Get into the solutions business - marketing - Column

Brandweek, April 6, 1998 by James Brandhorst

Marketers today struggle for new solutions for connecting consumers with brands. But one thing is critical to any solutions tested or tried; the retail store must play a bigger role in the consumer brand relationship.

Clearest evidence of retail's growing role is the emergence of experiential retail concepts like Niketown, Disney stores and the new Discovery Store. What these places have in common is the mission to go beyond the product-to-user connection with consumers, thus forging a more lasting brand loyalty bond. Though we have seen far less of this relationship-building invention in more utilitarian categories, like supermarkets, this is changing.

Truly progressive packaged goods marketers are seeing things differently because they are viewing the supermarket through the prism of the most significant trend to come along in many years; the one of solutions reigning over simple sales per square foot. It is a trend that retailers, especially, are beginning to call "solutions branding." "Meal solutions" has been the hottest topic of the last 12 to 18 months in the grocery business. Consumers no longer have time to figure out what to make for their meals, much less prepare those meals. So, retailers are giving their customers a meal "solution"--something that's ready to make or ready to eat.

The solution concept, though, should apply not only to meals, but to virtually every aspect of a consumer's daily life: cleaning the house, caring for the baby, feeding the dog. Consumers may not want relationships with bars of soap, but they may feel a certain loyalty to a brand that organizes a total family hygiene solution and the store where they can access that solution.

Solutions branding inherently requires a new level of cooperation between brand marketers and retailers. The two sides have edged closer together in recent years, primarily by experimenting with the concept of co-marketing, which mandates a strategic alignment of brand and store marketing strategies. As practiced, though, co-marketing generally has been tactical rather than strategic, and typically has not engaged the retailers resources to the extent that they might be.

The solutions trend, however, could give co-branding a strategic platform that formerly was lacking. It offers retailers the opportunity to position themselves as a solutions resource, and brand marketers the chance to create supporting marketing programs that retailers love. The complication, naturally, is that few, if any, packaged goods marketers can provide a total solution in a given category without forging strategic alliances with complementary brands. The winners, then, will be those brand marketers who assemble the most imaginative alliances.

Another major barrier to solutions branding is the way stores are currently organized: by category We need a whole lot of mixing and matching and cross-category pollination if the solutions branding opportunity is to be maximized. It's far from clear that this is something most retailers will do on their own. More likely, it's up to brand marketers to take the initiative and revamp their outdated category management presentations with a greater dose of creativity.

It will also become necessary to establish new means of interactive consumer communication within the store. A point of interaction could occur either on a human level (in-store consultants who create customized solutions) or via technology (computer-driven stations that assemble solutions based on shopper input). The former may prove too expensive for the average supermarket, even with brand marketer support. The technologies for the latter, though, are already present in many supermarkets.

Perhaps most important, Dr. John McCann, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, points out that store level data, collected via checkout scanners and shopper cards, is crucial to building consumer relationships and loyalties at retail. "With the customer database, each customer is a `market' because each can be understood via the data and each can be influenced . . . while he is shopping in the store," he writes.

Ultimately, building consumer relationships by connecting them with your brands in the emerging retail environment depends on understanding consumer needs and responding to them in a relevant fashion. Certainly, other methods can be used to connect consumers with brands. But to leverage the possibilities at retail is to leverage a watershed opportunity.

James Brandhorst is chief marketing officer at InterAct Systems, Norwalk, Conn. He can be reached at (203) 750-0300.