In the last few months, Leading FMCG companies Unilever, Mondelez, P&G came up with their growing frustrations on promotions not being effective in gaining or protecting market share.
http://www.thedrum.com/news/2017/02/08/mondelez-vows-be-more-disciplined-with-marketing-spend-after-fruitless-investment
https://www.marketingweek.com/2015/10/01/promotions-lose-lustre-as-consumers-grow-weary/
https://www.marketingweek.com/2016/11/29/fmcg-brands-pull-promotions/
Losses in promotions in consumer sector are well documented by Nielsen and McKinsey in their various reports in the last two years.Mindless promotions to push products to consumers is wasteful for society as a whole.A large proportion of food waste is actually due to poorly targetted F&D promotions that also leads to more unplanned items in the cart.
The point I have is why these big companies were not in a position to assess in advance which products, channels, locations will benefit from a promotion, whether price, multi-buy or anything else? Or if they did, where did it all go wrong?
A few months ago, I spoke at an online conference ‘AI with the best’ on ‘Building a collaborative AI Platform for Consumer Marketing Decisions’.The word ‘Collaborative’ here meant a platform that enables bi-directional augmentation of consumer and marketing function, artificial intelligence being a core technology to enable that.This is where we see the AI & big data-driven world converging together with various business and technology trends in the consumer data value chain.
The retail value chain spans from Consumer Goods Companies to retailers and E-tailers to the final consumer with various intermediaries, distributors spread across channels, chains in a multi-channel world. A real-time assessment of all contexts and constraints recognising weights of competition, brand perception, varying consumer demands across channels and micro-segments is needed if we want to avoid losses and wasteful expenditure in the consumer sector.
The data that hold these insights about contexts and constraints is diverse, broken, incomplete.In order to help marketing function to use this insight for deciding right strategy and execute in time, they need specialised tools and platform.A more detailed analysis is presented in the following slide deck:
Augmented, Automated Marketing
Using AI and contextual Big Data, Singular Intelligence Platform evaluates the impact of competition, market need and brand perception to help align product promotions with the right channels and customer segments with the objective of achieving optimal product sales.The product gives predictive alerts, helps explore evolving market scenarios and evaluate strategies and action plans proactively.
I welcome you to participate in the debate. Feel free to get in touch to know more.
