Sticky Learning Lunch 45: Increase Your Category Opportunities

Today's topic, Increase the Number of Category Opportunities Landed Part 2.

73% of your Category Opportunities Never Make it to Store.

You will learn: - Each of the 7 parts of the MBM Category Management Funnel. - How each part is essential to creating an effective Category Management approach. - Various tools and techniques to support each stage of the process.

You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:

Nathan Simmonds:

Good afternoon. Welcome to Sticky Learning Lunches with me, Nathan Simmons, and also the delectable Andy Palmer delivering to this week. And for the next week, we're just gonna give it a few minutes while the last people arrive, and then we're gonna dive into today's content. Just gonna give it another 30 seconds or so. While we're doing that, let's just make sure we're setting ourselves up for success. And I'll give people a reminder when we go back into this very briefly, let's make sure we're lighting up those phones.

Nathan Simmonds:

Get the little airplane, lift up, zero out the distraction, a hundred percent attention on what we're doing here today. The investment in yourself and the learning that you're about to get. Also, making sure that you've got a fresh sheet, fresh sheet for fresh thinking at the top of that page. You're gonna write keepers. Those keepers are gonna be the things that you want to remember and remind yourself about so that you can reread them and reignite that thinking.

Nathan Simmonds:

So as you are looking at the category management funnel, it's gonna help you get more clarity on what your targets are, know who your customer is, and knowing who your clients and your supermarkets are, all these key elements, by making sure you're documenting these key points can be absolutely vital, right? Today we're not gonna be doing too much screen sharing. So we've got Andy on camera one. We've got me on camera two.

Nathan Simmonds:

I'm gonna be here to be asking questions as we go through to making sure we get these points across. We're gonna start with a recap from part one just to make sure we're following that train of thought. And then what we're gonna do is we're gonna fly in and start looking at how to understand your shopper is absolutely vital for making this work. Andy, what have we got for day two?

7 Simple Ways To Understand The Category Management Process

 

Andy Palmer:

Excellent. So yeah, thank you Nathan. Today, absolutely more about understanding the shopper, keeping the shopper at the heart of all the decisions we make to help grow our category sales, our category profit, whatever measure we've got in place, which links us nicely. Back to what we talked about yesterday, right off the top of the funnel. Agreeing category targets the importance of having ideally a single focused point with a timeline that we want to achieve it and making sure we hit it focuses all our time and all of our efforts on getting what we want from this category.

Andy Palmer:

So yesterday we briefly talked about what f and pen, which was how much people are spending, how often they're buying, and how many people we've got buying, and maybe picking one of those as an example and targeting then our efforts towards achieving that. So yes, there was about agreeing a category target.

Andy Palmer:

Once we've got our category target, we can then start to move down and we'll continue to move down our funnel over the next few days. Kicking back off again on Monday. Today's about understanding the shopper. When we get into Monday, we're gonna be talking about understanding the supermarket or the channel that you are selling into. From there, it's about identifying opportunities, then about selling those opportunities, adding those opportunities down at stage six, and then coming all the way back round with evaluating and improving to keep this continuous cycles mythology absolutely alive.

Andy Palmer:

As I mentioned yesterday, these stages work together. But yeah, at the same time, they're not so much of a start, stop, start, stop. It's very much an overlap with that recycling that's gonna be going on. So we've got a category target. Today we're gonna be talking about understanding the shopper.

Andy Palmer:

I'm sure I'm preaching to the converter on this. Keeping the shopper at the heart of our decision is absolutely paramount to everything we do within category management. There is no good us making decisions on our range, our promotional plan, the products we've got out there in the myriad of other levers and buttons that we can push and pull if we're not considering who the end user is.

Andy Palmer:

And effectively that's us. We are the people that push trolleys, carry baskets, pick things up off the shelves, and yet too often we kind of put them over here and, and leave them out of our decision making process. So it's absolutely key that we keep ourselves and the rest of those people that are out there purchasing at the core of what we're talking about. So a few things to share with you today.

Andy Palmer:

Let me lemme sign and place where we're at today. So with three category targets, we're now in stage two understanding our shopper. A couple of things to share with you on this. First one, we have been doing category management for a very long time and time to time again, we see that often only a third of this particular area is focused on. And third that we see most clients work on is the shopper, the person who's actually buying the product. I wanna offer you an alternative that allows you then to consider some other areas.

Andy Palmer:

So I'm gonna introduce the concept of the shopper, the preparer and the eater. There's three different groups. Again, there can sometimes be one and the same thing. If we consider the shopper preparing eater, those who are buying it, those who are preparing it, and those who are eating it, we can then start to make some seriously powerful informed decisions on the stuff that we try to do.

Andy Palmer:

So let's not just think about the shopper, let's also consider those other groups, bringing that to life for a moment. Then what do we mean by the shopper pernita? Pretty sticking over there. Shop perta. What do we mean by that? So shopper, it's us. We're out in the supermarket. My wife will send me to the shops and she'll say, can you go and pick up some pack of fish fingers? I'm the shop, I'm buying those fish fingers. I'm looking for all the right cues in the store to entice me to pick up a certain pack.

Andy Palmer:

It's gonna be around price, packaging, what's in it? If it's added Omega-3 or something like that, they're the things that are going to entice me to make that perk decision. And then coming back fish, maybe hand 'em off to my wife. Maybe I'm gonna be the cooker, but I'm gonna be preparer for that particular meal.

Andy Palmer:

So I'm taking my fish fingers, of course I'm adding some additional elements to it. Am I then I may be not against eating fish fingers, but it could be for my daughter. She's eight years old. She loves fish fingers, so we're gonna cook her fish fingers, some, maybe some mashed potatoes, some other stuff that goes with it. She's the eater. We are then three potentially very distinct groups. And on this occasion, maybe they don't overlap one person's shopping, one person's cooking or preparing another person's eating.

Andy Palmer:

And yet other times the shopper pairer and eater could be the same person. The important thing to take from that is how can we consider the decisions that we're making to more better influence mode? More importantly, understand those three different areas. So shop, consider those and then consider what you can do differently as a result of really fully understand them. Is that making sense so far, Nathan? Let me, lemme bring you in for a second. Is that making sense to you?

Nathan Simmonds:

It makes absolute sense to me. And the, the way that it gets me thinking is often when you start a business or you're selling a service, the idea is that you fall in love with the problem. So a lot of businesses and a lot of I guess kind of category management, people doing the same sort of thing will fail, is because they fall in love with a solution. This is a great idea, this is a great product. It looks like this, this is gonna sell millions.

Nathan Simmonds:

And then they put it out there and they're like, no, it doesn't because no one likes what we're talking about. 'cause It doesn't solve the problem for them. And the, the story that comes to mind is when they were talking about washing powders previously, and they were, they were talking, oh, well we need, we need to make these sheets whiter than white.

Nathan Simmonds:

You know, the whole ba ultra thing, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these sorts of things. Wenatchee, I think in the fifties or sixties, when they did that research, it had nothing to do with whether the sheets were white. It was to do with whether or not it actually smelled good. So they were selling all this, you know, spending all this money on advertising campaigns to make these pictures of these beautiful, and actually all we needed to do was sniff it, did it smell good?

Nathan Simmonds:

So he was understanding the problem of the shopper or the needs and the problems of the shopper, the preparer and the eater. And having an idea of how to bridge all those gaps to make sure that every one of those individual groups is happy. So you sell more of that product.

Andy Palmer:

Absolutely. I talk about this in kind of the realms of what are their barriers and what are their motivations to purchase, what, what's going to entice 'em to, to pick it up, entice 'em to use it, entice 'em to eat it, and what are the barriers preventing those things. Once we understand that, we can then make, as you said, more informed decisions.