Shopper Marketing Excellence

The Top 20 Brand Marketers & Retailers

Procter & Gamble has once again taken the #1 ranking in the Hub Top 20 for brand marketers and retailers — the fourth time P&G has occupied the #1 spot in the eight years we have conducted the survey.

Although P&G winning may sound like old news, this year is a ‘Secretariat’ accomplishment. Based on the combination of first- and second-place votes, and comments from agency and retail executives who have worked with P&G, the company’s scores were the highest in history and exceeded the averages of all others on the Top 20 by 216 percent! Specifically: P&G received three times as many evaluations as the top brand marketer with which to work than the next highest evaluated company — across all 13 performance criteria. Following is representative of the many, many complimentary comments we received about P&G:

“Procter & Gamble has the most complete shopper-marketing organization. They are committed across the company to the discipline; they are prepared to invest in it, have the best understanding and knowledge of consumer and shopper needs and motivations, and demonstrate the greatest commitment to really partner with retailers — to truly reinvent categories. It helps that they have the scale (and resources) that get retailers’ attention. Others try as hard but because their brands represent low percentage of a shoppers’ basket or retailer’s sales they are unable to get as much traction. Even if P&G did not have this built-in advantage, I still believe they would approach shopper marketing with the same rigor and discipline.”

While P&G’s achievements in the shopper-marketing field have been consistently outstanding, this year’s rankings for brand marketers suggests achievements that are equally impressive:

• PepsiCo is #2. We know from a variety of sources that PepsiCo has worked exceedingly hard to achieve this, rising from #8 in 2014, #11 in 2012 and #13 in 2010, despite a major change in top management that could have derailed its determination in shopper marketing.
• M&M Mars at #3 shares a similar determination, having risen from #6 in 2014, #11 in 2013 and #12 in 2012.
• Walmart — the only retailer on the list so far — has risen to #10 from #11 in 2014, thanks to Andy Murray and his team who took over the responsibility for creative at Walmart in 2012.
• And, lastly, welcome to three new companies that made the Hub Top 20 for the first time and which truly add interest and variety to the list: Anheuser-Busch InBev, Samsung and T-Mobile at #14, #16 and #19, respectively. We look forward to these leading-edge companies improving on these positions as they continue to integrate shopper and path-to-purchase retailer strategies into their toolkits.

As in previous years, we asked agencies to rank the performance of the brand marketers and retailers with which they deal in 13 performance areas relevant to shopper marketing and the working relationship with their agencies. Then we indexed the results against the total for all 13 criteria to determine where agencies think brand marketers and retailers could be more helpful and effective. Because we used the same methodology to calculate the results as in 2014 and 2013, we were able to trend these results and therefore minimize the anomalies.

In the opinion of the agencies with which they work, brand marketers have been consistently good at integrating their shopper process among and between departments within their companies, establishing and maintaining retailer relationships, clarity of shopper-related objectives and strategies and insights and understanding:

Agencies think brand marketers need work in the following areas:

• Feedback and constructive criticism. This is particularly important when a brand marketer does not routinely measure the results of its shopper initiatives because otherwise the agency has no way of knowing how it — or the initiative — performed. Sample comment: “We know everybody is busy but when we work all weekend to develop a program that is within budget and meets its timetable and then hear nothing from the client.
It becomes disheartening over time.”

• Digital capabilities. The consensus is that packaged-goods brand marketers are significantly behind with respect to responding to retailer digital needs because their sales organizations are neither trained in, nor inclined toward, this discipline. In addition, their marketing people are not typically customer-facing. As one respondent put it: “I find digital to be much overrated in the grocery business. The industry is still low-tech from a shopper point-of-view.”
• Measurement. We don’t want to belabor this subject because we have addressed it many times in Hub shopper-marketing annual update surveys. The bottom line is that only 42 percent of packaged-goods marketers report that they measure their shopper-marketing initiatives. Until this improves, the other 58 percent have no benchmarks against which to gauge progress, set objectives or plan budgets. Clearly, shopper marketing in these companies is not a priority and, unfortunately, will remain stagnant.
• Accessibility. This is a significant issue for many agencies because the numbers do not reveal the nature and extent of the problem. For those brand marketers that position shopper marketing as a corporate strategy whose planning is integrated into each brand’s annual operating plan (such as Kimberly-Clark), shopper-based agencies play an integral role, and access to their clients’ key decision makers is not an issue.

However, for companies that position shopper marketing as a sales-driven tactic, access of agency personnel has been pushed down to relatively inexperienced ‘go-betweens’ who have limited decision-making authority. Until these brand marketers do their homework and elevate shopper marketing to a position in the company where it can reach its potential, this situation is unlikely to change.

To sum up the key messages coming out of this year’s survey, our take is as follows:

• The packaged-goods community as a whole — brand marketers, retailers and agencies alike — need to make digital a priority and shopper-marketing agencies (at least those who want to stay in the business) need to up their game.
• Insights/research, and the opportunity identification possibilities that result, need to become more transparent — and more collaborative. Both parties can bring value to this discipline and build on what the other brings — if they know about it.
• The more agencies, brand marketers and retailers work together as partners, the better the result. To quote a very satisfied brand marketer:

“I do not consider [them] our ‘shopper-marketing agency.’ I consider them experts on our team. They are true partners in every sense of the word. They bring insight so we can work together to be ahead of the curve. My organizational goals are their goals. We celebrate success together and discuss opportunities for improvement together. We worked through how to increase our overall campaign effectiveness over the past few years and in 2014 reached our highest results to date. No program is too big or small. No challenge is too tough. They make me smarter as a retail-marketing leader. How could I ask for anything more?