WPP’s global retail practice The Store launches “The Shopper Marketing Store” website
The Store, the global retail practice of WPP (NASDAQ: WPPGY) today launches “The Shopper Marketing Store,” an offer that harnesses and provides easy access to world-class agencies and experts in the field.
Shopper marketing encompasses a wide variety of different capabilities and touch points including, but not limited to, shopper insights, store design, customer relationship management, in-store communications, packaging and e-commerce.
According to the Grocery Manufacturers Association’s “Shopper Marketing 5.0” study,shopper marketing is now a $50-billion to $60-billion category, up from an estimated $35 billion in 2009, making it one of the fastest growing sectors in marketing.
For clients, the challenge has always been how to access and manage the disparate agency partners across all the shopper marketing disciplines in order to deliver cohesive, productive and cost-effective communications. To date, no resource existed bringing them all together for the clients.
Says David Roth, CEO, The Store, EMEA/Asia: “We recognized that as clients add more staff and budget against shopper marketing within their own organizations, there was the desire to have best-in-class resources, enable and integrate those resources, and perhaps most importantly, have a simple way to access all this terrific talent.”
Carl Hartman, head of shopper marketing at WPP’s The Store added: “Through The Store, we have significantly greater depth and breadth of shopper marketing resource that can be accessed than any other parent company, particularly in the area of insights.”
The Shopper Marketing Store brings together the resources of 15 Group companiesaround the world that specialize in the various skill sets in shopper marketing and makes them easily accessible to clients via a simple portal.
One aspect of the effort is The Shopper Marketing Store website that identifies the15 specialist companies and their experts working within the Group and their disciplines.
Clients can use the website’s dashboard to customize a shopper marketing solution
tailored to their own specific needs. Hartman and Roth will act as the interface between
clients and retail marketing specialists to assemble the required team for the client.
Says Hartman: “This is a proven construct. We have done this for Kimberly-Clark with great success. What they realized is that no single shopper agency can do it all well. We also
observed we have access to world-class resources in all the necessary categories -shopper and category insights, activation, field network, packaging, sampling, andconsumer promotions. Kimberly-Clark wanted deep, category-changing insights thatactually make it into their activation plans. When Kimberly-Clark wanted to build aworld-class shopper organization, they turned to us because we have the consultativeskills and resources. We were able to customize a solution that met their specific needs and delivered some of the finest agencies around.”
Don Quigley, president, consumer sales for Kimberly-Clark said: “In today’s dynamic environment, it is critical for us to get more integrated strategies and flawless execution for both brand and retail.”
Kimberly-Clark chief marketing officer, Tony Palmer added: “This solution helped us to best leverage our partnership with WPP and get the most from our strong relationships with all the agencies we work with.”
Hartman concluded: “Bringing a group of agencies together is never easy, but we’re probably better at it than anyone else because the parent company has vast experience successfully managing team accounts. For KC, we put a single leader in place to oversee the shopper business and get everybody to play in the sandbox. And we have a financial resource that rolls up the billing, so that the client only sees one bill, offers a single evaluation, and most importantly, has a ‘single throat to choke’.”
The specialist companies collaborating in The Shopper Marketing Store are The Brand
Union, FITCH, The Futures Company, G2, JWT Retail, Kantar Retail, Landor, Lunchbox, OgilvyAction, Rockfish, Shopper2Buyer, The Smollan Group, TNS, Wunderman and Y&R Retail