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Consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers are being challenged to redefine their marketing playbooks."

There’s no precedent for what we’re experiencing as governments, businesses, communities and economies around the world try to care for those impacted by COVID-19 amidst continued uncertainty of what’s next. But, one thing is increasingly certain: The pandemic is having both an immediate and long-term impact on the relationship between people, brands and retailers.

Consumer packaged goods manufacturers and retailers are being challenged to redefine their marketing playbooks, while simultaneously dealing with exponentially increased demand in some categories, steep declines in others and rapid shifts to new shopping behaviors. For consumer packaged goods companies, near-term strategies and decisions should be filtered through this question: How do we best help consumers and retailers in this time of need?

We’re advising our clients to take these three critical steps to navigate the rapidly changing marketing and retail landscape, while remaining empathetic to the life changes the pandemic is creating:

1. Strengthen the foundations.

As shopping behavior quickly shifts to methods that favor social distancing, like online grocery pick-up and e-commerce, consumer packaged goods companies need to ensure their digital shelf presence and e-commerce supply chains are optimized. If a product is out-of-stock or not visible as consumers rapidly increase their online shopping, brands could be permanently missing in shoppers’ future shopping trips.

Beekeeper Marketing and Sage Tree have been working with clients to use search, sales and online behavior data to prioritize products consumers are actively seeking — like cleaning products, vitamins and pantry fillers — to ensure they’re easily found online and readily available.

2. Use data to drive precision.

Gaining a near real-time understanding of shifting channel demands to effectively retarget trade and marketing investments is paramount. Marketing at the total brand level will be challenging in the near term, as shoppers prioritize basic necessities and de-prioritizing discretionary items. This creates a need to market at the SKU level and use data to monitor changing conditions.

Our sales and digital technology teams are leveraging real-time data to help brands unlock new ways to offer value, like identifying store locations with an item in stock.

3. Focus on driving contextual commerce.

Empathy, branding and engagement have never been more important. Marketers must interrogate all messages to ensure they are sensitive to consumers’ rapidly changing lives. But, as millions now shelter in place, retailers and brands have an opportunity to seamlessly implement purchase opportunities into the behaviors the crisis is forcing us all to adopt.

To do that, Advantage’s marketing agencies are working now with clients to help brands and retailers ensure their strategies:

  • Create new usage routines. Working from home, home schooling and the closing of non-essential businesses have upended our lives. Now, families are eating together more than ever. Consumer packaged goods makers, in particular, can help consumers establish new household routines with curated recipes, content and activities, while strengthening their customer partnerships with retailer-exclusive solutions.
  • Be contextually relevant. Recognizing different need groups, like college students and workers with children at home, can help determine what to prioritize in promotions, where to deploy marketing messages and how to merchandise products online at retailers. Our media agencies are using agile programmatic media to ensure media dollars are shifted to the channels most relevant to these different groups.
  • Support product innovations and drive trial in new ways. Brands with recent product launches are being challenged to drive trial in the absence of trusted tools like in-store sampling and secondary store merchandising focused on impulse purchases. Our clients are driving product trial through virtual product advisors, sampling in e-commerce shipments and turning in-store sampling kiosks into new-item merchandising destinations, all supported with targeted digital content linking to purchase.
  •  Redefine a brand’s role in community outreach and charitable engagement. Retailers, like CVS, are offering health-related education and merchandising in-store and online. Grocery chains are restricting access for the first few hours of operation to the elderly and other high-risk individuals. Brands, like Budweiser, are hosting virtual concerts to raise money for unemployed restaurant workers. Feeding America is mobilizing to raise money and donations for food banks’ COVID-19 efforts nationwide.

Shifting consumer engagements and offers to support those affected by this crisis will help our clients engage with consumers in an impactful way, while helping our local communities.

Consumer goods makers and retailers will persevere by maintaining a willingness to take unfamiliar risks, assist consumers during a challenging period, help retailers get shoppers essential items and learn at every step to inform how they’ll act now and in the future.


Brian Kristofek
President, Consumer & Shopper Marketing
Advantage Solutions

Brian Kristofek leads Advantage Marketing Partners’ consumer and shopper marketing organization. He joined Advantage in 2016 with the acquisition of the Upshot agency, which he led for more than 20 years.