If you think about the companies with perhaps least amount of consumer data, you would automatically think about consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers. Hardly anybody registers for their website or joins their loyalty clubs; moms don’t flock to their branded diaper sites; and they are at arms-length from any valuable transaction data (store sales) until well after the fact. So, with little registration, website, or offline sales data, why are so many large CPG firms licensing an expensive first-party data management platform?
While CPG companies will never have the vast amounts of point-of-sale, loyalty-card, app, and website data that a big box retailer might have, they do spend a ton of dough on media. And, as we all know, with large media expenditures come tons of waste. Combine this with the increasingly large investment and influence that activist investors and private equity companies have in CPG, and you can see where this leads. PE companies have installed zero-based budgeting that forces CPG concerns to rationalize every penny of the marketing budget—which, until lately, has been subject to the Wannamaker Rule (“I know half of my budget is working, but not which half”). Enter the DMP for measurement and global frequency control, cutting off and reallocating potentially millions of dollars in “long tail” spending. Now, the data that the CPG marketer actually has in abundance (media exposure data), can be leveraged to the hilt.
This first and most obvious CPG use case has been discussed extensively in past articles. But there is much more to data management for CPG companies. Here are just a few tactics big consumer marketers have written into their data-driven playbooks:
The Move to Purchase-Based Targeting (PBT)
Marketers have come a long way from demographic targeting. Yes, gender, age and income are all reliable proxies for finding those “household CEOs,” but we live in complicated times and “woman, aged 25-54, with 2 children in household” is still a fairly broad way to target media in 2016. Today, men are increasingly as likely to go grocery shopping on a Thursday night. Marketers saw this and shifted more budget to behavioral, psychographic, and contextual targeting—but finding cereal buyers using proxies such as site visitation sharpened the targeting arrow only slightly more than demography.
Packaged goods marketers have long understood the value of past purchases (loyalty cards and coupons), but until the emergence of data management technologies, have struggled to activate audiences based on such data. Now, big marketers can look at online coupon redemption or build special store purchase segments (Datalogix, Nieslen Catalina, News America Marketing) and create high value purchase-based segments. The problem? Such seed segments are small, and must be modeled to achieve scale. Also, by the time the store sales data comes in, it’s often far too late to optimize a media plan. That said, CPG marketers are finding that product purchasers share key data attributes that reveal much about their household composition, behavior, and—most interestingly—affinity for a company’s other products. It may not seem obvious that a shopping basket contains diapers and beer—until you understand that Mom sent Dad out to the store to pick up some Huggies, and he took the opportunity to grab a cold six-pack of Bud Light. These insights are shaping modern digital audience segmentation strategy, and those tactics are becoming more and more automated through the use of algorithmic modeling and machine-learning. CPG has seen the future, and it is using PBT to increase relevant reach.
Optimizing Category Reach
CPG marketers are constantly thinking about how to grow the amount of product they sell, and those thoughts typically vary between focusing on folks who are immensely loyal (“heavy” category buyers) versus those who infrequently purchase (“light” or “medium” category buyers). Who to target? It’s an interesting question, and one answered more decisively with purchase-based sales data.
Take the large global soda company as an example. Their average amount of colas their customer consumes is 15 a year, but that is an immensely deceptive number. The truth is that the company has a good amount of “power users” who drink 900 colas a year (two and a half per day), and a lot of people who may only drink 2-3 colas during the entire year. Using the age-old “80/20 Rule” as a guideline, you would perhaps be inclined to focus most of the marketing budget on the 20% of users who supposedly make up 80% of sales volume. However, closer examination reveals that heavy category buyers may only be driving as little as 50% of total purchase volume. So, the marketer’s quandary is, “Do I try and sell the heavy buyer his 901st cola, or do I try and get the light buyer to double his purchase from two to four colas a year?”
Leveraging data helps CPG companies not have to decide. Increasingly, companies are adopting frequency approaches that identify the right amount of messaging to nurture the heavy users (maybe 2-3 messages per user, per month) and bring light buyers to higher levels of purchase consideration (up to 20 messages per month). Moreover, by using DMP technology to segment these buyers based on their category membership, creatives can be adjusted based on the audience. Heavy buyers get messages that reinforce why the love the brand (“share the love”), and light buyers can receive more convincing messages (“tastes better”).
Increasing Lift through Cross-Channel Messaging
CPG marketers have some highly evolved models that show just how much lift a working media dollar has on sales, and they use this guide to decision on media investment by both channel and partner. With the power of DMPs for cross-channel measurement, CPG companies are finally able to apply even small insights they can to tweak sales lift.
What if the data reveal that a 50% mixture of equity and direct response ad creatives lifts coupon downloads by 200%? In other words, instead of just showing “Corn Flakes are Yummy” ads, you mixed in a few “Buy Flakes now at Kroger and save!” creatives afterwards, and you saw a huge impact on your display performance? Sadly, this simple insight was not available before data management platforms corralled cross-channel spending and associated it with an individual, but now these small insights are adding up to appreciable sales lift.
In another example, a large CPG company sees massive lift in in-store coupon redemptions by running branded display ads on desktop all throughout the week—but giving a “mobile nudge” on the smartphone on Friday night when it’s time to fill the pantry. This cross-channel call-to-action has seen real results, and only involves grabbing a brand-favorable consumer’s attention on another device to create a big impact. Again, a simple tactic—but also impossible without the power of a DMP.
CPG marketers have been able to achieve a ton of progress by working with relatively sparse amounts of data. What can you do with yours?
The Devil's Work 