Column: Fame & Good Fortune

As you can see on the cover of the March issue of Path to Purchase IQ, this month begins our annual coverage of Path to Purchase Institute’s Hall of Fame program. It’s a special time on the editorial calendar because it allows us to recognize some of the key people who are helping to define and shape our industry.And there has been plenty of “designing” and “shaping” taking place within this industry over the years. When we launched the Hall of Fame in 1994, it was fully focused on the world of P-O-P, recognizing the merchandisers and marketing services professionals working down in the retail trenches to drive sales through in-store marketing. That, of course, was fitting for a magazine that was then called P-O-P Times, nearly a decade before we launched the Institute.Since then, as we’ve mirrored the industry’s evolution, the roles of our Hall of Fame inductees have evolved as well, as both the scope and importance of marketing to shoppers has grown to address the unprecedented changes in consumer buying behavior which have occurred. Consider our three Class of 2020 inductees:• Steve McGowan, RVP of shopper marketing & strategic partnerships for Mondelez International, who is profiled in the March issue.• Jennifer Reiner, senior director of omnichannel marketing & e-commerce for Del Monte Foods, who will be profiled in our April issue.• Alex Gourlay, co-chief operating officer at Walgreens Boots Alliance, who’ll get the recognition he deserves in May.Three very different people with varied responsibilities in their organizations, although with two common characteristics that made them worthy of recognition: their success in spearheading best-in-class shopper engagement within their companies, and their willingness to share their perspectives with the industry at large. Those impressively varied titles illustrate exactly how far we’ve come in the last 27 years. Think about it: The internet was barely being discussed as a concept in 1994, let alone as a critical aspect of business-to-consumer commerce. And that’s part of what makes our annual Hall of Fame coverage so special because, as we salute the accomplishments of three specific individuals and their own organizations, we’re also able to recognize the amazing strides we continue to make as an industry. So here’s a most well-deserved toast to Steve McGowan, Jennifer Reiner and Alex Gourlay for the ways in which their personal success exemplifies the triumphs of our industry. But while we’re at it, let’s raise another glass for the rest of us, too.A NEW DIGITAL PATHSpeaking of continued designing and shaping, you might notice a new URL at the bottom of our pages this month: I invite you to visit PathtoPurchaseIQ.com, the new home for our magazine. This website will be your destination to find all the informative content from each month’s edition in digital form, along with related news from the Path to Purchase Institute and its community of thought leaders, solution providers and other key industry players. With the launch, consumergoods.com will revert back to being the home base of Consumer Goods Technology. Our sister publication will continue to focus on the full information technology suite driving change within consumer goods organizations, from the IT professional’s perspective. That will allow Path to Purchase IQ to do what it has done best for all these years: Help consumer goods professionals understand how best to engage with shoppers and influence product purchase throughout the retail ecosystem. So reset your bookmarks accordingly.

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