GE Appliances Embraces Shopper (Marketing)

Louisville, Ky. — Over the past year, General Electric’s GE Appliances division has ramped up its shopper marketing efforts beyond those of most manufacturers in the home center channel, starting with activity at Lowe’s and The Home Depot.Appliance and durable goods makers such as GE have typically focused on getting product to the floor and then promoting the suds out of them during the holiday season, with deep discounts designed to entice consumers already primed to get out their credit cards. But with its 65% of sales occurring at other times throughout the year because of appliance failure – and the potential for deep discounts to take manufacturers from loss leaders to just plain losses – GE needed to follow the lead of the CPG world and expand its efforts beyond simple promotions, says Jason West, general manager of merchandising, GE Appliances.“Traditionally, the white goods or durable goods category is a bit antiquated in terms of understanding consumer shopping processes and the consumer journey,” he says. “It’s about understanding the moments that matter to the consumer and presenting them with the right offer at the right time. It presents a new opportunity for us to think about how we spend our advertising and marketing dollars, and how to be impactful at that moment – which was a very foreign concept for GE.”The concept has been becoming increasingly familiar during the past couple of years as GE started building the business case and then, about 15 months ago, launched its shopper marketing efforts. “Our retail partners have been surprised we’ve done it,” West says. “They’ve been a little cautious early on. But they’re engaging and supportive now that they’ve learned, and we’ve learned, how we can strengthen and support each other’s business.”This has meant creating a customer marketing team to complement the product marketing and brand communication teams. “The piece of the equation that was always missing was the customer marketing,” he says. “That’s what we’ve been building out internally – advertising and marketing deliverables behind the scenes to support the account plan or the business plan.”This effort also has meant needing to align retailers’ marketing and sales teams to ensure that a product not only hits the sales floor but also sells through. And along with that, to align GE and retailer calendars, West says. “We’ve had some interesting discussions internally. The sales team did not understand why a retailer merchant would be interested in talking to a marketing person more than once a year. We explained that they want to talk to the marketing people inside the organization to find out how they plan. We’ve found the reception positive. Retailers want to cooperate and listen. They want to find the insights we bring to the space.”Given that durable goods is essentially a fixed unit industry, and “we’re all fighting for those fixed units,” GE Appliances has worked to figure out key markets where it’s performing well as a brand and do “tested learns” between the brand’s creative and that of the retailer, West says. “You’re able to partner and mitigate some of the risk. We can take their database and match it up against ours in certain local markets.”This might involve, for example, taking the 10 markets where GE sells the most cooktops and targeting consumers who might have bought a GE cooktop about 10 years ago, the norm for the replacement cycle. “We can partner with retailers on a strong call to action and a promotional offer,” West says.The more shopper marketing-oriented approach also has helped with the launch of new products – for example, a recent line of cafe refrigerators, for which GE Appliances co-developed creative with Lowe’s. “We used their platforms to amplify our message,” he says. “We were able to share some data that I think helped with the campaign.”That campaign and others have involved path-to-purchase bread crumbs like social and mobile, landing pages, Internet radio and print drops with the retailer. Although given tight visual guidelines in the aisles, “Most of our effort is spent out of store,” West says. “With a customer like Home Depot, we’ve done some in-store P-O-P material that reinforces an online advertising campaign to drive awareness, either a promotion or a service.”Although dashboards and metrics are still coming into focus, GE Appliances has been using “hard tactical measures like added impressions, click-through rates and downloads” to get a sense of campaign ROI, he says.“The harder to quantify metrics are when the merchant and the sales team invite the marketing team into the meeting and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got this new product on the floor, can you help us drive sell through?’ There’s been a lot of positive anecdotal support because they see the sales results,” West says. “We’re starting to get there. We’ve very early in our journey.”

GE Appliances Embraces Shopper (Marketing)

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