Retail presentations? Stop talking about consumers and brands! If you want to improve the presentations you make to retailers - try talking less about your brand!

We help clients win at retail and of course, to win at retail, you need to persuade a retailer to support your plan. Whatever you want to do: launch a new product, set up an activation or run a promotion, you need to persuade the retailer to support you. So as you can imagine, we see a LOT of retail presentations. Most of them are jammed with consumer data and brand information. They often look really professional. But they aren’t always that effective. In fact, many of them frustrate retailers terribly. In this post I’m going to explain why talking about consumers and brands isn’t the best way to persuade a retailers to support you, and what you should be talking about instead when you are selling to retailers.

The problem with talking about your brand in your retail presentations

Don’t get me wrong. It is important to talk about consumers. It’s just not as important as most people think. Likewise, you do need to talk about your brand too (probably), but that’s not the most important thing. Why?

Because retailers don’t actually care about consumers that much. And they certainly don’t care that much about your brand.

To anyone in the consumer goods industry, that might sound quite shocking. Sacrilegious, even. Especially to those in brand marketing teams. The consumer goods industry is built upon the relationship between consumers and brands, after all. Consumer goods companies spend their time and invest their money creating deep understanding of consumers and their needs and wants: and then more time and money tuning their brands to connect with those consumers. Surely retailers want to know about that?

Not so much.

Think about it. I saw a presentation recently about a brand that improved the confidence of its target consumers (I’m going to keep this vague for confidentiality purposes). Now that is a noble and worthy thing to bring to a consumer for sure. But how about the retailer?

How many retail buyers have a KPI to increase the confidence of consumers? I’ll tell you.

Zero.

And brands? How many retailers have a KPI to sell more of a particular brand? Same answer. Zero.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about consumers when we are selling to retailers. I’m not saying we shouldn’t talk about brands either . But they have to be put into the retailer context. They have a role to play (but it’s a lot less important than you think).

What do retailers want to hear about?

Retailers care about many things. But the thing that they care about most, is their KPIs, and what their boss wants. Yes – retail managers are the same as anyone else in any business! So when we are selling to retailers, our selling story has to talk to their KPIs and strategies. How will this initiative help the retailer sell more product in total? Will it improve the margin mix for my category? Improve my inventory performance? Help me achieve my sustainability or other CSR goals?

That is what most retailers are interested in.

This part of our selling story – we call it the customer proposition – is key. It’s the part of the story that tells the retailer ‘what’s in it for them’. If there is no value to the retailer – why on earth would they support you?

Why talk about consumers & shoppers in your retail presentations?

So why do we need to talk about consumers? Why do we need to talk about shoppers?

To make the customer proposition believable. That’s it!

We need to add two other elements to our story to make it believable. We need to talk about  shoppers. Why? Because we need to convince the retailer that the benefits we’ve promised will actually be realized. We can promise that our new product will grow the category by ten percent, but why should a retailer believe you?

We should add in shopper research and data that support our case. We need to ‘shopperize’ our presentation. We use data to show that our initiative will encourage shoppers to change their behavior. We build a shopper proposition to support our customer proposition – to make it credible. We need to explain who the target shopper is, and how and why our activity plan will change their behavior in a way that will deliver the commercial benefits we’ve promised to the retailer.

Hold on! Don’t delete all of your consumer insight slides!

And the consumer bit?

That’s there to make the shopper bit credible! We need to convince the retailer that shoppers will buy our new product, or respond to our activation. And shoppers only buy stuff that makes sense to consumers. Even more important, shoppers only repeat their purchases for brands that deliver to consumers. So sustainable sales will only come if we can deliver value to the consumer.

The consumer proposition is a key part of your retail selling presentation

So in addition to the shopper proposition and the customer proposition we need a third element: the Consumer Proposition. This explains who the consumer is, what their current behavior is, and why and how they will change this behavior in the future. This is where we can talk about our above-the-line campaign, for example.

The complete Commercial Proposition is the heart of your retail presentation

So that’s it. Its that simple. We need a customer proposition to explain why our plan adds value to the retailer. We need a shopper proposition to convince the retailer that they will enjoy the benefits we’ve promised. We need a consumer proposition to convince the retailer that shoppers will indeed change their behavior in the way we predict, which further enhances the credibility of our customer proposition. Put all this together and we have a balanced, commercial proposition, that explains why consumers demand will change, how shopper behavior will change, and the benefits that the retailer will get when this all takes place. 

The problem with most retail selling presentations

See the problem is, consumer goods companies get it the wrong way round. We think the subject of the presentation is the consumer and the brand, when the real subject of the presentation should be the retailer.

Retail presentations – checklist

Next time you need to create a customer selling presentation, use this checklist to improve its impact:

• Is there a clear, commercial benefit to the retailer (not just your brand, the entire category)
• Do you use shopper data to explain why shoppers will change their behavior in the desired way?
• Do you use consumer data to show that there is consumer demand or a consumer need, and that this will support the change in shopper behavior we predict.
• If there is any other data in your presentation, consider removing it. Keep it simple.

If you have a major activity coming up, or just want to get better retail buy-in from your plans, check out our training programs now, or get in touch. Our team is always happy to take time to understand your specific situation and see how we can help.