case for printed direct mail. Sure, social media and mobile marketing are on the rise. But that doesn’t mean that customers aren’t responding to direct mail or that this channel is losing its effectiveness. That’s just plain false. The reality is, direct mail remains a critical part of the mix. So the next time someone tries to tell you direct mail is dead, remember:
1 Direct mail doesn’t require opt-in
Unlike email and text messaging, you don’t have to get a recipient’s permission to send them direct mail. This means, even if a customer doesn’t subscribe or unsubscribes from your email list, you can still get in touch with them. (Which is why it’s always a good idea to get physical addresses from those on your email lists!)
2
Direct mail never stays in a spam filter
“Yes, your message may be picked by someone else,” notes Roger Buck, former director of marketing and product development at The
Flesh Company. “But the chances are small - and direct mail never has a virus.”
3
Direct mail stays effective longer than you think
Direct mail is a bit like a note on the refrigerator door. “We sometimes hear from customers that our mail stays on their desk for weeks,” says Andre Palko, president of Technifold USA. “They may not immediately take action, but our brand lingers until they are ready to contact us. An e-mail does not last as well — and is far less striking.”
Direct mail open read rates
4 It’s still effective when the target recipient has moved on “If you send an email to someone who’s no longer at a particular company, it bounces. If you send a postcard, the new person in that job sees it — and you’ve just introduced yourself as a vendor,” says Palko.
5 With direct mail you do not have to fight to get attention E-mail is effective, but also overwhelming. A study by The Radicati Group concluded that the average business customer sends or receives 121 emails per day. In 2024 there are probably more than 500 emails a day in all likelihood. Larry Bradley, owner of Proforma Sunbelt Graphics, writes: “The overwhelming deluge of e-mail in the office is a solid hurdle for e-mail marketers. It is difficult
Eight Reasons Direct Mail is More Effective than Email Marketing
to distinguish the mess from the real mails, so that a large part of business e-mails is not read at all. By contrast, companies receive much less marketing by mail than ten years ago — a unique advantage for direct mail.”
Direct Mail vs digital marketing channels
6 Certain offers just won’t get traction by email
There’s a reason businesses are more likely to get lending offers in the mail than they are by email. B2B decision-makers trust direct mail more than email, especially for high value products and services. Mailers can also include a wide variety of trust-building content not possible (or reasonable) to include in email. Yes, you can provide links. But with direct mail, you get that content in front of them in a tangible way right out of the gate.
7 Direct mail can reach highlevel decision-makers
There are only so many things you can do to make email look more important. But beyond writing a compelling subject line, most of them look hokey. Direct mail offers options like kits, dimensional mail, and unique packaging options that, by their nature, get past the gatekeepers. (Palko has used everything from metallic envelopes, lunch bags, packing list pouches and prescription bottles to mail letters. “They are not only
fun, but they get opened!” he says.) While these mailings may have higher price tags, they can also get near 100 percent open rates. When you’re trying to reach the C-Suite, that’s worth a lot.
8
Direct mail drives social media and online marketing
Many people believe you don’t need direct mail when you have social media and mobile marketing. What they’re overlooking is how social media and mobile marketing relationships get captured in the first place. Very often, it’s through print. Saying that you only need social and mobile is akin to saying that when you buy a house you only need the upper stories and not the foundation. Without print, getting social and mobile engagements is much more difficult.
Don’t let digital marketers get away with stealing your customers based on false contrasts. Open the discussion about the benefits of direct mail versus email — and when to use each. Be proactive and let direct mail showcase what you can do.
HEIDI TOLLIVER-WALKER is former print industry magazine editor and long-time industry analyst, content developer, author, and blogger. This article was first written for Xerox’s blog. She has written for the industry’s top publications, research companies, and private companies for the past three decades — so long that she still has an AOL address, which she signed up for back when AOL was still cool. You can reach her at htollvr@aol.com
What It Takes to Rewire a CPG Company to Outcompete in Digital and AI
BY ABDUL WAHAB SHAIKH AND SHRUTI LAL, WITH HANNAH MAYER AND SPURTHI GUMMADALA
AAI transformations for CPG companies.
There’s a race on to capture value from digital and AI, and consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies are in danger of falling behind both retailers and consumers. It’s not for lack of trying. Like most sectors, CPG companies have been on some form of digital and AI transformation journey. But most of them are stuck in the pilot purgatory stage characterized by plenty of subscale activity and little at-scale value.
Our analysis of digital and AI maturity has shown that CPG companies are among the poorest performers, while retailers are near the top.
Exhibit 1
This halting progress is all the more frustrating and worrisome in view of the huge value at stake. We analyzed the potential of digital and AI transformations to drive top- and bottom-line impact along the full value chain. Our analysis revealed a potential 6 to 10 percent incremental revenue uplift and corresponding growth of 3 to 5 percentage points in EBITDA over three to five years, depending on the subcategory.
Furthermore, the increased adoption of generative AI (gen AI) could increase the economic impact of traditional AI by 15 to 40 percent, unlocking an additional $160USD billion to $270USD billion annually in profit (measured in EBITDA) for CPG companies globally.
The CPG sector faces some unique challenges. The proliferation of data, for example, and its complexity — sources are scattered across retailers, suppliers, manufacturers, and consumers — have created massive issues in terms of harnessing the data to find, track, and capture
value. At its core, the reason for this low success rate is that companies fail to perform the deep organizational surgery required to
affect the broad-based change that’s needed. It’s never “just tech” when it comes to successful digital and AI transformations. Companies need
to rewire how they work.
But even while CPG as a sector performs poorly, some companies are high performers, as Exhibit
Exhibit 1
Exhibit 2
STRATEGY
1 shows. One beverage company that embarked on a digital and AI transformation unlocked 18 percent EBITDA uplift over two years. It was able to make and sustain these improvements by being comprehensive in the scale of, and commitment to, the change needed.
A committee of senior leaders started by prioritizing domains that had significant growth opportunities and were feasible, given their capabilities. They then developed a detailed road map and established more than 50 cross-functional pods — joint teams spanning markets, regions, and enterprises — with specific goals and the autonomy to deliver necessary solutions. They put in place a centralized stage-gate process with clear decision rights to track, advance, and fund solutions to help maintain momentum.
To support the technology solutions, they moved aggressively into cloud to help create more scale and flexibility to use in building modular, customized applications. They also invested in a data lake and a governance model with clear areas of responsibility. For example, IT defined and managed the data architecture while the business defined use cases for data products. Realizing talent was an acute issue, they upskilled their own people through tailored learning curricula that included on-the-job learning, formal training sessions, and individual coaching.
Exhibit 2
Six questions to help outcompete with digital and AI In working with more than 200 large companies across industries, including 25 of the top 30 CPG companies, we found that six enterprise capabilities are critical for companies to rewire themselves and achieve sustainable competitive advantage from digital and AI ( Exhibit 2). In rewiring how they work, CPG companies need to answer six key questions. Six enterprise capabilities are critical for successful digital and AI transformations.
1. Where is the value?
Making sure that a digital and AI transformation delivers meaningful value starts with prioritizing and focusing efforts on domains where meaningful value
exists. While the distribution of value varies across CPG sectors, our analysis shows that the greatest payoff for most sectors is concentrated heavily in two areas: consumer insights and demand creation, and customer and channel
management (Exhibit 3). There is one notable exception: the beauty industry, where the direct-toconsumer area takes center stage. New technologies can have a big impact on that interaction model, as well as on the e-commerce process
and fulfillment management. In general, these are the domains CPG companies should prioritize for their transformation programs.
Exhibit 3
Digital and AI impact varies by
Exhibit 3
Exhibit 4
STRATEGY
sector.
As CPG companies assess the value, they will need to be thoughtful about understanding gen AI’s impact. McKinsey analysis identified just four areas — customer operations, marketing and sales, software engineering, and research and development — that could account for approximately 75 percent of the total annual value from gen AI use cases. The majority of that value comes from increased productivity in the form of, for example, better and faster issue resolution in customer service, more personalized communications, and more-effective product discovery. Gen AI could increase the productivity of the marketing function, with a value between 5 and 15 percent of total marketing spending.
One consumer company, for example, implemented a gen AI large language model (LLM) to improve the manual process of financial planning and analysis (FP&A) research. An initial proof of concept showed a reduction of up to 30 percent in time spent on research.
Some companies are already actively educating their organizations, especially leadership, about gen AI, the
capabilities it unlocks, and its applications in business. In fact, since the second quarter of 2023, almost all CPGs we analyzed have had an immersion session on AI for C-level executives.
2. Are leaders from the business side actively part of the transformation?
CPG companies often underestimate the role of business functions in a successful digital and AI transformation, relegating the initiative to IT. Case in point: At a large food manufacturer, the supply chain domain was one of the company’s most successful domains, in part because the leadership, including the COO and CFO, made supply chain a priority. The business dedicated a senior director as product owner for not only the build but also rollout and adoption, and these business leaders joined biweekly sprint reviews, engaging with the supply chain digital leader and the working team in designing a completely new way to optimize customer service. Top business talent should act as product owners of the transformation for their given product, working closely with technology leaders to define the road map of solutions, managing
where tech talent can thrive.
A good place to start is upskilling leaders to better understand how tech creates value. P&G instituted a reverse-mentoring program in which junior tech people worked with senior leaders to help them understand how to use tech. Leaders also went to leading digital businesses to observe operations and speak with leaders to understand what skills are important to bring into an organization.
the pipeline of use cases to build the solution, influencing technology infrastructure decisions, governing data, and being the voice of the transformation to their wider teams. The core operational unit is the agile “squad.” Comprised generally of five to eight people across business, data, technology, and design functions, these teams are responsible for building the solutions on the road map (Exhibit 4). They are crucial for scaling. Acting autonomously based on clear guidelines, these agile squads are the only way companies can enable hundreds or even thousands of teams to deliver transformational change.
Exhibit 4
3. Are you an attractive longterm employer for digital talent? Without top in-house technical talent, CPG companies will struggle with their transformation. Having a hiring strategy and competitive compensation will only get you so far in attracting and retaining digital talent, especially when you are competing with digital natives. The core issue is that work at CPG companies often doesn’t attract top tech talent. Companies will need to offer meaningful missions, learning opportunities, and an environment
It’s important to focus on hiring talent with some proficiency in relevant areas. Competent developers are significantly more productive than inexperienced ones, and that trend carries over into gen AI as well.8 To find the right talent, CPGs should look to suppliers or retailers who are already progressing on their digital journey. Adjacent sectors such as hospitality and telecom can also be sources of expert talent with broader skills that are transferable to CPG companies. Offering promotions and compensation based on skills mastery and establishing engineering-specific career tracks can also help in retaining your top people.
A large beverage CPG knew it needed to upgrade its talent if it wanted its digital and AI transformation to succeed. But established recruiting practices were slow and not geared to the leading technical talent the business needed. A talent win room came together with a new plan. First, they invested in developing clear new role descriptions, tailored to the specific skills required. Second, they focused on identifying new recruiting sources rather than turning to more general jobs and networking venues. Third, they sped up the evaluation process with coding tests, which allowed them to quickly narrow down more than 7,500 initial applicants to high-potential candidates. And fourth, they put in place batch days organized around the full set of decision makers, which allowed them to make decisions on candidates and extend an offer within 24 hours. Over this time, the talent win room had a set of KPIs that they referred to often to track their progress and correct any issues quickly. In 90 days,
STRATEGY
they were able to fill the 25 critical digital and analytics roles they needed — a tenfold increase in the speed of hiring.
4. Are you deploying your technology investments to optimize for reuse?
Many CPG companies have key elements of a core infrastructure in place — such as cloud, data lakes, and planning software — but they are often not set up to operate at scale. This situation is largely the result of a complex tech stack where systems are built to support a specific function or market. This makes it challenging to share data and reuse solutions, leading to costly replication of applications and difficulty in scaling.
Enabling solutions that serve multiple domains has significant benefits, such as allowing a company to use a broader range of data to make better revenue growth management (RGM) decisions. Getting to this state requires companies to develop a modular architecture (Exhibit 5).
Exhibit 5
For this approach to work in practice, companies need a global strategy and a team made up of experts from central IT (including enterprise architects, cloud developers, and engineers) and leaders from target markets to design the system together. They should focus on creating modules to support three to five market archetypes (for example, hypermarkets in the United States and more-traditional trade stores in Latin America), develop a road map for building them, and then test them in the market. Typically, this process includes making key decisions, such as what domain tools to deploy, what cloud infrastructure to develop, and whether to build or buy specific technologies.
5. Are you developing data products?
Data in the CPG industry is notoriously fragmented across retailers, distributors, consumers, syndicated data providers, marketing platforms, contract manufacturers, third-party logistics providers, and more. This issue has become even more acute with generative AI, with the
introduction of huge amounts of unstructured data. Without a centralized, well-coordinated data strategy, teams end up using raw data for their one-off needs, wasting data scientist and engineering capacity on creating inconsistent data sets that can’t be accessed by other teams or systems.
To redress this issue, companies need to focus on three things:
❯ Build data products. Data products are reusable building blocks of data that can be easily consumed by teams and systems. One CPG focused on developing a data product on
store-level customer attributes, which teams across sales, RGM, planning, and supply chain used for their own use cases. To get this right, the company had to understand what data it had and which parts of it were important to each function’s use cases. Out-of-stock data, for example, was important for sales and planning functions, while the promotions calendar, promotions ROI, and volume uplift data were important for RGM (Exhibit 6).
Exhibit 6
Standardize APIs and invest in
data pipelines. It’s important to create standard APIs and systems (with the right access privileges) that developers can use to access data sources. Invest in data pipelines to deliver data to the right data products. Because the company often doesn’t own all the data from retailers or manufacturers, for example, that data needs to be constantly monitored for changes.
Put in place a strong data product owner. The dedicated data product owner should be from the business, not the IT, side of the company.
Exhibit 6
Ten Burning Problems With Loyalty Programs You Need to Fix
If you have one of the 10 problems with loyalty programs listed in this article, then it’s time to course correct and steer towards success
BY ZSUZSA KECSMAR
Running a loyalty program is a long-term endeavor with lots of ups and downs along the way. Still, sometimes you might feel that you aren’t just experiencing a bump on the road but are permanently stuck in second gear. That’s because overlooking important details during the planning phase can handicap your reward program’s true potential. Some problems with loyalty programs aren’t always apparent — and some might not even be your fault. But they can still sabotage your success (and your ROI) nonetheless.
To help you assess your program’s performance in a datadriven manner, here are ten loyalty program statistics that uncover the biggest reasons why your loyalty program isn’t working.
If you feel inspired to revise your loyalty program’s concept, we have good news: this handy little worksheet will help you cover all your bases.
Do Loyalty Programs Work?
Loyalty programs can indeed be a huge value generator for brands. Our Global Customer Loyalty Report 2024 proves this: 9 out of 10 companies claimed to have a positive ROI. Regardless, future and existing loyalty program owners often worry about loyalty issues. In this section, we aim to put their worries to rest.
Why don’t loyalty programs work?
There could be several reasons why loyalty programs don’t deliver the desired results. The concept you’ve chosen might not match the industry you are in. Maybe your
math is off, and the cost-to-point ratio feels unrewarding. Or the benefits on offer are unappealing or lacking in variety. However, deleting the program is never a good idea, even if the program underperforms.
What is the challenge with loyalty programs?
There could be numerous loyalty program challenges, but the biggest one is optimization. Once launched with a solid, successful MVP, many program owners get comfy, not wanting to change it in fear of breaking it. This can cause the initial concept to get stale. Companies need to monitor the reports and test new initiatives continuously.
What are the disadvantages of a loyalty program?
Loyalty programs have no concrete disadvantages, but they do require a hefty time, money, and human resource investment. When you decide to launch a reward program, you need to be ready tech-wise and dedicate an entire team to the program — not just tasking the marketing or CRM team to run it part-time.
What are the risks of a loyalty program?
Loyalty programs primarily come with benefits and perks, but they also have downsides that can impact your brand’s reputation. For example, canceling a popular reward can cause an uproar in your community. Still, reward programs more often negate risks than cause them, as you can use points and benefits to compensate customers. If you want a quick summary of the common mistakes you can
make with your loyalty program, check out this episode of Mission: Loyalty, our edutainment video series.
Your Rewards Program Feels Unrewarding
One of the most common problems with loyalty programs is that, in the customer’s view, it is either too difficult or takes too long to earn rewards. After all, instant gratification is an important aspect of catering to modern buyers. Dangle the carrot before customers’ eyes for too long, and they’ll join another program. How to avoid this loyalty program problem: Offer both high-value and low-value rewards so customers can always redeem something affordable. Give new members a welcome gift so they get a taste of the benefits early on. Allow members to earn points for non-transactional activities.
German mountaineering product retailer Bergzeit runs an award-winning loyalty program that integrates a sports tracker to award members with bonus points for climbing to new heights. The results? 95 percent increase in the average frequency of orders per member.
Your Reward Portfolio Lacks Variety
Balancing the value proposition of a loyalty program is no easy task, especially because every customer segment has different preferences. Though we don’t recommend spreading yourself too thin with reward types, offering something other than discounts is one way to keep things fresh and exciting.
How to avoid this loyalty program problem: Try to find
a healthy balance of rewards — offering only discounts or only experiential rewards leads to an imbalanced experience. Try including partner rewards, which make the reward catalog more colourful, especially when gifts, freebies or merchandise are involved. Offer early access to products, VIP customer service and downloadable content, which are rewards that all have a high perceived value. A rewards catalog centered around experiential rewards, like a fashion shows and gourmet dining experience. Though expensive and might require a lot of planning, highend rewards can be excellent additions to a loyalty program. In fact, they can be your main value proposition!
You Had to Change the Rules After Launch
Another reason why loyalty programs fail is that companies change the rules after the launch. For example, you change a reward’s cost from 100 points to 150. Though this might seem like a small change in your book, it can upset members or make them feel that you are trying to take advantage of them.
How to avoid this loyalty program problem: It’s always better to start out strict and prudent and loosen the rules later on — not the other way around. Try easing users into changes by communicating them in advance. Granting a one-time benefit (like a couple of bonus points) can also improve the mood.
Managing a loyalty program is no easy task. If you wish to learn how a best-in-class loyalty technology can make it easier for
you, check out our Product Release Webinar, featuring our top experts!
The Concept Is Getting Outdated
One of the less obvious problems with loyalty programs is that loyalty trends are in constant flux. A decade ago, tiered programs were still considered a selling point, but nowadays, they are more of a hygiene factor. As time passes, it’s only natural to re-evaluate your program and modernize it by adding new features or updating the loyalty logic.
How to avoid this loyalty program problem: Keep your loyalty program concept up-to-date by adding new features every two to three years. Upgrade your tech stack if your current one doesn’t live up to expectations. Before committing to a new tech provider, thoroughly weigh your options and issue RFPs to see each solution in action.
Make sure your loyalty program comes equipped with the right reporting capabilities, so you can keep a close eye on important metrics like engagement levels, reward redemptions, tier distribution, etc.
There Isn’t Enough Personalization
The next possible loyalty program challenge is customization. Personalized deals and offers are the secret sauce of a loyalty program. If customers receive rewards and messages that feel relevant, they are more likely to use them. Skipping on personalization and generalizing the experience will leave them disinterested and eager to try a competitor’s program.
How to avoid this loyalty program problem: Personalization only works if you have member data — you need to know how to utilize your loyalty program to collect relevant information. Birthday reward emails are an ideal way to test your personalization strategy because they also have a surprise & delight effect. Use gamified surveys to learn about customers’ favorite types of rewards, then make sure to offer what they want.
If you want to improve your skills as a data-driven loyalty manager, learn from Sara Arecco,
our Head of Customer Success, in this episode of Product Espresso.
It
Lacks the “Wow” Factor
Loyalty programs are like amusement parks. They have to be fun and thrilling across the board, but they also need one definitive spectacle that draws a crowd. Failing to have one major value proposition is one big reason why loyalty programs fail in today’s highly competitive market.
How to avoid this loyalty program problem: Partner benefits can easily spice up your existing reward portfolio for a relatively low price. High-value experiential rewards can be an effective centerpiece for your loyalty program marketing. Invites to community events and influencer parties can be just as effective rewards as physical gifts.
If you are looking to impress your loyalty program members (or give them special treatment, early access or special interest groups (VIP clubs within the program) are an excellent choice.
You Are Using “Fake” Gamification
Gamification can mean many things, from friend referrals to prize wheels and even arcade-style minigames. Opting for flashy but static solutions, like a reward carousel, won’t necessarily mean you’ve successfully gamified your loyalty program. If that’s the case, you won’t be able to see the bump in engagement you had hoped for.
How to avoid this loyalty program problem: Prize Wheels, virtual scratchcards and raffles are excellent ways to randomize what kind of reward members would get — and to make the experience more exciting. Social media contests where customers need to write a clever comment or share their images to win a prize are not only a good gamification feature but also increase word-of-mouth. For truly game-like gamification, consider online or offline treasure hunts, leaderboards, or even virtual games
No Members-Only Offers
When someone enrolls in a loyalty program, they expect special treatment. Most customers want more bang for their buck or to be part of an exclusive group. It is important to make members feel special through exclusive deals or rewards. Otherwise, they may turn away.
How to avoid this loyalty program problem: If you have tiers, you can combine multiple members-only offers. Investing in offer management and segmentation helps you create rewards that are region or channelspecific. Members-only rewards don’t have to be coupons or discounts — they can also be free content or invitations to exclusive community events. Mockup of a VIP club feature within a loyalty program that provides early access for 1000 points.
Did you know? Loyalty programs where you need to pay an entry fee in points to access certain benefits are called freemium programs — because they are a mix of free and paid elements.
You Forgot to Market It
Thinking that reward programs are a “set-and-forget” kind of thing is a huge mistake. If you don’t put any marketing efforts behind your program or don’t give it the spotlight it deserves on your website, then don’t be surprised that enrollment is low.
How to avoid this loyalty program problem: Rely on more than just a welcome gift to carry your reward program. On your website, dedicate enough space, or at least display a banner about the loyalty program — just adding it to the navigation bar is not enough. Invest in influencer marketing and encourage members to become brand ambassadors so they will promote the program in an authentic way.
Referral programs are staples of the industry, but you can still make them more exciting by turning them into a challenge! This way customers receive a greater prize, but they need to invite a set amount of their friends to earn it.
challenge usually arises for long-running programs founded on in-house development. Now counting as “legacy tech,” it’s becoming increasingly difficult for owners to add new features to an outdated platform or integrate with modern, third-party solutions.
How to avoid this loyalty program problem: Migrate to another loyalty program platform that comes with out-of-the-box modules and has established integrations. Another sign that your technology has run its course is that reward campaign management is clunky or requires coding knowledge. In this case, search for a no-code solution. Faulty integrations are just as bad as not having any integrations at all, so don’t rush the implementation phase. Antavo’s no-code Workflows module comes with a drag-and-drop editing interface where you can review how specific campaigns are executed step-by-step.
Remember, There Are No Problems With Loyalty Programs That Cannot Be Solved
When you realize that your loyalty program has one of these problems, you can do two things: either introduce a feature that solves the issue (adding gamification elements, for instance) or, if the issue is fundamental, go back to the drawing board.
Don’t worry. Revamping your loyalty program can easily lead to better results, so it’s worth the time and effort. If you want to switch to a loyalty program platform that fully supports nextgen reward programs, then our experts would be happy to hold a showcase. Don’t hesitate to book a demo or send us an RFP.
If you are looking for a guiding light on how to shape your loyalty concept, download our handy worksheet.
ZSUZSA KECSMAR is Co-founder, CMO and Head of Partnerships at Antavo. Zsuzsa is also Chief Strategy Officer and has helped lead Antavo from a startup into a scaleup. Listed by Forbes as one of Europe’s top 100 female founders in tech, Zsuzsa is a former journalist recognized by the European Commission. 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
KFC UK & Ireland exemplifies what true game-like gamification should be about. Their arcade-style minigame can be played after making an eligible order to win freebies.
You Backed Yourself Into a Corner Tech-Wise
This particular loyalty program
One of the key roles of the data product owner is to establish and closely monitor meaningful KPIs to track the most important determinants of value to the business, such as fulfillment, on-time delivery to warehouses or shelves, or data-product usage rates.
A global CPG was able to rapidly transform its RGM domain end-to-end in just two years by building modular technology components that enabled it to scale solutions across its more than 30 category/market combinations. Instead of building pricing and promotions analytics around the data available for a particular region/category, for example, the company built a standardized RGM data product that teams could easily use. Each market category only had to input its own data into the product to take advantage of the underlying analytics engine. Because the data product was modular, specific local factors, such as currencies and units of measure, could easily be swapped in.
6. Are you anticipating and preparing for the most critical scaling challenges? The fragmentation in CPG companies — accounts, categories, brands, geographies, and functions — makes adoption and scaling technology challenging. Too often, companies have to redo a lot of work to tailor solutions to local environments.
While the adoption of technology relies on many factors, in practice it is most crucial to involve potential future users early in solutions development; give end users incentives to use the technology; minimize the effort required of them, by building solutions into existing tools, for example; and track their uptake over time.
The key to tackling scaling is to “assetize” solutions by packaging them as modular assets that teams can easily reuse. The focus should be on technologies, such as APIs; processes, such as solution rollouts, operational guidelines, and training; and support, such as subject-matter experts who understand how to deploy the solution and adapt it to different environments. A digital and AI transformation is a complex journey. But for CPG companies willing to make the commitment to change at scale, the value can be transformative and a competitive necessity.
ABDUL WAHAB SHAIKH is a partner in McKinsey’s Atlanta office, SHRUTI LAL is a partner in the Chicago office, HANNAH MAYER is an associate partner in the Bay Area office, and SPURTHI GUMMADALA is a consultant in the Seattle office. The authors wish to thank ROGER ROBERTS for his contributions to this article. This article was edited by BARR SEITZ , an editorial director in the New York office.
About QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey QuantumBlack, McKinsey’s AI arm, helps companies transform using the power of technology, technical expertise, and industry experts. With thousands of practitioners at QuantumBlack (data engineers, data scientists, product managers, designers, and software engineers) and McKinsey (industry and domain experts), we are working to solve the world’s most important AI challenges. QuantumBlack Labs is our center of technology development and client innovation, which has been driving cutting-edge advancements and developments in AI through locations across the globe.
COURTESY INFO-TECH RESEARCH
New insights from InfoTech Research Group highlight the importance of adopting an Exponential IT mindset to meet the evolving demands of fans and capitalize on new business opportunities in the sports and entertainment sector. A recently published guide from the research and advisory firm outlines how sports and entertainment organizations can integrate advanced technologies, enhance operational efficiency, and deliver personalized fan experiences.
The sports and entertainment industry is experiencing unprecedented technological advancements and shifting consumer expectations. Organizations in this sector face significant challenges, including evolving to enable autonomous processes, keeping up with specialized knowledge of emerging technologies, and increasing competition from other entertainment forms.
Addressing these critical challenges, Info-Tech Research Group has released a new blueprint, Priorities for Adopting an Exponential IT Mindset in the Sports & Entertainment Industry. This comprehensive guide from the firm provides IT leaders with strategic insights and actionable plans to leverage advanced technologies like AI, data analytics, and automation. The research findings and guidance will enable sports and entertainment organizations to drive innovation, enhance operational efficiency, and deliver exceptional fan experiences.
“Increasing competition from other forms of entertainment is pushing the sports industry to provide more attractive offerings to sustain the business,” says Elizabeth Silva, senior research analyst at Info-Tech Research Group. “IT leaders must no longer be spectators of innovation but strategic business partners to the organization’s success. Through visionary guidance, Exponential IT should be explored and adopted to secure a strong position within the evolving landscape of the sports and entertainment industry.”
Info-Tech’s latest blueprint emphasizes the significance of adopting an Exponential IT mindset within the sports
How Data Insights Power Customer Experience in Entertainment
and entertainment sector. This approach involves integrating advanced technologies to optimize operations, drive continuous innovation, and provide personalized fan experiences. The firm advises that by embracing Exponential IT, organizations could navigate industry disruptions and meet the evolving expectations of their audiences.
In the blueprint, the firm identifies several critical challenges the sports and entertainment industry must address to achieve technological advancement.
These challenges include fans’ expectations for personalized services and experiences, which can be difficult to execute due to a lack of data strategy, governance, and quality. The ability to capitalize on data is becoming crucial to keep pace with the shifting economy. Evolving and enabling autonomous processes and capabilities to remain competitive is increasingly difficult, as is the struggle to keep up with highly specialized knowledge of emerging technologies and trends. As well, the monetization of new business models, such as esports and hospitality, poses great opportunities but is challenging to execute due to the current
❯ Fund Exponential Value Creation: Allocate resources strategically to support new platforms and capabilities like AI, automation, and quantum computing. Redirecting budgets from maintenance to innovation is essential for organizations to stay competitive and ensure long-term viability.
❯ Treat Data as a Product: Manage and utilize data as a strategic asset rather than a byproduct of operations. Establish robust data governance practices, improve data quality, and leverage data analytics to gain insights that drive decisionmaking and innovation.
❯ Let AI Take Over Core Operations: Implement AI and automation technologies to streamline core operations, enhance efficiency, and reduce manual workloads. Adopt AI-driven solutions for tasks such as predictive maintenance, customer service, and real-time data analysis to stay competitive and innovative.
immaturity of the market.
To navigate current challenges within the sports and entertainment industry and seize the opportunities of emerging technologies, Info-Tech recommends a holistic strategy that includes detailed planning, robust investment in workforce development, and fostering a culture of adaptability and innovation. This approach will enable organizations to effectively navigate their digital transformation and significantly improve fan engagement and satisfaction.
The recommended strategy, outlined in the new blueprint, includes four key priorities that sports and entertainment IT leaders must consider as they adopt an Exponential IT mindset to modernize their operations. These priorities for IT are highlighted below:
❯ Co-Own Organizational Outcomes: Shift the perception of IT from a support function to a co-owner of business outcomes. This requires IT leaders to collaborate closely with other business units, aligning IT initiatives with organizational objectives to drive value and support strategic goals.
Info-Tech advises that by addressing these strategic priorities, the sports and entertainment industry can effectively manage the complexities of digital transformation, as detailed in the firm’s blueprint. Embracing an Exponential IT mindset allows organizations to enhance their offerings, streamline operational processes, and offer personalized fan experiences. This approach fosters technological resilience and positions organizations to capitalize on new business opportunities in a dynamic market. By following this guide, organizations can achieve sustainable growth and success, ensuring they are prepared to meet future technological demands.
INFO-TECH RESEARCH GROUP is one of the world’s leading research and advisory firms, proudly serving over 30,000 IT and HR professionals. The company produces unbiased, highly relevant research and provides advisory services to help leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. For nearly 30 years, Info-Tech has partnered closely with teams to provide them with everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
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