People to Watch: Tia Newcomer, Hewlett-Packard

Name: Tia Newcomer Company: Hewlett-Packard, Vancouver, Wash.Title: Director, U.S. Shopper MarketingAge: 36 Education: University of Nebraska (BA, Journalism and Mass Communications)Why She's One To Watch: Overhauled HP’s in-store merchandising to create clear, consistent messaging across all printers and PCs.With a background in traditional CPG marketing for the likes of Frito-Lay, The Clorox Co. and Revlon, Tia Newcomer had to change the way she thought about shoppers when she joined Hewlett-Packard (HP) five years ago. "In the CPG space, as a consumable, you're turning once every week if not more in those categories," she says. "At HP, typically most of our products are on a three-year lifecycle of replacement for a customer, so if you think about that, [there are] very different marketing needs to market to someone that's not in the buying cycle except for every three years."At the beginning of this year, HP's trade marketing department changed its name to shopper marketing, with Newcomer at the helm. She was recently promoted from manager to director of this team. "We're living through what I call this breakthrough time where we are having to change the way we go to market, which includes shopper marketing," she says.She cites Walmart as a great partner in this effort. "Because they know and have worked in the CPG space for so long, I think they're 100% lockstep with us on the shopper marketing approach because they know what it's done for their other categories," she says. For consumer electronics and office products retailers, this is a new approach, so HP is helping them look at marketing from a shopper's perspective. Newcomer's biggest project this year has been a complete overhaul of how HP printers and PCs are merchandised. Extensive research revealed that product stickers on its printers, although important to shoppers, did not communicate anything that would help the shopper make a decision. "We weren't saying anything, it was very cluttered, no one understood why they were paying more or what features they were losing or gaining," she says.To remedy this, Newcomer asked her team to take a step back and look at every SKU to decide which consistent features should be called out on the stickers. "I took the handcuffs off and I said, 'design for the shopper.'" The resulting sticker program launched across all existing and new printers Oct. 1 and was carried over to PCs and notebooks as well as online, giving all HP products a consistent, system-wide message.One of HP's key research methods in this project was in-store eye tracking. Of the two minutes that shoppers spent looking for a printer, a minute and a half was spent looking at the product, the product fact tag and the sticker, reaffirming that those were the most important pieces. Surprisingly, they spent less than seven seconds looking at the wall behind the printers, an area HP had put a lot of copy and images on in the past."The results qualitatively, when we interview shoppers in that space, is that they say it's calming. They actually doubled their time in-line with that design, and they went right to the product, which is where we need them to go," she says.

People to Watch: Tia Newcomer, Hewlett-Packard

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