Traditional NAMs and their marketing colleagues have been reared in a culture of continuity. In other words, we spent years building up relationships with consumers and customers, on the premise that a strategic approach to brand optimisation produced a predictable and acceptable return on investment, growing a level of brand equity that would carry us over the troughs in demand.
This all changed with the 2007 global financial crisis and the emergence of the savvy consumer, gradually morphing into the savvy buyer, each unwilling to outsource their purchase decision-making to marketers and retailers, in a continuous search for demonstrable value-for-money, for each purchase…
The results are evident in the successes of Aldi and Lidl at the expense of Tesco and the other mults…
We are now as good as yesterday’s sales results, everywhere…
Any supplier attempting to build up a continuous relationship with the discounters, soon realises that life in this channel consists of a series of one-off initiatives, each bearing little or no relationship with previous moves made with the retailer.
In fact, thinking about it, the same now holds true for dealings with the major multiples (the over-rider agreement is now seen as ineffectual and is fast becoming increasingly dis-credited as the row about commercial income escalates…).
And perhaps this is how it should be in business..
If this is the case, perhaps all branded manufacturers should target Aldi & Lidl with one-off experiments to help their colleagues become accustomed to discontinuity, developing skills that can then be applied, hopefully with even more effect, via their traditional customers, making each initiative ‘the best ever’, as if our livelihood depended upon it…as it probably does…
This all changed with the 2007 global financial crisis and the emergence of the savvy consumer, gradually morphing into the savvy buyer, each unwilling to outsource their purchase decision-making to marketers and retailers, in a continuous search for demonstrable value-for-money, for each purchase…
The results are evident in the successes of Aldi and Lidl at the expense of Tesco and the other mults…
We are now as good as yesterday’s sales results, everywhere…
Any supplier attempting to build up a continuous relationship with the discounters, soon realises that life in this channel consists of a series of one-off initiatives, each bearing little or no relationship with previous moves made with the retailer.
In fact, thinking about it, the same now holds true for dealings with the major multiples (the over-rider agreement is now seen as ineffectual and is fast becoming increasingly dis-credited as the row about commercial income escalates…).
And perhaps this is how it should be in business..
If this is the case, perhaps all branded manufacturers should target Aldi & Lidl with one-off experiments to help their colleagues become accustomed to discontinuity, developing skills that can then be applied, hopefully with even more effect, via their traditional customers, making each initiative ‘the best ever’, as if our livelihood depended upon it…as it probably does…
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