Best Face Forward

Recent studies have shown that the shopping experience outweighs price and promotions in driving satisfaction and loyalty. This month, Eric Seiberling, marketing director for the Consumer Packaged Goods-Retail Industry for Dassault Systmes, explains how consumer goods (CG) manufacturers and retailers can work together to create better shopper experiences.


How must retailers change to meet new consumer demands?

Seiberling: Retailers must differentiate themselves in the marketplace both against brick and mortar stores and online competitors.  This requires a change from a “warehouse” mentality for products to creating shopping experiences for consumers. According to a recent Market Force Information study, Trader Joe’s, Publix, Whole Foods, Wegmans and ALDI ranked high on the consumer delight index. These retailers found the right mixes of selection, pricing and promotions, and designed shopper experiences for high-value consumers. As a result, these chains are experiencing high single-digit growth and stronger margins while grocery industry revenues have declined 1.3 percent over the same period. These growing retailers have created unique experiences that spark with their shoppers.


How can retailers and CG companies work together to create better shopping experiences that drive sales?

Seiberling: A shopping experience is the combination of products and shopping environment that best meets the needs of the desired consumer. Retailers and CG manufacturers see two sides of the same coin. CG companies have developed deep insights about their consumers and how they think and feel about the product. Retailers have rich point-of-sale and loyalty card data that provide insights on shopping behavior and spending patterns. Both perspectives are needed to improve the shopping experience and create a win for both parties.

Retailers and CG companies need to start by getting a common perspective on the goals they are trying to reach and the metrics used to determine success. Often, retailers and CG manufacturers focus on their own silos of information. They need to create common dashboards to monitor joint performance and discover hidden opportunities to drive sales for both. New technologies allow indexing of multiple proprietary data sources and create a common dashboard that provides a shared view of the present and a joint vision for the future.


How can retailers and CG companies work together to translate insights into new store experiences?

Seiberling: CG companies and retailers can win with shoppers by enhancing assortment, making products easily accessible for purchase, improving adjacencies/layouts/space allocation, augmenting in-store communications, and delighting shoppers with branded experiences. This requires collaboration to design new shopping experiences to meet target consumers’ needs.

In the past, this effort was limited to paper drawings and physical tests in pilot stores. This made testing cost prohibitive, time consuming and risky to attempt novel designs. Virtual technologies take these risks out by allowing both parties to co-create and test multiple ideas in days instead of months at a tenth of the cost and effort.

Several CG companies are using virtual solutions to better understand the shopping experience, explore new shopping experiences with retail partners, validate new designs with consumers and gain alignment in a short period of time. Creating the win-win with retailers gained them increased category sales, better placement and even category captaincy over their competitors.

Retailers can also use these virtual tools to adapt merchandising plans to packaging and assortment changes, as well as to store fixture variability. 2D planograms often do not account to the irregular packaging dimensions, resulting in operational issues at the store. Visualizing a store in 3D can solve many of the issues store managers face when the space and merchandising plan has been changed. This can cut the time it takes to execute a new category management plan in the local store.