My first job out of college was selling and marketing cookies for Keebler. I flew to Chicago for training, received a company car (a Ford Escort - woo hoo!) and thought I'd be living the high life. But I soon realized the lion's share of my job involved climbing over boxes in the back hallway of supermarkets and loading cookies on shelves. While I drove hundreds of miles alone in my car each week, my friends were hitting Happy Hours and playing on their company softball teams. So what did I do? I quit Keebler and joined them, of course. I lasted four years in the Corporate Controllers Office for Prudential Insurance in downtown Newark, NJ - and I learned a lot.
Looking back, I realize my role as strategist here at birdsong gregory, a leading Shopper Marketing and advertising agency in Charlotte, uniquely benefits from my field experience at Keebler and the analytics I learned at Pru. Developing well-founded strategies for our clients requires an ability to understand markets, distill unique points of difference for our clients and formulate a communications plan that will deliver results. While I may have hung up my Keebler elf costume, don't be surprised to find me walking the aisles of supermarkets researching for our clients.
The recently concluded FMI2012 in Dallas this month highlighted a number of troubling data points for supermarkets. Among the items presented by the association's president and CEO, Leslie Sarasin:
Only 64% of shoppers choose conventional supermarkets as their primary shopping venue. This is the lowest percentage in years.
In 2010, online sales accounted for $12 billion of sales of consumer packaged goods.
Traditional grocery stores have not been adding square footage, while supercenters, dollar stores, convenience stores, and clubs have added 150 million square feet since 2005.
The good news, if you can call it that, is that grocers have been issued a wakeup call. The strongest among them will survive and thrive, while weaker retailers may find their doors shuttered. Need some help? No one knows grocery like birdsong gregory. Contact our shopper marketing agency to learn more.
This infographic from Lemon, a mobile expense tracking app, highlights some interesting insights about what data shoppers are willing to share. Based on an IBM survey of more than 28,000 respondents, the findings indicate that shoppers are quite willing to share certain levels of personal data in exchange for offers that are unique to them. Ultimately what shoppers crave most is a genuinely personalized shopping experience and often times a release of personal information is required to deliver that experience. Find out more about engaging with your shoppers by visiting birdsong gregory, the leading independent shopper marketing agency in the southeast.
I'm headed to Chicago April 17th to represent birdsong gregory at the annual Path to Purchase Institute Shopper Marketing Summit. This is an industry conference where experts share knowledge and best practices to help brands and retailers achieve success along the path to purchase. The keynote this year will be delivered by Mike Rowe. You may know him from his popular Dirty Jobs series on the Discovery Channel or his commercials for Ford. But in Chicago he'll be talking about a line of cleaning products also named Dirty Jobs. The products, all labeled “heavy duty,” include a stain remover, carpet cleaners, a spot and stain remover, a degreaser and hand sanitizers. The Dirty Jobs products are being marketed by a new company, called My Dirty Jobs, that is licensing the “Dirty Jobs” name from the Discovery Channel parent, Discovery Communications.
At birdsong gregory, we've never been overly concerned about winning awards. We figure the best demonstration of our success is keeping clients and earning new ones. So each year when the deadline nears for ADDY Awards submissions (the Oscars of the ad world), we carefully select only a few pieces of our more interesting work to enter. This past year we submitted five entries and it's rewarding to see that three of the pieces were selected - and all of them were awarded Gold (see our team celebrating above). The winning entries included trade show support for Bloom, a video animation for Resolute Forest Product and our own holiday card. Great clients let you create award-winning work, and we've got some of the best.
Chobani, the best selling yogurt in America and a new client of birdsong gregory, served up its delicious Greek yogurt at the Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim last month. The trade show, attended by almost 60,000 industry professionals, provided a showcase for Chobani to unveil its new campaign, "It's crazy to love a yogurt this much" from Leo Burnett New York. Our team developed all the retail-facing sales materials and designed the Champions banners pictured above.
Our engagement with Chobani illustrates a great example of how birdsong gregory applies our specialized shopper marketing expertise to complement a national campaign. Find out more about our services at www.birdsonggregory.com
Today's Wall Street Journal tells us that Target "... is tired of being used." In an article discussing a concept called "showrooming," where shoppers come into a store to see a product in person only to buy it from an online rival - typically at a lower price, Target is asking its vendor partners to create special products for the banner that shield it from price comparisons.
Online sites like Amazon.com pose a significant risk to retailers like Best Buy to Barnes & Noble. The article reports that this years holiday season saw an average 4.1% jump for brick and mortar stores while on line sales jumped 15%. Target's sales were particularly disappointing in electronics, books and movies – all categories that have made a significant shift to online sales.
It appears that Target's vendors may have little choice but to play along because of the second largest discount chain's clout. For a shopper marketing agency like birdsong gregory, this just highlights more opportunities to mine the path to purchase for consumer insights that may benefit our online and B&M clients.
What's this video got to do with shopper marketing or advertising? Absolutely nothing. But man what a skilled job this guy does at parallel parking his car.
Need to find the food court at the mall or the closest airport bathroom? You may be in luck. Google has announced plans to bring its mapping technology to the great indoors. With the launch of Google Maps 6.0, users of mobile devices running Android now have the ability to use Google Maps not just to get directions to an IKEA, Macy's or one of several airports, but to use the mapping functionality to figure out how to find housewares, ATMs, and your flight gate once you are inside.
Acording to the LA Times, Google's inside mapping will work similarly to its outside mapping. A little blue dot will move along with you to show you where you are, and the technology is even able to know what floor you are on -- what Steve Lee, director of product management for Google, called "the third dimension of mapping."
Just note that the release is pretty limited. Although Google's launch partners include 18 U.S. airports -- notably some of the biggies, such as Chicago O'Hare International Airport, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and San Francisco International Airport (obviously) -- LAX and JFK are still not available.
Some of the big-box stores such as IKEA, Macy's, Bloomingdales and Home Depot have already been mapped, but not Target. Not Wal-Mart. And not nearly as many malls as you'd like to see, especially in this holiday season. Just another example of the shopping experienced being enhanced through technology.
The Windy City certainly lived up to its name during the annual Shopper Marketing Expo this month in Chicago. We were buffeted by winds up to 55 miles per hour. Fortunately most of my time was spent indoors at the historic Navy Pier. The Expo brings together the brightest minds in the shopper marketing space and serves as an opportunity to share best-in-class examples of practical applications at retail. During one of the dinners I was seated next to a senior brand manager from Kimberly-Clark and we toasted each other for being fellow Gold Hub Prize winners. His team won for work related to Kotex and Poise feminine care products. It was gratifying to realize that our young, agile studio in Charlotte is competing at the level of national and international brands like Kimberly-Clark and their agency partner JWT/OgilvyAction. As we like to say, sometimes the biggest ideas can come from the smallest agencies. Learn more at www.birdsonggregory.com
This is a quick peek inside the refreshed Bloom Grocery store. This showcases just a part of the work that earned shopper marketing agency birdsong gregory a Gold Prize for excellence in the retail environment from Hub Magazine.We introduced new graphics and merchandising efforts in key departments to amplify the new product offering and improve the shopping experience. See more of this work at www.birdsonggregory.com
The Wall Street Journal recently highlighted what it calls the new frontier of frugality - retailers having to come to terms with consumers who traded down during the recession and aren't coming back. According to the article, 75% of consumers shop with a list compared to 45% just 3 years ago. Private brand grocery sales are up 5%. And 72% of consumers think the economy still has a way to go to reach bottom.
To survive this new reality some brands like Coca-Cola are introducing new, smaller sized packaging at a lower price and Wal Mart is reintroducing layaway which it phased out in 2005. More than ever, this new reality calls for having greater shopper insights to understand the best ways to engage them. Give birdsong gregory a call to see if we can help your brand thrive on the new frontier.
We are in the midst of designing new promotional materials for several communities developed by our client, Crescent Resources. In a clear demonstration of "doing what it takes" to please the client, we offered up members of our own team as models (I use that term loosely) for several photo shoots scheduled over the past week. Above is yours truly and my wife Heidi enjoying some time by the fire. Keep an eye out for our shopper marketing agency's favorite dog, Pete, who's making his model debut soon.
We've often said that at birdsong gregory we're more interested in delivering results for our clients than winning awards, but every once in a while the two come together nicely. We were just informed that the collection of work we developed to relaunch the Bloom Grocery Brand has been awarded a Gold Prize from the annual Hub Magazine competition honoring excellence in the retail experience. Our peers in the Gold category include international brands like Disney, Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble. And their agencies partners are some of the biggest names in the Shopper Marketing space. It just goes to show you that you don't need a big shop for big ideas. The top Gold winners are competing for the best-of-the-best Hub Cup via on line voting through September 14th. Click here to vote for Bloom.
Our shopper marketing agency has devoted countless hours over the past year strategizing, formulating and finally launching a new brand position for our grocery store client, Bloom (see the case study to learn more). Knowing there was a lot at stake, we commissioned a research study to gauge shopper sentiments about the store experience before we relaunched the brand. Now that the relaunch is complete, and shoppers have had a few months to soak in the new surroundings, we went back and completed a second wave of research to see what they think. The results are very promising. We saw a 7% lift in the likelihood of shoppers to recommend Bloom to their friends, a 15% increase in likeability for key departments in the store, and 15% improvement in store navigation. Those stats along with a double-digit increase in overall same store sales, how's that for ROI?
A new study out of the National University of Singapore offers a great defense for the next time your boss catches you surfing the web instead of doing work. You can say that browsing is boosting your productivity.
The study, entitled "Impact of Cyberloafing on Psychological Engagement" reveals that compared to working straight through or to other activities like responding to personal e-mails, web browsing rejuvenates workers. The results found that the subjects from the group that were given browsing time reported less instance of exhaustion and boredom, while also proving to be more effective in executing tasks.
Diet Coke first hit store shelves in 1982 and has been a top seller ever since. But even legendary icons can use a bit of updating. AdWeek asks industry experts to chime in on the new packaging design. Click here for the whole story and to learn more about birdsong gregory's philosophy on design, shopper marketing and the state of advertising read our Manifesto featured on our new web site.
Talk about retail activation and employing shopper technology! European grocery chain Tesco has 'opened' a virtual supermarket in a South Korea subway station where the items are just pictures lined against the walls of subway stations. Riders can simply snap an image of the QR codes placed on each product to add it to their shopping cart, then they checkout and then have items delivered to their home by the end of the day.
As reported recently in The Wall Street Journal, the once staid barcode is suddenly getting a bit of flair. It seems that granola, juice and olives packaging are sporting barcodes that integrate famous buildings, blades of wheat and bubbles into the ubiquitous black and white rectangle of lines and numbers. This evolution of package design to include the barcode is a way for consumer-goods companies to better connect with customers. And while the the trend is popular with smaller companies, even one of the world's largest food companies, Nestle SA, is trying out vanity barcodes on its smaller brands.
The Journal reports, "Barcodes are what allow retailers to track products through their stores and change pricing without needing to retag every item. Every retail barcode number in the U.S. and 107 other countries is assigned by GS1, a nonprofit standards organization created in the early 1970s when barcode technology entered the retail landscape. A company applies to GS1 for a barcode number specific to that company. It then creates (or hires a firm to create) the barcode to match that number."
Do you have a novel vision for your next barcode? Contact Shopper Marketing agency birdsong gregory and let's chat.
Digital Life on Today posted an article this week about a very novel use of QR codes for marketing. While it seems that some people wear their passion on their sleeve, Jessica Stuart had hers printed on a silk-and-linen dress.
Described as a "... bigtime-TV-producer-cum-digital-entrepreneur." Stuart started a firm that specializes in "short form, multi-use content," and she provided a demonstration of what that is than at the recent Webby Awards. A winner of two awards for a video she created for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, she wore a dress that was printed with QR codes that played the video when the the codes were scanned by those attending the event, by using their smartphones.
QR codes are mobile bar codes that are just starting to bubble up in mainstream commercial ventures. With QR — which stands for "quick response" — codes, shoppers can use their cellphones to swipe the code to buy items, shop or even watch product videos.
The codes "are popping up not only at hipster events like the annual South by Southwest music and digital conference and festival in Austin, Texas, but also in mainstream corporate marketing," noted Jonathan Blum in a recent Entrepreneur.com article. "TAG Heuer, Macy’s, and the car-maker Mini now sell using QR codes. Some uses seem rather mundane: Retail giant Sears went as far as to place QR codes in a recent mass-market tool catalog.
My first job out of college was selling and marketing cookies for Keebler. I flew to Chicago for training, received a company car (a Ford Escort - woo hoo!) and thought I'd be living the high life. But I soon realized the lion's share of my job involved climbing over boxes in the back hallway of supermarkets and loading cookies on shelves. While I drove hundreds of miles alone in my car each week, my friends were hitting Happy Hours and playing on their company softball teams. So what did I do? I quit Keebler and joined them, of course. I lasted four years in the Corporate Controllers Office for Prudential Insurance in downtown Newark, NJ - and I learned a lot. 
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