Medieval doctors and merry-go-rounds

Over the past year, many in the retail sector have been warning of the dangers for brands of getting drawn into the price promotions trap, and how they need to find a way to get out of this cycle - and quickly. This was further emphasised recently, when in the build up to a lecture at Mountainview Learning alongside Mars global chief marketing officer Bruce McColl, Professor Byron Sharp of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, accused marketers who try to build brand loyalty through price promotions of being like "medieval doctors" whose bloodletting tactics inadvertently kill the patient.

To get off this potentially damaging price promotions merry-go-round, marketers need to think and act smarter when it comes to dealing with retailers. For us, this serves to underline the two areas we have been calling for brand owners to focus on:

Firstly, leveraging brands at the point of purchase using retail media and looking at how companies can plan this more effectively, and take advantage of retail communication opportunities that are being presented in a more coherent and joined up way;

Secondly, optimising how they do that using store-level data to target the biggest areas of opportunity. Ultimately, these two things lock together as the data helps brands to plan and target campaigns more effectively.

You don't need to kowtow

This means that should brand owners find themselves faced with the larger retailers demanding price discounting, they do have an option other than having to kowtow to those demands. Agencies like ourselves are now in a position to help these brands find the information they need and locate where the biggest opportunities are for them to make money. For example this can be done by ensuring that the right stock is in the right shops rather than simply applying a blanket one-size-fits-all approach to supply - and then directing their budget spend towards these areas and away from the promotional elements, thereby helping keep the integrity of their brand.

The reality is that many companies will already have much of the data that they need to do this at their fingertips. Often this is spread around various departments, and systems are now on the market. One such example is our own skuBASE, which offers brand owners the ability to draw this data together across their company to get real-time information about individual store performance, helping them to identify missed opportunities and hidden insights that can help drive sales and enable more effective shopper marketing. As is the situation with companies like Coca-Cola, it is now possible to have this information delivered directly to a laptop, iPad or notebook in a succinct one-page format, which is updated automatically and presents the latest data sets comparing individual store performance against group benchmarking figures. This can empower sales and marketing people to make more informed decisions on the spot.

Another fundamental shift

Another fundamental shift taking place is the transition of retailers to becoming media owners in their own right, which is being driven from within the convenience sector. The Co Operative stands head and shoulders above the competition in this respect. Its media centre really is the best example of how this works in practice. By creating a suite of media that an advertiser can buy, and making it accessible through a centralised platform, the Co Operative is able to sell things such as shelf barkers for pounds and not pennies. Not only that it is making it much easier for brands to plan efficient and effective campaigns across its stores.

Combine these two areas and you have a powerful proposition that not only optimises sales and marketing communications activity by driving store-level intelligence back into marketing campaigns to help brands deliver their messages in specific and targeted areas, but also helps brands to more effectively plan and execute these campaigns across a growing sector of the market - convenience.