The 5Ps of marketing have changed dramatically. Are Traasdahl from Crisp, shares tips on how brands can gain a competitive advantage in the omnichannel marketing space.
Rapidly changing consumer attitudes and behavior. Surging growth in online grocery shopping. Higher expectations for an omnichannel experience. An evolving competitive landscape. No doubt, things have changed radically in the retail business, especially in the past year.
Today’s consumer experience is shaped by interactions with retailers and brands across multiple channels and touchpoints, making seamless consistency imperative.
Successful CPG brands and retailers must develop holistic, omnichannel-first strategies that meet consumers where, when, and how they want.
That’s all possible thanks to programmatic commerce: a shopper-centric, data-driven operating model that proactively recognizes, responds, and adapts to an ever-changing consumer in a dynamic omnichannel world. It drives product innovation, assortment optimization, pricing strategies, channel selection, and promotion execution. And it allows us to redefine the classic 5Ps of marketing to gain a competitive edge in this new future.
1. People: A 360-degree view of the consumer
Gartner predicts that for the foreseeable future, changes in consumer behavior will have a greater impact on value in retail than any other factor. To anticipate and meet ever-evolving consumer demand, retailers and brands need to align around a shared understanding of how consumers shop, live, and eat — and use this knowledge to provide value.
For example, with in-store browsing curtailed and economic uncertainty, consumers are relying more heavily on pre-purchase research. Smart brands and retailers are finding ways to provide more robust pre-purchase discovery, including using AI-driven webchats, suggesting complementary items, building meal solution bundles by occasion and dietary requirements, and more.
2. Product: Innovation and assortment optimization
With a shared view of the consumer, brands can innovate on new product development and optimize local assortments. With this insight, they optimized distribution and marketing, accordingly, driving regional sales. Using programmatic commerce, innovation teams can tap directly into a vast array of data sources to identify trends, refine concepts, build demand estimates, and launch products.
3. Place: Rethinking “where to play”
The interconnectedness of in-store and online shopping is here to stay, with ever-increasing choices for where to shop: brick-and-mortar, retailer sites, DTC brand sites, social media, and more. This is a good thing: the omnichannel customer shops more frequently, buys more on each visit, and is more loyal.
To take advantage, brands and retailers must deliver an integrated digital and physical journey that provides consistency and convenience at every touchpoint. Building that ecosystem requires synergy across online and offline branding, and data to make sense of it all holistically.
4. Price: Data-driven optimization
Historically stable Key Value Items (KVIs), the items whose pricing is most likely to affect a shopper’s choice of retailer, transformed dramatically during the pandemic. Being out of sync on KVIs alienates shoppers and erodes price image. It also leaves money on the table by overlooking less price-sensitive items where margin can be safely recovered. Through analysis of real-time retailer, brand, and market data, teams can get a high-level view of trends, hyper-target customers, and fine-tune localized pricing with surgical precision. The result: the optimal balance of price increases/decreases to drive profitable demand overall.
5. Promotion: Personal and precise
Omnichannel shopping requires omnichannel marketing: the coordination of ad messaging, targeting, and campaign optimization across multiple devices and content channels to deliver personalized, consistent messaging. Plans and budgets can be refined on a granular level to target shoppers within a certain radius of select stores that brands and retailers know have inventory on shelf. For example, programmatically feeding on-shelf product availability by location into digital ad purchase portals with decision rules to only buy ads where distribution is in place prevents shoppers from finding empty shelves when they show up to buy and marketers from wasting ad dollars.
Programmatic commerce enables the new 5Ps
The next generation of go-to-market strategies requires data literacy and analytical skills, supported by deep data integration between multiple systems across the company and between suppliers and sellers. With programmatic commerce, retailers and brands can test and learn together with unified, real-time data. This transforms the supply chain from a disjointed web into a seamless operating model that creates competitive advantage, keeps customers happy, and drives profitable growth. And it can be implemented today by brands of all sizes.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Are Traasdahl, Founder & CEO, Crisp
Founder and CEO of Crisp, Are Traasdahl has more than 20 years of experience in mobile and digital technology. Prior to Crisp, Are was the founder & CEO of Tapad which was later acquired for $360M, making it the fifth-largest venture-backed M&A exit in New York at the time. Prior to Tapad, he founded Thumbplay, a mobile entertainment service that he grew to more than $100M in revenue in less than 3 years. Thumbplay, later acquired by Clear Channel, is now called iHeartRadio.