P-O-P People to Watch: J. Ryan Parks, Jarden Consumer Solutions

Name: J. Ryan Parks Company: Jarden Consumer Solutions, Boca Raton, FL Title: Customer Marketing Manager, Wal-Mart/Sam's Club Age: 34 Education: BS in marketing, with emphasis on advertising, promotion and quantitative analysis, Missouri State University. MBA, John Brown University, expected 2008When it comes to coveted insider status with Wal-Mart and Sam's Club, Ryan Parks has a serious advantage. "I worked my way through college at Sam's Club -- I started off pushing shopping carts," says the now Wal-Mart liaison for Jarden Consumer Solutions. After eventually working his way up to a seat as corporate marketing manager at Sam's home offices in Bentonville, AR, the ambitious Parks left to start his own marketing agency in northwest Arkansas, where he consulted with companies on promotional strategies that would see success at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club.When The Holmes Group was seeking a person to bring it closer to Wal-Mart and Sam's Club, they tapped Parks. He achieved several lofty goals, including increasing monthly sales at Wal-Mart by 45% and earning the retailer's "Supplier of the Year" honor. Holmes since was purchased by Jarden Corp., and Parks has stayed strong in his role.Tell me about your main responsibilities. My main responsibilities include developing objective strategy and tactics specific to Wal-Mart and Sam's Club. How do you step-by-step evaluate those with Wal-Mart and Sam's Club? It starts with our Wal-Mart buyer and collaboratively with Wal-Mart marketing. We work very close with them to determine what their overall needs are, and we work down from there. It really comes from understanding what is important to Wal-Mart and Sam's Club.How did you get where you are now? I went to Missouri State University and graduated with a business degree in marketing, with an emphasis on promotion, advertising and quantitative analysis. I worked my way through college at Sam's Club. I started off pushing shopping carts inside, so I got to experience Sam's Club at the lowest level. I worked there all the way through college, and once I graduated college they offered me a management position, so I was a manager in the clubs out in the field, in operations for a while, then I was promoted to a corporate marketing manager at the home office in Bentonville.After Sam's Club, what happened? I left Sam's club to take a stab at my entrepreneurial spirit, and started my own marketing agency in northwest Arkansas. Our focus was on the Wal-Mart and Sam's Club supplier community, and then medium-to-large-size businesses within the northwest Arkansas quarter.What kinds of things did you find you were advising people on most? It was mostly for Wal-Mart suppliers, it was mostly trade level promotional support: What's the most effective way to reach the customer who's shopping at Wal-Mart; What things do you have to do to get them interested in your product, get them interested in your promotion, increase trial, increase conversion rates.How did you study those things? The majority of studying the shopper took place while I was at Sam's Club. So, through numerous focus groups, through just sheer experience being in the stores, watching people, understanding how they move, how they interact with products, what they look at when they're walking down action alley or in the side counter, really helped me in my experience with my agency.What were some of the tactics you used to advise other businesses? Some tactics were retailtainment events, developing promotions outside of the store environment, in the parking lot. That way, before they enter the store we were able to capture attention and get them interested in the brand, interacting with the brand, so that whenever they do go inside the store or club, they were able to have that top-of-mind awareness of what piqued their interest outside, and hopefully encourage a purchase. Any noteworthy success stories from back then? We did a great promotion with Hasbro for Mr. Potato Head's 50th birthday, at Wal-Mart, which included a Mr. Potato Head 50th Birthday tour, where we had a stretch excursion limo that was graphic-ed with Mr. Potato Head graphics, and character appearances at several different Wal-Mart locations.There was a sister company that my business partner had, called Retailtainment; they're actually the execution end of what happens in stores, so I can't take credit for everything. My side of the company was responsible for developing concept and graphics, and their side was charged with actually the execution part of it. So that was a fun promotion; we did some stuff with Gillette, and Wal-Mart and Sam's Club in specific, stuff like that.What were the steps between then and where you are now? I felt my life was being led in another direction, so I quietly disembarked the agency field there and became director of marketing for a building manufacturer. So I got out of retail; I got out of the Wal-Mart/Sam's Club for a while, and was building components manufacturer almost three years as director of marketing. I started with the Holmes Group in Oct. 2004, and then the Holmes Group was purchased by Jarden last July 2005, so now we are part of Jarden Consumer Solutions Business Segment. So now my responsibilities include doing what we had discussed earlier for the Rival brand, Crock Pot, Sunbeam, Mr. Coffee, Oster, specifically at Wal-Mart and Sam's Club.How did you get there? I started with Holmes and they were seeking a person for a position like this, so they could be closer to the Wal-Mart and Sam's Club, and understand their needs and how we could coordinate with their marketing strategies and tactics and develop synergies between the two. So, I was selected for that position, and after Jarden bought Holmes Group, my position just flowed into the Jarden Consumer Solutions business as well.How did you feel when you won "Supplier of the Year" with the Holmes Group? We were proud. It was mostly done for a great promotion that we put together for October 2005 for the Crock Pot brand. Any time you're recognized among your peer suppliers for doing a great job, that's a great accomplishment. What project are you working on now? I'm working right now on in-store FoodSaver strategy. FoodSaver is a vacuum storage brand, and it's an integrated promotion with Wal-Mart that consists of demos and in-store radio and advertising and All You magazine. The purpose is to complement our national advertising campaign and really drive the purchase at P-O-S. What do you mean by "more than just a P-O-P display"? A retail promotion strategy? What I mean by that is, it's more what I do and how I look at it. I look at it more from a strategic level; it's more than just putting out a pallet display or a sidekick. It's more than getting product in a store. It's more about a collaborative effort with Wal-Mart; and what tactics can you layer on to make it more of an overall cohesive strategy than just a onesie-twosie, in-and-out deal.Do you have any examples of that? Yeah, what we did with Crock-tober, our promotion with Crock Pots (Crock-tober is a Rival Crock Pot trademark name, so it's not Wal-Mart specific). We develop a program every year called Crock-tober, where we emphasize our national efforts on Crock Pots and developing a national promotion for them in October. In 2005, we licensed our brand to ConAgra to develop Crock Pot Classics meals, so they developed a lot of advertising behind it, and we took advantage of that and collaborated with Con-Agra to do in-store demos, to do specialized displays, to do in-store TV, in-store radio and really drive the purchase at POS and take the synergies between our two brands and drive it at the store level. We had displays and corrugated merchandising efforts, so we had a Crock Pot pallet merchandised adjacent to Crock Pot Classics meals in the freezer cases, so whenever we can put those two brands in close proximity to each other and then develop a communications strategy at the store level to increase the awareness and then couple that with our national campaign and ConAgra's national campaign, it was a successful strategy.How important do you think it is to make sure that your in-store messaging ties into things you're doing on TV and print? I think it's very important, and a lot of times with CPG firms and manufacturers, you see that disconnect from the store level to the brand level. While I still think in-store can be effective if not done like that, I think it's better always to be in the same step as your national brand campaign. That way, you're able to drive your brand equities and your value position at the store level. Whenever you can tie that with promotional support at store level, that's when you have a success. You have to have that cohesiveness.What was the challenge of bringing a really established brand like Crock Pot, which isn't necessarily thought of as a modern brand, into front-of-mind awareness? The challenge was taking the brand that has a high household penetration and reenergizing the brand, which I have to attribute to our brand team. That really started with them and their design on how to license our product, get the brand in front of the public again and start creating additional sales because people see the new design of product or new functionality. Our product development team has completely redesigned the different SKUs that we have, so they're modern, they're digital models, they're fashion-forward models. So there are models with new technology and increased functionality.How have relationships with mass retailers changed the way companies like yours market product? I think that it helps us, the more tactics that Wal-Mart and Sam's Club have available to them, it helps us get in touch with the consumer on a closer level, helps us connect with them more. We have to work closely with Wal-Mart marketing to be able to understand what their objectives are and what their strategies are, and coordinate our efforts with them. So really, it's a synergistic approach. It helps us take advantage of what they have going on, and to work collaboratively.What are your expectations for P-O-P in the future? I don't do a lot with digital signage or a lot with actual P-O-P that is digital or video, and that's just due to constraints that Wal-Mart has with P-O-P. They're pretty limited -- You have 80 million-plus shoppers going though Wal-Mart domestic stores every week, and whenever you put any type of P-O-P up there, you gotta think it's going to be ripped and handled a lot by customers. If anything does go up, it has to be very robust, but Wal-Mart has, especially in the past year, tried to get away from in-store clutter, and that's kind of part of it. We've talked about some P-O-P and we've been advised against it specifically for that reason.So what's your answer to that challenge of not being able to put in so much signage? You have to make sure you really do a good job in your packaging at communicating the benefits of the product and the value that the consumers are going to receive. Any chance you get to put a display in-store, you have to make sure that in three seconds when a consumer walks by that pallet or display, you effectively communicate what you want them to understand.Do you think it's more effective to communicate with visual pictures or with words? Visual. I think it's more effective, because, you know the old saying, a picture is worth 1,000 words. It really is. If you can create a visual that communicates a concept, it's much more effective than putting it in print. Take, for example, any Caution sign you see along US highways, byways and roads. Children playing, pedestrians, those are all picture-based and they communicate a message pretty clearly. You need to liken that to the in-store environment because in both situations, you have a very limited amount of time to get across what you want to communicate to the customer.Do you have any specific examples of really great graphics? What's an image that sold Crock Pots? One of Wal-Mart's focuses last year was, "Save me time, save me money and save me." Those were one of the focuses that they have. Who's shopping at Wal-Mart? It's the mom. So, for our pallet in Crock-tober, the visual on the side of our pallet was the Crock Pot cooking on the countertop, and then there's a window behind where you saw mom out playing with the kids. So everything that was going on in Wal-Mart last year had an element of Save Me Time, Save Me Money, and with the Crock Pot, you can cook all day while the cook's away, so it really hits on Save Her Time, and Save Her Money. Crock Pot is a good way, you put all your stuff in there, you don't have a whole lot of other prepared meals that you can get together at the same time, so it's a great way for them to save money, and then "Save Me," it's that breath of fresh air that the consumer can feel when she knows that she has a good meal for her family. So the visual that we had in-store was the Crock Pot cooking, and the banquet Crock Pot Classics right beside it, so it saves time, saves money, and then the Mom is out enjoying some nice time with her kids.What would you like to learn yet in this industry? I'm learning every day. Any time that I can get opportunity to talk to my buyer, Wal-Mart marketing, is a definite opportunity. One thing that I learned at Sam's Club and in the Wal-Mart environment is that you never sit still, you never rest on your laurels. I've always said, you gotta be able to turn on a dime and have 5 cents change at Wal-Mart. That's one of the things that I look for whenever I meet with my buyer and anybody in marketing; What's going on, what's the next ups, what are they pushing, how can we help be a good business partner with them and develop coordinated plans? What can I do to learn? How involved are you with sales in Wal-Mart overseas? Not a whole lot right now. Most of the work that I do is just domestic.How do you study the shopper? It's, you know, we don't have a defined process and I would probably maybe advise against a defined process of how to study, because I think that just as Wal-Mart is evolving, the shoppers are evolving as well. They're constantly interacting with the strategies that Wal-Mart puts in place, so their shopping behavior changes. So you've got to be on the lookout and you've got to keep a close eye on those behaviors. I'm in the stores all the time, and the best thing for me is talking to Wal-Mart associates, the department managers, store associates, to try to get a feel for how they feel about the category, how they feel about shoppers. Then lots of times, also just talking to shoppers in the aisle and asking them, why did you pick that product over this product? Maybe not just for the categories and brands that I work in, but I'll lots of times walk other aisles. Why did they pick this bread over that bread; it's a fairly commoditized type product; what's driving their decision over that, is it price, is it packaging, does it look better, does it give them a feeling that they're taking care of their family better, why did you pick this dog food or this toy over that dog food or that toy. So just trying to understand the consumer and what they do; I try not to put a lot of constraints on what it is I want to learn. I don't want to say, "I just want to learn this," or "I just want to learn that," that's what I'm referring to, don't narrowly define your processes, leave it open because you'll learn a tremendous amount more. And read Paco Underhill's Why We Buy.Do you think it's important to measure the effectiveness of your in-store marketing? Extremely.How do you measure effectiveness of your programs? We look at stores that we have promos in versus stores that don't have promotions in a pre-promotion time period, and a promo-period time period. And from that you're able to gauge, how has your promotion performed in relation to a control market, how has it performed in relation to previous time periods, how did it perform during promotive time period. Whenever you're dealing with statistics, there's always a margin of error, so nothing is 100%, but at least you get some guidelines on how different strategies perform for you.How is your role different from that of a brand manager or a product manager? A brand manager is in charge of advising the overall brand, and the brand equities and the brand attributes and the brand architecture; and product managers use that information to determine what channels brands are going to play in. My role is from a promotional standpoint, how do we get more sales, how do we take that brand architecture and product management opportunities that we have and turn that into sales at POS. I work with our marketing teams and salesforce here in Bentonville to develop the strategies and tactics to do that. Mine is a shorter term scenario, a year's term is my planning stage, so the things I have going on I'm planning within the next year, and a brand manager is in charge of the overall brand and where that's going.What do you like best about your company, your team? I think that Jarden is very focused on understanding the consumer, and I like that, because it ties in with what I believe. They also are focused on customer satisfaction and really being best in their class in both aspects, the consumer and the customer. Also, I think that Jarden overall places a high degree of value on their employees, and while results are expected, within the last year, which is all I know, everything is treated in a fair and equitable manner.What do you like best about the team you work with? I work with mainly with the Wal-Mart and Sam's Club sales team on the ground in Bentonville. What I like best is the connection that we can make between marketing and sales, because a lot of times I think that you can create pie-in-the-sky marketing activities, but if it doesn't translate to sales, it can be disappointing. I enjoy the sales calls with our buyers and talking about the marketing strategies and tactics and seeing them getting excited about it, and actually being able to go into stores and seeing that take place in an actual environment. I also enjoy the team atmosphere. We work collaboratively. And most of the times each team member will know what's going on with other team members, we're able to give suggestions; we're able to take our experience from relative avenues and do it for the greater good of the company.What do you do to relax outside of the office? I play with my 3 kids. Abram, 8 Aidan 5 and Annalee, 3. That gives me the opportunity to be creative. My kids are tremendously creative, so being able to use our imaginations together helps recharge me, helps me have a unique perspective. Sometimes you need the ability to get outside of what you're doing and let the creative juices flow and you're able to come back to the problem or situation with a new perspective. If you put something in about my kids, you have to put something in about my wonderful, beautiful wife. Leann was a marketing manager at Sam's Club when we met, and now is the director of household affairs at the Parks family house. It's great because I'm able to talk with her, and she helps me be very creative as well and provides a lot of good suggestions, like having my own personal adviser. Behind every good man is a good woman. I'm also currently getting my MBA at John Brown University, I start my first class August 21.

P-O-P People to Watch: J. Ryan Parks, Jarden Consumer Solutions

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