Partner Insights: BritOn Solutions Group
by Chris Rodkin
President, BritOn Solutions Group
A big part of our growing success has been working with both data and agency partners. One of those partners is BritOn Solutions Group, a boutique sales and marketing consulting agency focused on driving profitable growth for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies.
Today’s insights post features a perspective from Chris Rodkin, President of BritOn Solutions Group, on how intelligentVIEW is part of BritOn’s solution offering for CPG customers.
For CPG brands, getting their products onto store shelves across multiple key retailers is a critical driver of success. To achieve this, they need a clear understanding of who their target consumers are and where they are geographically, so that we can best understand how to reach them through availability in the right retail banners.
The challenge is that many CPG brands are one step removed from their end customers, as traditional brick-and-mortar retail still represents over 90% of the Canadian CPG market.
While there is a growing offering of third-party data and industry insights available from various providers, these can be cost-prohibitive for emerging and growth-oriented CPGs and may not be granular enough for established brands.
Even if the data is accessible, turning the data into insights requires resources often not readily available in most smaller CPG marketing and insights teams.
So how do we identify the key attributes of our high-potential consumers and pick the best retail banners and store locations to optimize reach and velocity? We leverage CiG’s intelligentVIEW insights platform as the solution for building, understanding, and activating against our clients’ most valuable consumers.
Building an Ideal Consumer Profile
What does your ideal consumer look like? Most of our CPG clients have a general, high-level understanding. Something like this: women between 30-49, university educated, urban/suburban who are time-starved, with children under 12. While a good general overview as a starting point, this description is far too broad to be actionable.
The intelligentVIEW platform has the ability to add significant depth to understand your ideal consumers by integrating thousands of demographic, psychographic and behavioural attributes. This paints a clear picture of all the critical and unique segments that make up your most valuable consumer groups.
In fact, building out this basic profile in intelligentVIEW provides us with a lens into 28 distinct consumer groups across Canada that significantly over-index on these basic demographic and behavioural characteristics.
IntelligentVIEW has several audience builder tools, intelligentSEGMENTS, and a data ecosystem of over 20,000 attributes that we use to start building out ideal consumer profiles. If the CPG brand has first-party customer data, we anonymize that data and connect it to the intelligentVIEW data ecosystem to build audiences based on key traits.
If there is no data available, we work with the general insights provided by the brand to build out the audiences we want to profile. These can be based on a mix of demographics, psychographics, lifestyle, and shopping behaviours.
This is one of the real game-changers for our CPG clients: the ability to access high-value, up-to-date, premium data in real-time to build audiences and understand the different markets that their products are being sold in. One of the most impressive features of intelligentVIEW is how quickly and easily we can go from data to profiling to in-depth customer understanding. We can move from building a profile to digging into insights in a matter of minutes!
Understanding the Ideal Consumer Segments
Often CPG brands believe that they only have one or two target groups. IntelligentVIEW shatters this myth by identifying a variety of segments and shining a light on the most important groups, their commonalities, and differences. IntelligentVIEW makes it easy to learn and understand who our consumers are.
One of the components we use in developing any program is the intelligentVIEW profile report. Once we’ve built an ideal consumer audience, we’ll run an initial report to get demographic, behavioural and lifestyle insights on the different segments within the audience.
From here, we’ll drill down into each of the segments to examine the key features of each group, outline the potential market size and number of households.
We can then use the mapping features to visualize the geographic footprint, especially if we’re looking at expansion into certain geographic markets, new channels, or specific retailers.
We typically run multiple reports as we drill down into the different segments and look at the market opportunity. We’ll share these reports with our clients and work collaboratively to build out ideal customer personas to guide planning, messaging, and creative development.
Profile reports provide insights on:
- What are the different segments within my ideal consumer audience?
- What is the size of those different segments?
- How many households are in each of the segments?
- Who are they, where do they live and shop (by channel and banner)?
- How diverse are these shopper groups?
- What are their media consumption habits, what are their hobbies, etc?.
These reports are often a key resource used by our clients when collaborating with retailers on their local or ‘store of the community’ programs.
The second game changer for our customers is that not only can they build and understand ideal customer segments, they can then activate media against those audiences directly from intelligentVIEW.
But what do you do with all this information? Activate!
Driving Strategic and Effective Activation
With increased media fragmentation and an ever-changing consumer media landscape, the ability to build and then activate audiences through multiple channels directly impacts the bottom line and increases ROI.
IntelligentVIEW AdSpot lets us see what our clients’ competitors are doing across all media channels, where they’re activating and what creative they’re running.
Through the intelligentVIEW insights platform, we can build out an audience of high-potential prospects and then activate against them.
Media channel planning and execution examples:
- Push that audience to both direct mail and digital channels.
- Influence OOH placement using mapping features.
- Understand radio and broadcast preferences.
- Map your ideal audience.
- Easily execute sample drops with Canada Post.
- Drive consumers to the right retail locations. Ensure that your target consumers know where to find your brand at their local stores (big and small) with both direct mail and digital efforts.
Build brand availability by matching your CPG brand’s target consumer profile with retail banner and store trading area insights. IntelligentVIEW’s insights reports help tell the story and build the business case for why any brand(s) should be listed and distributed in the highest potential banners and stores.
Focus your shopper marketing, demonstration, and store coverage efforts against these stores in the highest potential trading areas. Maximize your marketing/shopper marketing budgets and your ROI.
As CPG brands continue to navigate the ever-shifting consumer and retail landscape, partnering with CiG and BritOn Solutions Group to leverage intelligentVIEW makes it easier than ever to understand how to identify and engage high-potential consumers and retailers with speed and precision.