We are going to be at the GroceryShop conference next week. It is a massive production where retailers, traditional CPGs, product and tech startups, investors, agencies, consultants and media vendors mingle, network and share their capabilities. GroceryShop offers an amazing and super-efficient opportunity to marketers and vendors to have a series of “speed dating” meetings where new business relationships are started and new deals are born. They carefully curate this process and let both sides select who they want to meet with. A Tinder-like experience of sorts, I am being told. The meetings are quick, fun, very informative, but prepare to be “drinking from a firehose”.
Conference meetings are an extreme example of what CPG marketers deal with these days. Throughout the year, they are exposed to tremendous number of new technologies, marketing tactics and vendors who sell them. Keeping it all straight in your head is nearly impossible, yet knowing the vendor landscape and skillfully navigating it is a huge competitive advantage for any marketer.
I’ve written about the importance of having a process for discovering, evaluating, and testing emerging omni-channel marketing tactics to stay current. It doesn’t have to be complex or elaborate. Simply agreeing on how to meet vendors, what information to collect and how to share the findings with the rest of the organization can turn your team into an agile and savvy powerhouse. Not only will this type of process arm you with great information and create more meaningful vendor relationships, you will also save a lot of time by not meeting with the vendors who are not the right fit and can’t possibly make sense for your brands’ objectives or your retail accounts.
But building a process and training the team how to collect and share data can be daunting and time consuming. That’s why Shopperations is launching a new vendor and tactic discovery platform that will help CPG marketers and their current and potential vendors communicate more effectively and efficiently.
Imagine a portal where:
- Even the most junior marketer can quickly get up to speed and lean what vendors and tactics are allowed at certain retail customers.
- Where marketers can filter tactics by the types of brand objectives they help achieve.
- Where the tactic implementation lead times and common KPIs are clearly stated.
- Where you can sort, filter, compare and save your favorite tactics and vendors.
- Discover new capabilities that are being launched and reach out to learn more.
Sounds awesome, doesn’t it? Well, it’s coming!
We are seeking early adopters, both CPG marketers and vendor-side representatives, to help us finalize Vendor Catalog functionality by giving feedback on its usability and features.
Register here if you want to be one of our pilot users. It’s completely free!
