Building a MarTech Strategy that Bridges the Consumer Proximity Gap

Liz Dominguez
Martech concept

In a world that’s flooded with data, emerging tech, and product innovation, it may appear that any and everyone has a direct line to consumers. But CGs must have the ecosystem in place to leverage this insight, as well as the MarTech strategy and capabilities to perform with agility and speed.

CGT spoke with top digital product marketing experts about how CGs can improve their consumer proximity by overcoming the barriers to first-party data and being more intentional about tech capabilities that are largely going unused. Learn how to overcome the barriers to stronger consumer relationships and increase brand relevance.

The MarTech stack is complex and underutilized. In this webinar’s transcript, learn how simplifying your technology and marketing efforts can help you bridge the consumer proximity gap and drive higher acquisition rates.

Albert Guffanti: Good afternoon everyone, my name is Albert Guffanti. I'm the publisher of CGT here at EnsembleIQ. I'm glad you've joined us today for our webinar entitled “Consumer Products Marketing Transformation: Driving Breakthrough Growth.” This topic is particularly important as we see digital product marketing continue to undergo a transformative shift in the consumer goods industry, driven by emerging technology that establishes a direct relationship with consumers and their data.

 

“Ninety percent of the world's data was created in the last couple years, being underutilized and under-leveraged in the consumer goods industry. This creates a need for us to explore why that is, as well as how the MarTech stack within CG organizations tends to be weighed down with complexity and inconsistency, with only 58% of capabilities being used.
— Albert Guffanti, Publisher, CGT & RIS News

There are companies that are doing it well, and fortunately, we have two experts who are going to shine a light on how companies like Puma, Chobani, and Adidas have found a workaround and are utilizing their MarTech capabilities to the fullest advantage.

First, today, we'll talk about the major trends that are shaking up the industry. Second, we'll talk about how, as a marketing technology executive, you can react to these changes that are happening — it may feel as though your head is swirling a bit, so we'll provide some clarity around that. Thirdly, we'll discuss what the most important capabilities are to focus on in your capacity. Of course, it's all about prioritizing and creating a roadmap, and we'll do that here. 

To take us through this incredibly interesting and important content, we have two MarTech gurus from SAP: Sunny Neely, global solution director, and Paul Smith, global industry principal for consumer products. Gentlemen, great to have you on the webinar today to discuss this topic, let’s start off by having you introduce yourselves.

Sunny Neely: Hey, I’m Sunny Neely, I'm excited to be here today. I'm in the consumer products industry business unit for SAP. Prior to SAP, I was a practitioner myself, having been a senior brand manager at Coca-Cola and Ferrero. It's important to take up a practitioner's view, put yourself in the shoes of the end user, and understand how MarTech can make the job easier, more impactful, and help achieve the end goals of MarTech.

Paul Smith: Hi, Paul Smith, very pleased to be here. I’m a global industry principal for consumer products. That means I own our point-of-view on customer experience within consumer products, including all things digital, digital marketing, or commerce, all interactions with the consumer, or capture consumer data. I look through the wider lens of everything that needs to work in a consumer product goods company and see how that influences demand, what it does to influence supply, how it shifts and where people are making promotional spend, whether it's trade management, trade promotion spend, or whether it's marketing spend. That’s my own entire world view. I come to that from a background of having worked in the software industry for 25 years. I've been in startups, small businesses, digital agencies, and now, SAP. 

Guffanti: Sunny, I'm going to turn things over to you to get into the first segment and dive into the consumer products marketing transformation.

Neely: An interesting way to begin is to look at what's happening in the marketplace. I was a brand manager not long ago, and we had been doing things the same way for a long time. Habits and activities still continue in many places today. Picture another day in consumer products; you're reliant on third-party data with a DMP cranking away against anonymous, temporary communications with consumers. 

“If information is coming back from campaigns, it's fragmented and siloed. You have information on a Facebook campaign here, how the SMS is performing, how the loyalty program is performing — all these in different places.”
— Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director, Consumer Products Industry Business Unit, SAP

When the agency came back with digital results, receiving a 35-slide deck with about 100 different metrics, it was difficult to piece together and understand the direction of the business. Market research is something done manually. Still today there are times when you do field research and it's several weeks or months later that it comes back, which means action is going to be delayed.

Then, finally, e-commerce. In consumer products, many people are talking about D2C, but many people aren't because of the risk of channel conflict. That's a place where a lot of companies aren't willing to move in that direction, despite the benefits of that move. This is what the current state is for many companies.

One of my favorite examples, when I worked in marketing with one of the pacesetters — a company that has made massive strides in marketing transformation — Puma with athletic gear and footwear. Working closely with Puma, I got a close view into how they've done things differently. 

First, they've created a very large first-party database with direct access to consumers. They did this in an organic way by offering a reasonable benefit, an incentive to people that come to their website. They've been able to build their subscriber base dramatically, doubling it in six months, and going from a rate of approximately 1,000 consumers per day up to 10,000. That’s an amazing lift on the size of the database and amount of insight gained into consumers. 

What are they doing with that data? Like a lot of folks, it used to be email blast marketing with no segmentation, but they've been able to segment those consumers, isolate and identify the highest potential, intent to buy, or most engaged, and hit them with the relevant offers. That's how they've been able to increase open rates and drive revenue, so that this omnichannel component is a significant part of the growth model.

When you focus on the first-party consumer and think about that relationship, it creates a virtuous circle where more data flows in and more insights flow out. This allows you to provide better and more relevant offers to consumers further down the line, and then you can develop more relevant products for consumers. It has knock-on effects of impact across the organization. That's what it can be like, and the results are impressive. 

“It's such an amazing difference that marketing transformation can bring, but this is not something that is done overnight. It's not something to be sniffed at because it takes a lot of concerted effort. That's something we should aspire to, but also be realistic about the steps that need to take place to make it happen.”
— Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director, Consumer Products Industry Business Unit, SAP

Guffanti: Sunny, that was a great intro to the rest of the content we’ll experience here today. You’ve teased us a bit and laid some of the groundwork. Let’s enter the next segment of our discussion, which goes through some of the major trends that are shaking up the industry. What are the key trends that you are seeing that we should be focusing on?

Smith: We're going to hone in and look at four key trends in a bit of detail. The first being data. At the end of the day, CP companies are living in a world where there is a data deficit. We're going to take a look at the implications of that data deficit, why it exists, and who else has all the data that is either needed to partner with or find other ways to engage with consumers.

Next is proximity. It’s never been more necessary as a CP company to have a direct relationship with the end consumer. To be able to hurdle the barriers of the gatekeepers of traditional retail and be able to leverage and gain that first-party insight. You must understand consumers' wants, needs, desires, behaviors, purchase patterns, and be able to use that to achieve the objective that we see Puma and other sneaker brands achieving.

 It's going to be a theme that will come up as we move through as well. Proximity sometimes is about direct-to-consumer, but it's also about how you do that engagement directly with consumers, recognizing that most people in developed economies and developing economies get a mobile phone, spend a lot of time staring at that screen. There is a lot more time spent staring at that screen than looking at physical shelves. Thinking about the digital opportunity and that element of proximity is an interesting spin.

The individual, of course, is a key trend. From the challenges of privacy and the ever-diversification of the silos of accessing consumers, the arrival of different channels and different sources, and the emergence of world gardens. 

“Fundamentally, it's about understanding the individual, being able to capture data and insight that allows you to hone your product proposition, your message, and your understanding of the individuals, and identify those new needs from individuals as well.”
— Paul Smith, Global Industry Principal, Consumer Products, SAP

Being able to not only sell the existing portfolio of products, but anticipating the demand for other elements and being able to pivot on that to produce them very quickly. We’ll take a look at complexity and disruption, new business models, people who are moving and shaking things up, and some of the transformational changes that are taking place.

If we hone in on that first point of data, a huge amount of data is growing almost exponentially, but who owns it all? The blunt answer is generally not consumer product goods companies – CPG companies are kind of sandwiched as the cheese in the middle of a hard cheese sandwich where everybody else around them has got more insight. 

The retail partners have the POS data, the footfall data, they know the consumers, they’re probably already selling to them through e-commerce and are hoovering uploads of insight data from that. On the other side, the ad networks and media agencies can also pinpoint target people, as they have even more first-party data. Stuck in the middle, is the CP company that doesn't have that level of access, insight, or first-party behavior. 

This is what we mean when we talk about a data deficit: everyone else in the ecosystem seems to have more insight. At the same time, there's the problem of CP companies needing greater proximity and immediacy of connection to consumers. They need to be able to hurdle those gatekeepers and be relevant to consumers at the moment. To be able to do all of that while growing propositions like direct-to-consumer, yet trying to avoid channel conflict.

“You can come up with different propositions, spin on existing propositions, or launch things that are specific to direct-to-consumer, which means completely avoiding channel conflict.”
— Paul Smith, Global Industry Principal, Consumer Products, SAP

At the very least, you end up with a different price pack architecture for what you do in DTC versus through normal grocery retail as well. This kind of proximity debate is something that we see some companies moving very quickly toward having a direct consumer connection. 

As we mentioned before, sneaker brands, cosmetics companies, pet food, and snacks are all moving quickly into this space of having a direct relationship with consumers. For some, that ease is soon going to be the majority of the business, which is different by sub-industry and sub-segment within CP. It's not the same for frozen food, for example, but there are still elements of digital relevancy and connection that can be achieved in that space as well. Sunny, can you share a bit about that?

Neely: Paul mentioned the individual as another key trend. Obviously, we know so much about individuals, but it's important to look at the other brands that are competing for each individual's attention. I saw a statistic that the typical consumer sees about 10,000 branded messages every day. That’s mind boggling. But when you get up, you look at all the brands in your kitchen, on your computer, on the way to work, at night scrolling — whenever you see them, you're competing against 10,000 different brands every day to get the salient message through. 

Those brands are producing tens of thousands of new products every year. Almost all of them, 89%, are personalizing themselves. They're competing just as hard as you are to get that message through.

Personalization in a very basic, blunt way — like personalizing someone's name at the top of an email or presenting different information based on gender — is just not enough anymore. First of all, make sure that you're building trust with consumers. You don't want to overdo it and overplay the information to the point where you know too much about them, but find the most relevant points. 

As I mentioned in the Puma example, looking for the consumers that are engaged and giving the types of things that they're going to be most interested in is critical. We'll discuss personalization a bit more, but you can't get around this idea that the individual needs individual attention.

Then, we launch into what's happening in the landscape of MarTech right now. It's messy, guys. 

“Let’s talk about the MarTech landfill. If many brands, particularly large multinationals, could have custom apps that are built by brand, market, or even campaign — some MarTech stacks have nearly 100 different tools and typically, only 58% of that is being utilized. Think about the waste.”
— Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director, Consumer Products Industry Business Unit, SAP

All the unused capabilities that are going by the wayside. The fact that the MarTech stack is that complex makes it that much harder to navigate and integrate, which causes friction. One of the key frictions that we're seeing internally, within the CP companies, is between the marketing department and the CIO office.

From firsthand experience, having worked at Diet Coke, these digital campaigns that require some type of integration with the CIO office, is a night job for the CIO. It’s a lot of long hours, a big project management assignment that no one is ready for — all on top of the usual day job. Finding a way to simplify the IT stack so that it works harder, more effectively, and in a simpler way for both the IT and the marketing department, is going to be critical. That's where you're going to see a partnership emerge between those two departments.

Next, are third-party cookies. There’s nothing people have been talking about more the last couple years. Eighty-six percent of digital marketing relies on third-party cookies. It’s important to realize that’s almost all of it. When third-party cookies go away, if you're not thinking about what to do after, it's almost all of your digital marketing that will be changed or impacted, and probably made much less effective. 

This should be a wakeup call to anyone not thinking about first-party data. It's about gathering that information. Not just gathering every bit of information or first-party data that you can think of, but thinking about the outcome, the types of critical engagement platforms, or engagement tactics with the end consumers, and the kind of data needed in the first-party universe that you currently rely on third-party cookies for.

Being prescriptive about what the end goal is for data is the right place to start, and that will help people more gracefully navigate this transition away from third-party cookies. 

Smith: Also in that bucket of complexity and disruption, are some new business models and evolved business models that we need to think of. First is e-commerce. The pandemic accelerated this space because of the sheer amount of time people spent at home, in lockdown, and through perfectly sensible, rational reasons, we were requiring more deliveries at home. 

“Some CP companies took advantage of this, where traditionally, e-commerce may have been a fractional percent of their complete mix of sales — it might have been maybe 2-3%. We've seen that rapidly move to 8%-15%.”
— Paul Smith, Global Industry Principal, Consumer Products, SAP

Some of those outliers such as cosmetics companies, skincare, pet food, coffee, are moving much more quickly. Certainly, sneaker brands, and some elements of the DC side of fashion in CP, moved very fast and continue to move fast in this space.

The advantage here is that a direct consumer proposition may not necessarily be the biggest money spinner in terms of a traditional CP business, but the amount of insight it generates, the understanding, dialogue, and interaction that can be had with consumers can inform the portfolio. It can inform the targeting, help with lookalikes and other spends elsewhere in marketing. It allows you to refine your perspective on who your consumers are — there's even shifts happening within e-commerce. 

We're seeing almost a meteoric rise of social commerce, to some extent, driven by the sheer amount of time people are spending on social media. It's a channel that's been an ad space for some time, but we're seeing more active deployment of solutions where people can see something, click it, buy it immediately there in their social feeds. Social commerce is growing at a CAGR of basically 40% between now and 2027. 2027 is going to be a $600 billion U.S. market, purely driven by people clicking on an effective product that's placed into social spaces.

This gets intermingled with a mix of influencers and ambassadors, which is what brings us to one of the other disruptors here as well: the arrival of people with new business models. The scary reality for CP is that there are tools and players out there that are cutting out both the retailer and the CP company as well.

For example, people like Shein in China, a consumer manufacturing capability for fast fashion, has now overtaken Amazon as one of the top shopping apps in the U.S. This allows people to order fast fashion items. What they're doing is gathering huge amounts of trend data, both from Google Trends and from detecting and sniffing data online, then turning very quickly into a design and production process.

From initial identification of a particular trend for a particular style, item, or product, to having it produced and available for purchase within three or four days. That's huge. They go to market heavily by using a revenue share model with influencers. 

“Again, it comes back to e-commerce working in social, then also with a transformed mechanism by which actual demand gets connected immediately to production. This is a level of disruption that is slightly at the far end, but that's what people were looking at when they said, "Amazon is selling books online" 25 years ago.”
— Paul Smith, Global Industry Principal, Consumer Products, SAP

Amazon is the second biggest retailer next to the Alibaba Group now, and Shein will be similar as well — hugely disruptive. Being able to detect and understand what they're doing, how they're doing it, and being able to replicate some of that DNA into a CP company's behaviors in terms of digital interaction is going to be a fundamental need going forward. 

Guffanti: I'm curious, from our audience, are these the major trends that you are dealing with yourselves? Are there others that we didn't touch on? The big question now is: how do I react to all these changes? What do I do now? How do I best prioritize what I handle, given everything that's thrown at me? So, how do we react to all these trends that we're seeing?

Neely: It's pretty clear — this is where simplicity helps because there's so many different things you can do — to really zero it out when it comes to data. It's all about gathering more data and doing more with what you have. That helps to unify and simplify the data in a single source of truth, a platform that can accommodate it and measure what matters. Don't go on a fishing expedition to try and find all the information you can, but think about what you're trying to achieve in the end goal.

On the proximity, you need to seize the opportunity to connect directly. Maybe you can sell directly. Some brands are more conducive than others to having their own storefront, but if not, setting up a content portal or different types of offers, apps, etc. A lot of interesting consumer products companies have apps for different types of lifestyle aspects, to the consumption of the brand. That's a great way to gather data and is critical to getting that direct relationship started.

For the individual, it's not about a single blunt type of personalization, but the whole funnel. They need to learn something different about you in order to give their attention and gain awareness. Then, there are going to be different ways as they go through the funnel, building consideration and eventually loyalty that you can personalize and get more relevant to what they're looking for. 

On the complexity front, this is the type of challenge marketers need to lead. They're the only ones who understand the end consumer. You don't want the supply chain team or IT team to think about the end game for this because marketing is what needs this type of cross-industry, cross-company transformation to be successful, in order for you to be successful. Strategic partnerships that can simplify and more closely integrate a tech stack are going to be critical for that type of success. 

“A lot of clients are finding that they need data, but they also need engagement and need it to be closely intertwined. It needs to be an end-to-end system of action that can be turned on and relied on versus thought about.”
— Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director, Consumer Products Industry Business Unit, SAP

Have two different development projects for gathering data on consumers. Then, you've got something that drives engagement. It needs to be an end-to-end process.

All these different types of sources of information that come in like digital profiles, commerce, marketing, etc. can be personalized. Then, at the consumer level, delivered to all these channels and applications. Whatever channel you're communicating on — a lot of people are relying on Facebook and Google Ads, but email and SMS, and some other types of channels can be used for direct communication, as well as apps.

What about service? What about the new product development process? Is the consumer database set up to directly impact that and achieve the outcomes you're looking for? This idea of tightly integrated, data-driven engagement is going to be critical for success.

The next piece is personalization. I mentioned very basic personalization and can tell you in the short-term, for example, if you do email marketing for the first time, the personalization within that tool is only specific to the email channel. It’s a fast way to do personalization, and it's better than nothing, but you'll have a lot of data maturity where the personalization can happen at the level of the consumer and be pushed out to those different channels.

Eventually, those enterprise touch points — not just communications, but things like new product development, service — need this meaningful data personalization or consumer personalization at scale. 

Guffanti: As we enter the final home stretch, I’d like to zero in on the go-forward plan. We talked about the mandates we have in front of us and the need to respond to the rapidly changing world we all live in. There's an app and a technology for every single thing that you can possibly think of, but how do organizations become more efficient, more impactful, less scattered? What are the most important capabilities they should be focusing on to drive the most impact?

Neely: I like to think about this in terms of the stages of the parts of the process of brand management in general. If you're driving consumer products marketing, everything begins with a brand plan. Typically, the first two months of the year, you're going to put together a growth strategy and prioritize those most important growth levers. You’ll need to bring all the information you can across your data sources to evaluate what you're going to invest in, and how you're going to drive growth.

Having done this the old way with all the different silos, it was very difficult to compare apples to apples. The value of putting a million dollars in advertising to invest in market research, or the value of a new product line extension, is almost impossible.

“If you've got a central unified data source that has, let's say millions of consumers in it, and it can provide insight in a comparable way against the different potential touch points with the consumer. It adds a whole new level of clarity and objectivity to brand planning.”
— Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director, Consumer Products Industry Business Unit, SAP

I'm excited about what can be done in brand planning in this new world marketing transformation. Consumer data is going to be the critical part for that.

In sales, marketing will impact it directly. For example, working with key accounts: all the different engagements, particularly with large consumers and retailers that were critical of the sales for Diet Coke, Ferrero, and the other brands I’ve worked with. Then, of course, what you would expect from marketing consumer engagement throughout the year advertising, which is a big part of the annual plan for marketing, then measurement and optimization. 

Across these phases, there are four key capabilities. One is consumer data management, which forms the foundation. Second is a very impactful, omnichannel integrated marketing engagement platform. D2C commerce plays a fantastic role where it's relevant and can be leveraged. Then, of course, consumer and brand insight. Not just in brand planning, but for use in sales and understanding. Improving the types of engagement with consumers is critical across the board as well. 

Let's start with customer data. If you want to have a golden record, a unified consumer profile, the most important ingredient of that is first-party data. However, you want to be able to marry this with second-party data from partners, third-party data that you may be purchasing from brokers, and whether you have anonymous consumers in there or are able to migrate them as we all hope we can, that's what's going to unlock the hyper-personalization and unlock trust. This couldn't be more important. 

“Think about trust — not just because it's the right thing to do. Consumers will get to the point where they're tired of giving away the first-party data and they’ll shut down. They're reaching that breaking point.”
— Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director, Consumer Products Industry Business Unit, SAP

You've got to provide value in exchange for the first-party data that they trust with you. There's a very real regulation impact that can't be avoided or ignored. Amazon, for example, was hit with a $900 million lawsuit last year because of GDPR violations.

Not necessarily because they were any much further out of line than many other corporations, but when you're a large organization, there are a lot of areas where compliance and security need to be monitored and locked down.

Finally, omnichannel relevance. If you're able to unify the consumer record and deliver that personalization at the consumer level, then you'll be able to deliver the right message the consumer needs wherever they are in the communication channels. It might be in service or many other places. That’s the value of a unified consumer data platform. 

A great example is Nestlé. This is a situation where more than 100 million consumers and hundreds of brands — in many different markets — were all trying to do the same thing. It's one thing to be a brand manager managing one brand in one country, that's challenging enough to make sure those records are coming in and that the identity and consent is tracked, the purpose for the data is tracked, and the expiration is monitored so that you don't keep communicating after that consent has been revoked and expired. 

That's hard to manage, but if you multiply that times hundreds of millions across all these different markets and brands, you realize that you're going to need industrial strength, market leadership in terms of the way that data is gathered and organized, and respect the purpose for which it was gathered. 

Smith: Looking at that marketing platform and being able to collapse all of that massive profusion of marketing stack and have the core capabilities brought together, that's what we do. Interestingly, our marketing platform, Emarsys, is the platform that's used by Shein for being able to do their email and push marketing.

We’ll look at others that use it as well, but one of its real virtues is that it can move quickly from people being able to define strategy and goals, into deploying tactics. Deploying, not just notional tactics, but tactics that have been crowdsourced from best practices and real marketers. 

Those tactics are being underpinned and informed by all of the data coming from the CDP to understand all of those elements and ways you can segment and connect with the right consumers at the right time, but then, being able to use those best practice tactics — such as warranty or project registration, a back-in-stock, price drop, or tactics specifically to move people through different levels of loyalty schemes. These are the kind of things that we can deliver inside the Emarsys marketing capability.

“Then, execute cross-channel. Being able to do it in email, mobile push, ads and paid media networks, or SMS, as all different branches are running out of the same campaign.”
— Paul Smith, Global Industry Principal, Consumer Products, SAP

This is a tool that when you tell it what you want to achieve, it spits out all of the elements of the campaign. You need to bring the creative execution to be able to have the imagery and copy materials that need to go into it. Again, it's all data-driven and it's driven by deep understanding of consumers. 

For example, people who use Adidas on Runtastic. Talk about a data-rich environment. This is hoovering up data from wearable devices that can then give more than 200 data points of understanding on how consumers are running, how they're exercising. It means you get the insight about knowing, do they run first thing in the morning? Do they run at night? Do they run in the cold? How long do they run for? What are their favorite sports? How active are they? Then, use that to understand what the most appropriate products are that suit that person's needs.

 It's all about the maintenance of motivation for Adidas. That's what they're using the data and engagement for. Their app has got 182 million users and 341 million App Store downloads. Our analysis portfolio has helped drive a 200% increase in the usage of that app as well. It’s a phenomenal success story that shows where the sneaker brands are leading in this data space, engagement space, and being able to make themselves a data-rich environment. 

Broadening that lens out a bit wider into direct consumer: How do you make direct consumer successful? Think about these five areas. Propositions, think if you are going to have channel conflict, how do you avoid that? How do you reformat product proposition or channel proposition? Do you bundle things together? Do you do it with new products? Rethinking how you offer value to the consumer. Rethinking packaging gives you lots of opportunities to find new ways of reaching new consumers, new segments, and servicing unmet needs.

Marketing in DC. It's not about marketing, it's about customer acquisition, and having that chief growth officer mentality, and being able to know which channels are you going to reach, which consumers, and at which spend point. Being able to leverage referral marketing and drive down acquisition cost in this space. 

“On average, it costs $26 U.S. to acquire a new customer. Always look at what's the best bang-for-buck in terms of acquiring new customers and focus on retaining them. When retaining them, that means the commerce experience has to be rich and sophisticated, cope with taxes and different payment systems, as well as be easy to update, automate, and manage.”
— Paul Smith, Global Industry Principal, Consumer Products, SAP

For most CP companies, the biggest challenge is getting fulfillment and post-purchase right. We have more conversations with people about order management and supply chain to be able to cope with these, whether it's coming from the owner state, marketplaces, or other channels. It's fundamentally important to make sure that you don't burn money in delivery costs, but also that you satisfy customers by shipping to them in the time scale that suits them while wrapping all of this in analysis and insights.

If you are a digital native startup with a DC-space employee, number two is usually a data scientist because they recognize the importance of being able to make the most out of every little bit of data that they've got.

Being able to get the data from analysis, marketing, e-commerce, and the supply chain, bringing that holistically together to succeed in D2C. Highly successful brands are finding the vast majority of engagement is on mobile. Everybody's got a smartphone in their pocket. That's where they've driven the experience and made sure that they can do it across languages, borders, currencies, tax regimes, making all of that work with the supply chain. A stunning example of being able to leverage that, and then continue the dialogue with those consumers with their marketing platform as well. 

Neely: We've talked about a lot of different ways that direct-to-consumer data-driven engagement allows this behavioral data to drive performance marketing, those short-term transactions that we all need to breathe life and to drive long-term growth into the future for consumer products. It's also important not to take your eye off the horizon and think about the long-term objective of brand building.

It's been proven that short-term performance marketing together with longer-term brand building is the most efficient way to build a brand as well as efficiently and profitably grow a brand over the long-term. 

You may be thinking: Market research is a slow moving industry. Brand tracking is something that many people do, and they don't necessarily see a lot of value in it because it's just questionnaires that go out to consumers and come back months later.

“What if you could turn that into a real-time dashboard that's role-based so that your brand managers, market-end sites, and CMO can be looking at the brand health alongside the other key metrics like social media performance, ratings and reviews from marketplaces, media spend, etc.”
— Sunny Neely, Global Solution Director, Consumer Products Industry Business Unit, SAP

Your view of long-term growth — how you're doing against things like brand awareness and consideration or key attributes that might be critical to the success of the brand, how those are tracking both for yourself and your competitors — can be put together in a real-time database. We’re able to do that, and it's something that is compelling. The best proof point is through Chobani.

Chobani is the classic giant killer brand. They disrupted the entire yogurt category, it seems overnight. Even after the main story of Chobani, they kept focus on consumer insights that were actionable. That's when they were able to switch over from a traditional brand tracking, manual approach to market research, the Qualtrics approach, which is about this real-time dashboard to give more actionable, real-time, outcome-oriented results. They were able to find an insight against an insurgent category within yogurt – the oat milk category – and the product they quickly launched was able to rise rapidly to number two in the category, all thanks to the insights they're getting.

It's amazing to think about the real-time behavioral data points that are coming in through a customer data platform and taken action against in an engagement platform, yet is also a modernized view on the horizon that's real-time. Bringing together those two different sides of the coin can be very impactful, particularly for brands that are reaching critical mass and starting to think about long-term growth. 

Smith: One of the things we do in SAP is the end-to-end process. We're obsessed with finding new ecosystems, new partners, people we can connect to our marketing platform, commerce platform, supply and demand capability, the ERP. We have a startup incubator, SAP.iO, and we go hunting for the cool companies. In the space of MarTech marketing engagement, we've partnered and connected some really cool companies into our products and ecosystem, companies such as TVPage. 

TVPage, based in San Diego, enables video-powered influencer commerce. Back to the example about Shein and social commerce, TVPage gets people up and running with doing this. Being able to have influencers out there recording videos, then connecting that to the product, finding new audiences, new ways of acquiring consumers, and having an interesting video-based engagement. In the work era of 5G, it's going to all be about video. 

Then we've got companies like Jebbit that have turned the ability to capture first-party data into highly engaging structured quizzes. It's similar to BuzzFeed’s engagement style, but it works with particular demographics being able to hover first-party data. Companies like Mention Me allow you to reduce your acquisition of custom customers by using referral marketing through incenting people, but then also looking at the data link that hangs around — who are your VIP referrers and how valuable are they to your brand?

“There are amazing capabilities in this space. It’s been exciting to bring these into the SAP ecosystem and into the product stack.”
— Paul Smith, Global Industry Principal, Consumer Products, SAP

We can offer some advanced thinking in terms of how consumers' data can be captured, how they can be engaged, entertained, and retained going forward as well. We've got insights on pricing and demand, not a month out-of-date at a category level, but how to get it in real-time at SKU-level as well. That's companies like Algopix, who we've worked with in terms of being able to do that with marketplace data, which helps enrich the entire story.

Neely: Let’s talk some more about strategic partnership because Paul hits a great point. There's so much incredible innovation going on in the marketplace. About a month from now, the Martech 5,000, which is really the Martech 8,000, is going to release its new landscape diagram — I'm sure it will be even more complex than it was before. It’s important that you curate that and bring together the most relevant capabilities because many of the capabilities in MarTech tax aren't being used. 

That's where a partner can help you derive greater return on investment, integration, faster and more agile time to market. SAP does this by allowing you to have that direct consumer relationship and bringing together an integrated suite with the most important capabilities.

There are always going to be more capabilities out there, but pulling together the most important ones as we face this urgency to transform against real deadlines — like the deprecation of third-party cookies — that's where a robust roadmap for core capabilities and a partnership ecosystem is important. It’s nice to have a strategic partner to guide you along that way. As I said before, we need the CMO, the marketing leadership to lead the transformation for the whole organization. It's an exciting time. There's a lot of uncertainty out there, but there's tremendous upside. Of course, SAP would love to be along the ride with you. 

Guffanti: As much as we've gone through today, there's so much more to dive into. CGT and SAP have worked together to create an interactive universe on our website that will allow you to double click on this new consumer products world that we live in. You can see all the areas that we've built out for you, which will act as a resource to explore and zero in on where you need to focus. Paul and Sunny, as a CMO or marketing leader, what’s the best way to learn more about what these companies do and who they should engage with?

Smith: We have material about the startups that we're working with on the SAP.iO site. We have a directory of the 300 different startups that we've been working with to be able to help people find the cool stuff. If you want the ability to have videos that are personalized in real-time, we can lead you to SundaySky, show you where it links in with the rest of our stack. The consumers living somewhere currently very warm can have a nice warm climate up here behind whatever video material they've got, or if it's really cold, you can have it look wintery behind you. 

“You can put anything into personalized context once you've got the data and the right technology partners.”
— Paul Smith, Global Industry Principal, Consumer Products, SAP

SAP.iO is a great resource, or reach out to Sunny and I; we can help you understand some of these and where they fill.

Guffanti: Thank you very much, Paul and Sunny, any words of wisdom to leave us with?

Smith: Data, you just can't get enough of it. Once you've got it, you've got to do something useful with it. Always think about how that data transforms customer experience, and it will give you that breakthrough moment. That's what it's all about.

Neely: It's all about data-driven engagement and finding a way to have the end in mind. Every single data point that you gather, wring every last bit of value out of it by thinking about what you're trying to accomplish with it, how you're trying to drive that impact with consumers. That's the key to growth.

Guffanti: Fantastic. Thanks again, gentlemen, for taking us through this. Thanks everyone for joining us today, hope you found it productive. We look forward to seeing you on the next webinar. Have a great afternoon.

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