Off the Shelf: The Retail & CPG Blog

I remember the days when I would walk down seemingly endless aisles at the department store looking for the best deal on my favorite Colombian coffee only to find that the offer had ended just a day earlier. Two words come to mind when I think of those times; disappointment and frustration.

Fortunately for me, and all of you reading this blog, there are now better ways of getting what you want, whether it's detergents, diapers, or any other consumer packaged commodity. Here's what has changed the game:

• Digital technology is rapidly evolving and has empowered us to access product information and connect with each other across multiple channels including e-commerce portals, social media networks, and 3G mobile phones in real-time at the moment of truth, online or in-store. Product information has been democratized. Our perceptions are no longer shaped by a marketer's top-down mass broadcast communications.
• Channels are converging. The convergence of mobile platforms, online channels, and stores means that we have detailed information about product pricing, specifications, availability, and deals. At the same time, it gives enormous opportunities to CPG companies to have consumers converse with their brands.
• Audiences are disaggregating. As we huddle together in narrower special interest groups, it is becoming increasingly difficult for CPG companies to engage us, their prospects. There is an increasing need for CPG companies to develop context-aware personalized communication. Wouldn't it be great if you received a discount coupon on packaged foods via your mobile phone just before that long camping trip that you blogged about? I am not a statistic in a market research report. Nor are you. Our needs, interests, and tastes at a given time are unique, and it's time marketers understood that.
• In-store technology is more sophisticated than before. Stores, nowadays, can track our activity in real-time helping CPG brands to provide contextual promotions and increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. Using this technology, CPG companies can gain valuable insights and improve conversations at the point of sale.

As digital consumers of today, we have evolved to become more involved in the creation and consumption of products we purchase. In addition, brand loyalties have eroded and information on products and promotions is now at everyone's fingertips. The balance of power has tipped in favor of the consumer.

In the next few posts, we will take a closer look at some of these game changers and see how CPG companies can benefit from their use.

I'm also speaking at the CGT Sales & Marketing event about this - if you are going to be at the event, do plan to attend the session and participate in the discussions.

Posted by Larry Danna at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The necessity to address the US military's concern about their network connectivity led to the birth of Internet.  The emergence of world wide web has led to the decentralization of information for the users. Nowadays we are not only increasing our usage of internet but also changing the manner in which we interact with it. Internet no longer remains confined to searching information - we make friends on social networks, post comments on blogs, share information on wiki. The transition form Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 took almost 10 years & in this period we moved from a dump of static information where people limited to only reading articles to more interactive form facilitating collaboration between people. Web 2.0 really made a fundamental change in the manner of the usage of internet. Soon we are going to witness another change in the form of Web 3.0.

Many people believe that semantic web is one of the components of Web 3.0 & some even consider it to be synonym with Web 3.0. So how is Web 3.0 going to bring about the change? Google has become a part & parcel of our life. Currently search engines like Google rely on keyword phrases to figure out what the page is all about. For instance if the page contains "football" repeated a lot of times then the search engine thinks that the article is on football. This may not work every time & we might not get the desired result. Imagine if the computer can understand what the context is & not just the keyword(s) to return better search results. It's like integrating artificial intelligence with the search engine capability - teaching the engines to read, understand, draw out the essence and be able to deliver it to us, just like a human would do.
The Semantic Web requires the use of a web ontology language to produce domain-specific ontologies that machines can use to reason about information and make new conclusions instead of simply matching keywords as done by the present search engines. Once machines can comprehend and use information, using a standard ontology language, the scenario would change altogether. Soon the day won't be far when we will be able to search for the nearest restaurant that serves Italian cuisine, even if the nearest restaurant advertises itself as a pizza joint and not as an Italian restaurant. The soon to be outdated concept of throwing raw information by the search engine will no longer continue further.
Does this mean that Google's search engine technology is going to be obsolete in the near future?  The answer has to wait till such a time comes in the future when we will be able to witness the next phase of development in web technology.

Posted by Fazal Alahi Chowdhury at 10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)