Opinion: New approaches to decision making for product portfolios
The year 2020 will be remembered as the one where almost all consumers have tried new ways of shopping. Do they intend to stick with them for the long term?. The health crisis has accelerated the ongoing move toward online shopping methods, but which will stay and which will revert? Shoppers have learned to navigate stores in a different way and perceptions of ‘experience’ are changing. How do we know what’s next? Marketers everywhere are asking these questions and the honest answer is simply, we don’t know.
Effective marketing teams understand what matters to their customers and in that context, 2020 is showing there’s broad acknowledgment that companies need to rethink not only how they market their product offerings, but how they develop, distribute, and design them.
Instead of trying to predict the next trend, the best marketers are rethinking how they can be ready for whatever comes next. They’re figuring out how to digitally transform their organisations responsibly. They’re using data and consumer signals to distil actionable insights in a privacy-safe way, deploying automated tools that can respond to dynamic behaviour in real time, and building a culture of agility and resilience in the face of change.
“These adjustments don’t need to be radical, just radically responsive”, as Google puts it
When used strategically and responsibly, the signals available to marketers can help fill in the gaps of traditional market intelligence or even in an organisation’s own supply chain. At the outset of COVID-19, Pepsico found pandemic-induced constraints on production capacity were worsened by unavailable or unreliable demand signals that normally came from shipment and consumption data.
Eager for insights to inform not just its marketing but the entire business, the company partnered with Google to create a dashboard that helped it understand consumer demand for its top product categories, including terms such as “pantry loading” that indicated upcoming shopping behaviour.
“The insights were so fresh and relevant that the company used them to drive production and distribution decisions across six separate, billion-dollar brands and scaled the approach globally”, according to Google. “Marketers who focus on surfacing powerful insights into what matters to consumers right now will build the organisational muscles to be ready for whatever tomorrow brings”.
Increasingly using Artificial Intelligence tools and via digital transformation, the best marketers will drive growth not just in their own departments but across their entire organizations, including their partners in operations and finance.
Antonio Obieta, Managing Director, Green Seed Spain