King's Hawaiian Goes Beyond the Shelf
Founded more than 60 years ago in Hilo, Hawaii, by Robert R. Taira, King’s Hawaiian (www.kingshawaiian.com) makes original recipe Hawaiian foods with the Aloha Spirit. With recent marketing success, King’s Hawaiian began to look for ways to further capitalize on opportunities beyond the shelf and expand its brand throughout the United States. According to Robert Diaz, West Region Operations manager for King’s Hawaiian, the company needed visibility across all accounts and wanted to equip its Field Sales Representatives (FSR) with a tool that would enable them to act on opportunities in the market-place. The company also wanted downstream messaging and a way to measure retailer compliance, as well as FSR effectiveness and output.
In order to “prepare for the major seasonal swings in our business,” Diaz says King’s Hawaiian implemented RW3’s InStore Execution and BI Suite (www.rw3.com) across the organization. The BI Suite provides visual analytics to team members in the field and throughout the company. Data collected in the store is combined with third-party data to provide the account-specific views to build sales and market share.
With a focus on retail excellence, the company also rolled out the InStore Execution Suite, providing its team members with both the MarketCheck and SmartCall applications. The two apps focus on two separate workflows and deliver the data into the same database, a key factor that has proven beneficial for retail partners.
“The biggest challenge has been putting the data we capture to actionable use,” says Diaz. “We have begun to make some significant strides here and hope to make even bigger leaps.”
One example of success for King’s Hawaiian this year was July 4th, one of its highest grossing holidays. Using the InStore MarketCheck application, King’s Hawaiian executed a blitz strategy across 18 different states, completed over 375 audits, and did it all in a nine day period with only 25 auditors, which included the CEO.
According to Diaz, the application allowed the company to do organization-wide audits during holiday periods to get everyone involved in improving retail conditions. After the audits’ success, the team decided it would roll out club store audits as well in the next blitz.
“We were able to improve our display rates by 20 percent during the peak holiday season,” says Diaz. “This allowed the consumers to be able to get the product when they needed it. We made sure to capture higher sales rates by limiting out-of-stocks during the peak season.”
Using RW3 BI, management created custom scorecards focused on the reps’ productivity and tracked their ROI. Management was able to share the results across the organization.
“Improved communication throughout our organization and 3rd party was a big win,” says Diaz. “We had to hone our message to the teams to insure they understood the goals of execution and how we would measure success. We found the entire organization wanted to help us improve availability to our consumers. RW3 assisted them all with a way to participate.”
Moving forward King’s Hawaiian plans to engage with its third party broker and utilize the review and respond feature in the MarketCheck application. The goal is to have the brokers quickly reply to audits within the portal. Getting a response while the promotion is still in effect ensures the greatest return for King’s Hawaiian. The solution “enabled communication to our broker partners about opportunities at retail that could subsequently be corrected,” says Diaz.
Diaz advises other companies to “share the findings widely both internally and externally. Share the good news and address the bad news.”
“If working with a 3rd party broker, begin the conversation about data integration and data utilization early. If launching new items, get feedback from cross-functional groups (like marketing) to determine what information they are seeking to obtain in order to determine success of launch.”
He also says to develop “check-points” along the way to make enhancements to the process as needed. And finally, “start with a simple but high return goal. Execute that well and then refine and expand!”
In order to “prepare for the major seasonal swings in our business,” Diaz says King’s Hawaiian implemented RW3’s InStore Execution and BI Suite (www.rw3.com) across the organization. The BI Suite provides visual analytics to team members in the field and throughout the company. Data collected in the store is combined with third-party data to provide the account-specific views to build sales and market share.
With a focus on retail excellence, the company also rolled out the InStore Execution Suite, providing its team members with both the MarketCheck and SmartCall applications. The two apps focus on two separate workflows and deliver the data into the same database, a key factor that has proven beneficial for retail partners.
“The biggest challenge has been putting the data we capture to actionable use,” says Diaz. “We have begun to make some significant strides here and hope to make even bigger leaps.”
One example of success for King’s Hawaiian this year was July 4th, one of its highest grossing holidays. Using the InStore MarketCheck application, King’s Hawaiian executed a blitz strategy across 18 different states, completed over 375 audits, and did it all in a nine day period with only 25 auditors, which included the CEO.
According to Diaz, the application allowed the company to do organization-wide audits during holiday periods to get everyone involved in improving retail conditions. After the audits’ success, the team decided it would roll out club store audits as well in the next blitz.
“We were able to improve our display rates by 20 percent during the peak holiday season,” says Diaz. “This allowed the consumers to be able to get the product when they needed it. We made sure to capture higher sales rates by limiting out-of-stocks during the peak season.”
Using RW3 BI, management created custom scorecards focused on the reps’ productivity and tracked their ROI. Management was able to share the results across the organization.
“Improved communication throughout our organization and 3rd party was a big win,” says Diaz. “We had to hone our message to the teams to insure they understood the goals of execution and how we would measure success. We found the entire organization wanted to help us improve availability to our consumers. RW3 assisted them all with a way to participate.”
Moving forward King’s Hawaiian plans to engage with its third party broker and utilize the review and respond feature in the MarketCheck application. The goal is to have the brokers quickly reply to audits within the portal. Getting a response while the promotion is still in effect ensures the greatest return for King’s Hawaiian. The solution “enabled communication to our broker partners about opportunities at retail that could subsequently be corrected,” says Diaz.
Diaz advises other companies to “share the findings widely both internally and externally. Share the good news and address the bad news.”
“If working with a 3rd party broker, begin the conversation about data integration and data utilization early. If launching new items, get feedback from cross-functional groups (like marketing) to determine what information they are seeking to obtain in order to determine success of launch.”
He also says to develop “check-points” along the way to make enhancements to the process as needed. And finally, “start with a simple but high return goal. Execute that well and then refine and expand!”