By Jennifer Silverberg, SmartCommerce
All CPG marketers know that bad things happen when shelf placement in stores is not monitored. We have seen it all: unopened shippers, broken coupon machines and competitors taking your prime position. Unless you keep a close watch on your shelf space many of your products can end up unnoticed and ultimately unsold.
Even worse things can happen on virtual shelves, particularly for brands without plans to monitor what is happening across their networks of retailers. Through our work with top CPG brands, we’ve identified the top 6 things you want to watch for your brand in order to keep your online products as neatly stocked on the virtual shelf as in brick-and-mortar stores:
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1. Keep a close eye out for missing products and being crowded out by competitors: You’re wondering why your gluten-free version isn’t as successful as planned. Is it because it’s not showing up at all? Or because a competitor has introduced four new gluten-free options that have knocked your product to a virtual “back shelf?”
2. Make sure your product name is consistent and complete: Are you being called what you want to be called, and are the right products listed with the right names? Just last week, we found a spot where a brand name had been misspelled throughout a whole category at a major retailer! Easy to fix, but you have to watch for when it happens.
3. Keep everything looking picture perfect: You worked hard to create those 360-degree views of your product — are they showing up where they should be? If not, you’re missing upside opportunities, but it could be worse…we’ve seen upside-down product shots, competitive products mixed into image galleries, and hero image shots of the bottom of a package. You want to address all of these right away.
4. Track and optimize your search placement: What shows up when shoppers search your brand, or your generic descriptor? Are you well-placed versus your competition, or are you buried? Are the retailer’s products showing up before yours when your brand is searched? And how is it different from yesterday or last week? Search results can change daily and you want to keep track. This is something you can — and should — influence.
5. Proactively manage pricing — yours and competitors’: You may have a way to monitor for MAP, but what about pricing moves within the allowed bands? Competitor price drops and promotions can be real threats to your market share, unless you’re aware and prepared to respond. Online changes happen fast, and can be impossible to track without the right system in place.
6. Verify distribution: Are there any distribution holes where your products are not being displayed, or are not available? Believe it or not, your product may be missing for buyers in some states/regions. You want to make sure you’re not missing shopper opportunities or frustrating would-be buyers in areas where you’re marketing.
We’ve all seen the research showing that CPG is exploding online — from $22 billion to $100 billion over the next year or so. As consumers make this move to online shopping, brands have an unprecedented opportunity to gain visibility of, and control over, their consumers’ complete brand experience — from discovery, to purchase, to use to repurchase. One of the best places to start driving/leveraging this control is at the virtual shelf.
Jennifer Silverberg is the CEO of SmartCommerce, where her international team provides simple tools to help major CPG brands such as P&G, Unilever and Nestle own and drive their customers’ buying experience. Silverberg has over 25 years of experience working with major CPG and other brands in companies ranging from startup to Fortune 50 companies — always with a focus on building close connections between brands and their customers. Prior to leading SmartCommerce, Jennifer was the Senior VP of Marketing at Channel Intelligence, one of the world’s leading commerce technology partners, which was acquired by Google in 2013.
