Finishing Touch

Lots of people talk about attaining the perfect product launch, coordinating all the elements so the new items are in place, properly displayed and promoted, all at once, in complete harmony. But with sales, logistics, promotion, advertising and technical elements to bring together, the reality is that most campaigns miss a mark or two along the line. Beech-Nut is working hard to change that by leveraging a range of technologies to optimize the new product launch process, so that on September 20 a whopping 14 new products will be ready for eager shoppers.

If all goes according to plan, "we will have a consistent message delivered in a defined time period with measurable speed to shelf," says Tim McCreery, director of sales planning for Milnot Holding Corporation, which owns the Beech-Nut brand. That can translate into significant savings in travel and postal costs alone, let alone the sales boost and ongoing product success that can result from a well-executed introduction and follow-up.

The New Approach
Beech-Nut and its national broker, Advantage Sales & Marketing set out to formulate the new approach in April 2004 as the company prepared to bring its 14 new products to market. The new items include five SKUs in its baby food bakery line and nine products for the bilingual/ Hispanic baby food line, which is a fast-growing market.

"Fourteen at once is pretty significant," says McCreery. "The challenge was to get it all in before the holidays hit. The timeframe was incredibly short."
Beech-Nut's new approach taps a number of technologies already owned by Advantage, as well as a few acquired as part of the project:

1) WebEx - Beech-Nut and Advantage used WebEx (www.webex.com), the online meetings, Web conferencing and video conferencing service, to deliver its new product message through a three-hour presentation to Beech-Nut personnel and broker/sales agents. "It allowed us to hit about 80 people in a three-hour time period and get the message out immediately in a manner, tone and presentation that we wanted," says McCreery. That training session taught Advantage and Beech-Nut retail and business development managers at the national, retail, analyst and shelf set level how to deliver the new product message across the country.

"In the past we went market to market, delivering the message personally," McCreery says, a process that took seven people two weeks to complete.

2) Space Management Products - Beech-Nut and Advantage used shelf-set products including Apollo, Intactix and Spaceman to create planograms incorporating the new products to present to retail customers. "That allows us to [show] placement of items on the retail shelf in a visual manner, showing how we want the product faced," McCreery notes. Previous presentations were not backed by data schematics bolstering the recommendations.

3) TriNet - A Web-based online filing system developed by Advantage provides all selling and follow-up materials, pricing pages and other resources online so field staff can customize and print them as needed for retailer presentations. Previously, all of this material was mailed out, with lots of phone calls and follow-up mailings for those who reportedly didn't receive their packages. Now only samples must be mailed out.

"We've only received two calls" since the introduction to field staff. "The calls used to be non-stop," McCreery says.

4) Advantage Sales & Marketing Retail Tracking System (ARTS) - Beech-Nut will use its broker's tracking tool to monitor the launch after 30, 60 and 90 days. Broker field staff will hit stores packing Compaq iPaqs loaded with the software, allowing them to collect data about the rollout. The rep notes such factors as pricing, cut-in and proper tagging, and checks that the launch is happening as planned. That will get aggregated at the headquarters level to reveal overall launch success, as well as enabling analysts to drill down to store level, from their desks.

5) DataAlchemy - Beech-Nut will also use Information Resources syndicated InfoScan sales data to follow consumption patterns post-launch, beginning four weeks after the introduction. "We'll be able to see item acceptance and how it impacts on the rest of the segment answering questions such as "are we growing the category or cannibalizing the category?" McCreery notes. "It's presentation ready -- we can point and click and print," to prove the new products' validity to retailers.

McCreery estimates that travel alone will decrease from $20,000 a launch to about $1,000. Overnight shipping is vastly reduced, from shipping all sales materials to samples only. Time will tell how the faster, better coordinated and monitored time to market will impact sales.

Now, "we will have the fastest speed-to-shelf program we've ever had." McCreery surmises. "We don't have to wait nine months to figure out if we're seeing acceptance or not."