P2PI Member Spotlight

Member Spotlight

A snapshot of industry leaders from the P2PI member community

GINGER GUTHRIE WILSON

Partner, Strategy-360 Agency Ferrero USA (specialist in residence)

About your role: Responsibilities include leading shopper strategy, partnerships and omnichannel activation for the Ferrero mainstream chocolate portfolio in partnership with Ferrero’s category management team.

Biggest challenge right now: One challenge is clearly distinguishing which tactic or combination of tactics fuel incremental growth among a complex shopper journey with multiple points of influence.

Advice for others facing the same challenge:

Evaluate campaigns holistically by collaborating with cross-functional and inter-agency teams.

Best advice received in your career: Working with leaders who taught me the strategic value of crosspollinating ideas, talents and businesses to create outcomes for 1+1=3.

New marketing tactic used in the past year: At Ferrero, we’re leaning into the shopper insight that the path to purchase is anything but linear, and with the influence of digital shopping, we’ve taken a “full funnel” media approach, meaning most of our media touchpoints are shoppable.

Favorite hobby: Hiking, as it gives me a chance to be active, social and enjoy the outdoors in many beautiful places.

PARAS SHAH

Director, Omnichannel Shopper Experience Georgia-Pacific

About your role: Lead omnichannel shopper marketing, consumer promotions and retail media for GeorgiaPacific’s consumer business.

Biggest challenge right now: As consumers’ shopping behaviors and expectations have shifted, how we can transform our shopper marketing to reach consumers when and where they want to shop in an omnichannel world across multiple fulfillment options. Advice for others facing the same challenge: Shift investment mix to growing platforms (i.e., click & collect and home delivery), focus on getting on the “recently purchased list” to drive repeat trial, and develop joint business partnerships with retailers to experiment as they evolve their offerings.

Memorable aha moment in your career: The importance of testing to produce new learnings — even if our assumptions and hypotheses turn out to be wrong — and how those learnings can result in a method to drive business transformation.

Favorite hobby: Making pizza at home so I can eventually become a pizzaiolo!

CORTNE MILLER

Manager, Shopper Marketing Nestle Coffee Partners

About your role: Leverage data-driven shopper and category insights to develop strategic, omnichannel shopper-centric plans to unlock category and brand equity.

Biggest challenge right now: Staying ahead of the curve on the dynamic nature of e-commerce and where it is headed. How to plan for what’s next in order to be one step ahead of our competitors, make it seamless for our shoppers, and be experts for our customers.

Advice for others facing the same challenge:

Continuous education. Read, absorb and apply what you learn to your business. Don’t be afraid to take risks and move fast.

Memorable aha moment in your career: When I learned that the companies I joined or roles I took were more about the people I surround myself with and they make what you do so meaningful.

New marketing tactic used in the past year: Traditional and ride share out-of-home digital billboards.

Favorite hobby: Filling our home with new and interesting plant babies, which started at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. We currently have 39, including coffee, lemon and olive trees. IQ

Commerce Executive Network: 2021 Recap

The Path to Purchase Institute’s Commerce Executive Network (CEN) brings together executives from retailers, brands, agencies and solution providers to solve real-world complex problems, establish best practices and develop standards to implement bold initiatives and inspire change. This diverse group of industry leaders explored three key topics throughout 2021.

The Retail Media work group

discussed benefits and challenges of working with retailer media networks, media aggregators and third-party media sellers. It created various materials to help marketers as they navigate the ever-changing retail media landscape, including: • Glossaries of relevant media and measurement terms, along with a list of benefits and challenges of working with each type of media provider. • A retailer media campaign planning brief that helps teams set expectations, make decisions on media investments and ensure objectives are met. • A retailer media scorecard that helps standardize and compare

program results across channels and customers. • A shopper marketing tactic return on investment (ROI) guide and heat map illustrating the ROI by marketing tactic across select retail channels, product categories and retailers, powered by Foresight ROI. • A map of the capabilities and data available from Kroger Precision

Marketing (KPM) as the first of more assessments to come.

The Future of In-Store work group

undertook a close examination of the changing path to purchase that culminates in the store. The group identified various touchpoints along the shopper journey that cause shoppers moments of delight — or friction — and rated their impact on the perceived shopper experience, ultimately zeroing in on areas that have the most opportunity for innovation and the potential for improvements to drive additional revenue.

The group’s extensive model clearly identified six actionable areas with the greatest potential for impactful innovation: sampling, selection/ planned purchase, discovery/impulse, merchandising, BOPIS and loyalty. Focusing on these key areas, the group drilled down to potential solutions and facilitated deepdive discussions with the goal of determining the current landscape in that area, reviewing paint points and potential solutions, and sharing case studies of recent innovations and successful activations.

The model provides both an overview of the current landscape via a color-coded heat map that brings the final insights to life, as well as deep dives into particular areas of interest.

The Organizational Alignment

work group zeroed in on the need to rethink both how organizations are structured and, more importantly, how they determine who does what when it comes to path-to-purchase marketing. The group considered barriers to how work gets done, skill gaps, options for organizational design and potential changes in ways of working. It concluded that companies need to figure out what changes are needed, what their options are, what shorter-term steps they can take for immediate progress and “quick wins,” and what longerterm steps are needed to embed new structures and ways of working.

In collaboration with OxfordSM, the group created a tool that enables organizations to assess their current capabilities versus what they need, and figure out how to get there. Rather than attempting to provide a single optimal structure, the skills assessment tool enables organizations to see where they stand, based on the visual map, and provides data to support recommendations for changes in the organization.

Most of the documents and tools are available exclusively to CEN members. To join the group, contact Patrick Hare at phare@p2pi.org. IQ

Author’s Corner

‘Resurrecting Retail’

Q&A with best-selling author and retail futurist Doug Stephens

As one of the world’s foremost retail industry futurists, Doug Stephens’ intellectual work and thinking have in uenced many of the most widely known international retailers, agencies and brands. Path to Purchase IQ sat down with the bestselling author, and founder of global consultancy Retail Prophet, to talk about his latest book, “Resurrecting Retail: The Future of Business in a Post-Pandemic World.” Among the topics were trends on the horizon that will have the most impact on brands and retailers.

P2PIQ: From when you rst began writing “Resurrecting Retail,” what aspect of retail business do you think has changed the most? And what do you think will be the biggest shift we’ll see in retail for 2022?

Doug Stephens: From my perspective, the single biggest shift lies in the degree to which businesses across the spectrum have developed at least a tablestakes level of capability in digital commerce. From grocery to automotive, we saw businesses rapidly cobble together the means to serve consumers through any number of means, from livestreaming to by-appointment sales and curbside pickup. Similarly, we’ve seen millions of new merchants emerge on platforms like Shopify.

This hasn’t come as good news for companies like Amazon, Alibaba and other large marketplaces, which prior to the pandemic seemed to possess an insurmountable advantage. Therefore, we’re now going to see these companies enter a new phase of their own development, which will involve a range of new categories, services and technologies aimed at reclaiming competitive distance. Already Amazon is making big bets in verticals like education, transportation, ntech [ nancial technology] and healthcare. I believe they’re just at the cusp of a completely new competitive evolution.

P2PIQ: What’s one of the most surprising takeaways you unearthed while working on “Resurrecting Retail”?

Stephens: That the vast majority of businesses have very little sense of clarity when it comes to their purpose to consumers. What’s worse is that most don’t even realize it until they’re challenged to articulate precisely what their unique value is. And this is crucial, because without a crystal-clear sense of what the brand represents or the value it provides, myriad other tactical decisions become nearly impossible to make in an e ective way. How can you determine what sort of customer experience to build if you’re not even sure what speci c value your brand aims to deliver? How can you make cogent technology investments if you’re not certain what kind of experience you’re attempting to design? How can you even hire the right people if you’re not clear on the experience you want them to animate? Without purpose, nothing else matters.

Brands that do possess a clear and uni ed internal sense of brand purpose and value to their customers consistently outperform their competition, are more e cient with their capital, and have in nitely more loyal customers and employees. When we work with brands to develop strategy, purpose is always the starting point. In my view, the purpose is the new positioning in the post-pandemic era.

P2PIQ: Since the onset of the pandemic, how would you describe the essence of why we shop has evolved? What does this mean for commerce marketers?

Stephens: Given that we are still in the midst of this crisis, it remains di cult to triangulate consumer behavior with certainty. To varying degrees, consumers are still grappling with some very powerful and primal emotions that are underpinning their behaviors. Fear, disconnection, boredom and thoughts around mortality and legacy are all weighing on how consumers are shopping and what they’re shopping for. For example, at the outset of the crisis we saw panic buying as consumers worked to gain a sense of security and safety. We’ve seen remarkable spending on products that o er distraction from the pandemic — musical instruments, gardening supplies, digital entertainment, etc. We’ve seen enhanced luxury spending as consumers seek to regain a sense of self-esteem and

value. And, of course, we’ve seen major movement in the real estate market, as people sort out the kind of lives they want to lead and where they want to lead them from.

The economic picture is similarly cloudy at the moment. Stimulus spending, wage subsidies and restraints on things like travel and hospitality, as well as signi cant in ationary pressure, are making it di cult to get a clear sense of the consumer’s nancial wellbeing.

When we truly begin emerging from the pandemic, we’ll quickly get a much clearer sense of lasting behavioral changes left by the pandemic.

P2PIQ: What’s your No. 1 piece of advice to brands as they try to keep pace with the evolving consumer landscape and engage with shoppers across the path to purchase?

Stephens: There are only two kinds of businesses today: those that become the cognitive default in their category and those that become the emotional default. Amazon, for example, is clearly a cognitive default. That’s why 70% to 80% of us begin product searches there. We don’t love Amazon — they’re just remarkably easy and convenient to shop and that’s precisely the sort of consumption machine that Amazon set out to build. Most businesses can’t compete with that — nor should they aspire to.

The other category of businesses are emotional defaults. Brands such as Nike, Dyson and Patagonia are great examples of businesses that dominate by creating a very di erent kind of value. Patagonia, for example, is a cultural ag bearer for the environment or what I call an “Activist” brand. Nike trades on deep human and social themes, making them a “Storyteller.” Dyson treats its products like nely crafted art, making them an “Engineer” brand. Each has created an emotionally connected place in their customers’ hearts. In “Resurrecting Retail,” I o er 10 di erent archetypes like these — each o ering a di erent purpose and value to consumers.

The moral of the story is, if you’re not either the cognitive default or the emotional default in your category, your brand is not going to survive the postpandemic future of retail. It’s that simple.

P2PIQ: What would you highlight as a key mistake brands and retailers might be making as they adjust their strategies for the continued shifts in shopper behavior?

Stephens: Perhaps the biggest mistake I’m seeing play out right now is sort of an all-in approach to spending on digital marketing and e-commerce. It’s a natural response, given the massive ow of online spending right now, but it would be a huge mistake to forget about the value of physical retail — not so much as a means of product distribution, but rather as a powerful means of customer acquisition. The cost of digital advertising has seen a 10x increase in cost since 2016, and yet studies con rm that the majority of spending on digital marketing produces ads that go largely unnoticed by consumers. Physical stores, however, o er a true means of measuring consumer impressions, engaging shoppers in a proper brand experience and galvanizing a meaningful relationship with them. In other words, physical stores are becoming a more powerful and cost-e ective media channel. The next step is to begin e ectively measuring it as a media channel in monetary terms, which some of our clients are already working at doing.

P2PIQ: Looking to the future now, what short-term trends in retail do you see taking hold long-term?

Stephens: Generally speaking, I believe what we are seeing is retail (both o ine and online) moving from being largely centralized and search-driven to becoming more dispersed and entertainment-driven. Whether it’s livestreaming, social commerce or virtual stores, we’re going to nd that retail becomes more ambient and woven into more day-to-day experiences. Even online shopping will become less about going to a website and entering a search term and more about shopping from within content and entertainment experiences. This is the new frontier of retail. IQ

Meet the Author Coffee Hour — Feb. 17, 2 p.m. EST

Doug Stephens is one of the Featured Authors in our 2022 Book Club, which is currently reading “Resurrecting Retail: The Future of Business in a PostPandemic World.” Sign up (it’s free!) to be part of our Book Club and you’ll get access to our exclusive Meet the Author virtual coffee hour event — Feb. 17 at 2 p.m. EST — where you’ll get to listen in while we pick the brain of this “Retail Prophet” and then take part in the discussion during an interactive Q&A. Visit PathtoPurchaseIQ.com/bookclub to join us and get on the list.