Manufacturers Help Sam's Club with Digestive Health

Bentonville, Ark. — For Sam’s Club, there was no secret ingredient for this multi-manufacturer promotion to be successful. Planning, regular meetings and accountability – and the right project leader – drove results for a four-supplier digestive health promotion last year at the more than 600 Sam’s Club locations in the U.S.Jeremey Sudduth, buyer, OTC, for Sam’s Club with responsibility for analgesics, cough/cold, allergy, laxatives and antacids, sparked the promotion and says the true collaboration began with all the parties – including Pfizer Consumer Healthcare, Bayer HealthCare, GlaxoSmithKline and i-Health Inc. – seeing the value of being strange bedfellows. “They understood there was an opportunity for a return on their investment, no question,” says Sudduth. “They wouldn’t have come to the table if they didn’t think that was true.“I was really lucky that the four suppliers I brought together have really great support, they know their businesses, they know the ins and outs, they know who to talk to. It allowed the initial vision to stay pretty close to true throughout the entire process.”Sudduth says the idea came from opportunity and insight. The opportunity: No more than 4% of Sam’s Club members visit the OTC space. The insight: Years of study told Sudduth that members want to be told what to do to improve their health and wellness.A conversation with Pfizer last winter was the genesis of a solution for digestive health, and Sudduth invited suppliers that each had a solution for a different aspect. According to Sudduth, he then let Pfizer senior manager for shopper marketing Cate Spencer take over the supervision of the process.“Cate was phenomenal,” says Sudduth. “Herding the cats that were involved in this process is not an easy task but she made it look easy. We basically set up a conference call each week where we had all five parties to talk through each of the individual tactics, what the deadlines were, where we were with getting legal approval from each of the four companies.”Spencer says she had been a part of multi-supplier promotions before and felt they had not reached their potential because of a lack of organization and communication. Given the steering wheel, she used lessons learned from the past. “A lot of times buyers have a vision and manufacturers don’t deliver against that,” she says. “They can’t get brands engaged to get the funding. His idea, it actually came to life. We responded to his requests. We rose to the occasion.“(The suppliers) really wanted this program to be the best it had the potential to be by making smart choices along the way. Smart choices about creative, about targeting, about timing. All the details that are so important so that it’s a flawless execution.”The promotion began the last week of August and ended the first week of October. The in-store presence was a pallet stacked with four products – Pfizer’s Nexium, Bayer’s MiraLax, GSK’s Benefiber and i-Health’s Culturelle – topping a pallet skirt. A banner ad and a product page at SamsClub.com with videos for each product highlighted the digital presence handled by Triad Retail Media, St. Petersburg, Florida. Support included an inside cover ad in the September/October edition of Sam’s Club member magazine Healthy Living Magazine and inclusion in the chain’s in-store savings book ($5 coupons) for September.Over the middle four weeks of a six-week activation, the products had an 85% lift on sales and 141% lift in units, Sudduth says. Sam’s Club posted a 1-point increase in the category, 53% of product buyers were new to the category, and 70% bought more than one of the products.Menasha, Neenah, Wisconsin, and WestRock, Norcross, Georgia, handled the pallet skirt printing, and Cedar Knolls, New Jersey-based Vision Creative Group, Pfizer’s creative agency, developed the skirt design and magazine ad.Sudduth says the internal selling he had to do was more challenging than convincing the manufacturers, and the lessons learned will help with future multi-supplier promotions. He says there were a few keys: don’t be afraid to have an out-of-the-box conversation, leverage strong partnerships with suppliers, find complementary products, and let shopper behavior be the foundation. “Base a program initially off of a member insight, whether that’s penetration, whether that’s category awareness, whether that’s the education that you can take more than one item to improve overall health and wellness,” he says. “That’s a great place to start because the members have already told you that. Understanding that makes it easier to understand what success looks like on the back end.”

Manufacturers Help Sam's Club with Digestive Health

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