From Our Print Edition

Olga Yurovski, author of the award-winning Shopper Marketing Blog and the CEO of Shopperations, the marketing planning software, offers solid advice for shopper marketers in working more closely with retailers on planning.

CPG shopper marketers are planning for the year ahead, aiming to align brand retailer strategies and show how shopper teams will support their biggest retail customers. They’re working on unique, strategic, compelling marketing campaigns.

‘Any brand plan that has been released without prior consultations with the key retail customers and customer-facing teams is doomed to mediocrity.’

 A DREADED PROCESS

Sounds exciting, but most CPG shopper marketers dread the process. Planning in CPG has always been stressful due to its sales/marketing duplicity, extremely fluid retail customer plans and vast scope.

Rapid technology expansion has made the shift from traditional and in-store media toward digital campaigns even more complicated. Since digital media has amazingly short lead times, brand marketers can now be more responsive to market conditions, adjust their campaigns on the fly and shift dollars on a moment’s notice.

That blessing, however, intensified an already existing tension between customer-facing marketing teams (who require advance planning and sell-in) and brand marketers, their internal clients. Shopper and commerce marketing teams complain that brand plans, budgets and assets are not ready in time for customer sales meetings. That’s understandable, given that digital media’s lead time is short but retail execution still demands long lead times.

But this creates conflict between marketers who are running digital media campaigns from brand HQ and shopper marketers who must coordinate and pre-sell their programs months in advance. After all, retail planning, depending on the category, is done 4-12 months in advance, so shopper marketers feel increasingly frustrated and unprepared for joint business planning calls.

How to fix this? Enable store-back-planning. This idea is hardly new, but it’s rarely implemented correctly. The role of retailers in the success of CPG brands is increasingly important, so having their early input into the brand’s annual operating planning is key. Any brand plan that has been released without prior consultations with the key retail customers and customer-facing teams is doomed to mediocrity. When brand annual strategies and key initiatives are released to the field teams, they should see their fingerprints all over it. If they are surprised, you are doing it wrong.

(This is the first of four steps you can take to improve the process. For the other three, go to blog.shopperations.com.)