Confirming Retail Execution

As retail execution operatives are trying to move beyond simply having someone shoot digital photos to show whether displays are set up properly, certain CPGs are turning to a mobile app that employs shoppers on a dollars-per-job basis to carry out such photos at retail.There's a relatively new option available to field auditors – a mobile app called Field Agent – that pays everyday shoppers $4 to $10 per assignment to snap photos with their smartphones and send them in to the CPG company.Launched in April 2010, Fayetteville, Ark.-based Field Agent links clients who need specific information with agents willing to collect and return that information on their smartphones. Those who sign up as agents can view and accept jobs posted through the free Field Agent app.The service has about 125,000 agents and 250 clients – about 80% of whom are CPG companies, although they can be anything from real estate agents looking for pictures of a comp property to a search engine that wants to find out whether a given business is still open, says John Scott Bull, a co-founder of Field Agent. "Our biggest market is retail auditing – everything from confirming in-stocks, whether demos took place, whether product is priced right on the shelf, competitive store checks, those types of things. You can look at it and almost immediately fix the problem. They can solve problems before they've lost the money."Field Agent reports back 90% of jobs within 48 hours, Bull says, with photo confirmation and a GPS stamp that provides "all the proof in the world that the agent was in the location." The company covers nearly 99% of CVS/pharmacy stores and more than 99% of Walmarts and Targets, and Bull says Field Agent continues to grow.An Intriguing But Limited OptionSome in the retail execution field find the Field Agent concept intriguing and see a place for it, but say there are hard limits on what it can do. "It's hard to process what they're giving you and know whether it's valid," says Lance Andersen, executive vice president of retail operations at Crossmark, Plano, Texas. "We train people; they have company-deployed technology, and they're actually able to tell you what's going on in the store, versus just taking a photo and letting you decide, 'Is this what I wanted? Is this not what I wanted? Is it there? Is it not there?"Harris Fogel, president of Quofore, Atlanta, says he signed up as a field agent and can see its usefulness. "I don't think it will replace your sales people, but I think it will replace some of the ad-hoc research work you might do," he says. "You get what you pay for it, but damn, it's a great way to get a lot of information, fast, for low cost, leveraging everyday consumers."Aidan Tracey, chief executive officer of Mosaic, Dallas and Toronto, can see how the app provides useful visual information, but that's about it. "It does nothing for merchandising compliance, or store-level conditions, or consistent feedback," he says. "I'm not going to say it doesn't have a role, but it's a little bit more narrow than people might first have thought. These are not employees. You can't tell them what to do. You get what you pay for – it's an old saying, but it's the truth."Tom Prestridge, director of the retail leadership group for Unilever, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., says his company does not plan to sign up for Field Agent. "If we're getting things from [shoppers] rather than an industry insider, there's an independence to that. On the other hand, would we be getting people who are biased to their brands? Would we get the right geographic mix? And would we have consistency? If you hire a company, you're going to get a pretty comprehensive read. With shoppers, on a little bit more random basis, are you going to be able to maintain that same personnel structure?"Bull acknowledges flip sides to Field Agent's low cost and high rate of speed. "There is a disadvantage to us," he says. "What you really lose is the ability to do a very advanced job at retail, something along the lines of rebuilding a modular, or restocking product from the back. Those types of things, we're not going to ask our agents to do. We don't pretend we do."Moving Beyond Pictures as Proof"A few years ago, the big deal was trying to get pictures as proof of performance. Most companies have those capabilities today," says Crossmark's Andersen. "It's becoming a lot more real-time to capture and maintain data, using store-specific data in trying to look for opportunities such as phantom inventory and out-of-stocks."Mosaic has spent the past couple years upgrading its technology "to move to a Web 2.0 mindset" while staying focused on the basics of a well-trained execution force, says Tracey. "Photos have been around for a while. We've moved to the next level, where photos contain metadata, seamless and already linked to a call-report," which lays out where and when the photos were taken, and which promotion they're linked to, all of which the client can quickly query.This data provides clients with additional assurances that a display is being effectively merchandised, Tracey says. "Leading agencies and partners are making sure that's part of the new world order," he says. "After a few weeks of the promotion, you can analyze how it's doing. You take the [big-picture] data and correlate that against the store-level information to evaluate which markets were more successful than others."RockTenn Merchandising Displays, Norcross, Ga., deploys a tool called Shopper Gauge that converts video footage into data, capturing shopper "dwells" in front of a display and purchases that are converted from those dwells, says Jon Kramer, chief marketing officer. The company has installed the system in Family Dollar and is talking to other retailers. But such tools can't measure compliance on a full scale "because we're not going to have this tool in every store," Kramer says. "You can't look at 400 stores and say, 'That's predictable and projectable' – whether something gets put up or not."Having such blanket coverage requires the right people in store, which has brought about a swing back toward the use of "W-2 employees," Mosaic's Tracey says."Smart marketers realize there might be a slight premium in cost, but there's no comparison in terms of ROI," he says. "To get quality data, they need a quality employee with a quality hand-held with a quality piece of software. … It's a blinding glimpse of the obvious. If you're not doing that, everything else is irrelevant because it will be garbage data collected."The tough economy has led retailers to pull back from their own work in restocking shelves and replenishing displays, which means brands need more third-party help in dealing with inventory corrections and out-of-stocks, says Todd Baird, division vice president for retail teams at Advantage Sales and Marketing, Irvine, Calif. Advantage tallies on-shelf, out-of-stock, void, not authorized, and missing a tag.Baird says the biggest trend he sees right now is customized deployment around events. "It's a coverage to supplement the routine monthly or weekly service call – things like nights, weekends, requests to go into the stores and do a pack-out, make inventory corrections and replenish displays. … We are doing a lot of auditing of shelf conditions. We will provide feedback to clients on the condition upon entry, what we did to solve the problem, and condition upon exit."Crossmark provides weekend-based, Thursday-Monday coverage rather than the traditional Monday-Friday merchandising schedule because "there's still so much pressure on the shelf to have availability of goods," Andersen says. "At a Walmart store on a Sunday evening, you'll see entire categories blown out.""It's all about ROI," agrees his colleague, Wayne Luciano, vice president of marketing for Crossmark. "We get continued requests for validation of displays in-store and to make sure that shelf tags are on and that we have out-of-stocks filled, prior to key shopping days in particular."Engaging RetailersBrands also have come to realize that retailers have come to hold the upper hand, as they have consolidated, which makes compliance a tougher sell, says Dennis Moore, president of analytics at Nielsen Co., New York. Brands are trying to partner more with retailers than monitor them. "If a manufacturer says, 'You didn't do what you said you would do,' the retailers aren't so interested in those kinds of conversations. Certainly, there is a lot of partnership and things going on in the digital space."The best thing brands can do to gain compliance is to bring retailers projects that they're excited about in the first place, says Mark Scott, executive vice president of marketing service operations for Acosta, Jacksonville, Fla. "I don't see anything consistent other than in general, brands are desiring higher actual in-store display execution than they get," he says with a laugh. "Everybody wants displays. What's going to motivate extraordinary results is when you get the retailer engaged and excited. They can see how the programming helps differentiate them and sets them apart and helps them win."Marketers face tough budgets for execution, aside from high-end projects, says Kevin Lee, vice president of Footprint Retail Services, Lisle, Ill. "They'll spend money on a great in-store item, but the amount they're willing to spend on execution, on auditing and insuring that it's up there, has probably slowed down," he says. "Given the tight budgets, I think they're willing to slip back a little bit to where we had been – you put the display out there and cross your fingers."Unilever's Prestridge expresses satisfaction with his company's suppliers but acknowledges that budgets limit what brands can do. "We can't give away the farm," he says. "We're trying to come up with something lower-cost that still gives us a chance to speak to the shopper in the store. When we do [execution], we'd rather have faster results. We want to be able to adjust on the fly."

Confirming Retail Execution

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