Essentials

The Leaders Guide to Career and Company Success

Retail Marketing

Contents
Table of Contents 2 Introduction 3 Four Decelerators Undermining Retail Marketing Performance 4 Decelerator 1: Uncertainty 5 - 6 Decelerator 2: Discontinuity 7 Decelerator 3: Misalignment 8 Decelerator 4: Imprecision 9 - 10 The Solution: High Performance Marketing 11 Four Accelerators of Retail Marketing Success 12 Accelerator 1: Visibility 13 - 15 Accelerator 2: Continuity 16 - 18 Accelerator 3: Alignment 19 - 20 Accelerator 4: Measurement 21 - 22 From the Marketing Fast-Track to Your Career Fast-Track 23 About CrossCap 24

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Introduction
Retail is an extremely demanding and unforgiving race to success. As a retail marketing leader, you face intensifying competition and escalating customer expectations. And, in todays pedal-to metal, omni-channel environment, the race is more challenging than ever. To perform at your absolute best, you have to focus on the key factors that deserve your attention -- and manage them with rigor and precision. Thats the purpose of this executive guide -- to identify the critical accelerators that enable you to perform exceptionally and drive protable growth while overcoming the decelerators that might otherwise hold you back and undermine your career success. Based on our insights and experiences with leading retailers, weve witnessed certain patterns of retail marketing excellence emerge. These patterns of action span the spectrum of traditional media (such as print and broadcast) and newer digital media (such as social and mobile). The benet to you is that they have provided the immediate actions you can take to move your organization toward world class performance. Its your moment to seize. By focusing and capitalizing on the accelerators most critical to your success as a marketing leader, you will make the organizational and promotional moves needed to strengthen your brand, increase sales lift, and amplify protability. And by implementing the suggestions found in this eBook, you will be empowered to overcome the inherent inefciencies associated with todays labor-intensive and error prone approaches to retail marketing. So, what does it take to perform on the retail marketing fast-track? Read on and nd out what the most advanced retailers have discovered. Sincerely, Your Retail Marketing Experts at CrossCap

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Four Decelerators Undermining Retail Marketing Performance

Todays retail marketers are struggling with a set of problems and pain points that threaten to undermine their success. Lets call them decelerators. At a time when marketing organizations need to operate faster and smarter than ever to merely keep pace with the competition, they are constantly slowed down and rendered ineffective by these issues. Among them:

Uncertainty

Discontinuity

Misalignment

Imprecision

To perform at a level that todays hyper-competitive retail markets demand, its critical to both recognize and address these issues. Lets begin by isolating and dening them.

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Decelerator 1: Uncertainty
Executing long-term, multi-channel, marketing strategies requires the handiwork of some of the best marketing planners whether youre a single banner retailer with 100 stores, or a multi-banner retailer with 1,000+ stores. Being able to accurately plan projects, efciently interact with merchants, and align campaigns across channels can easily overwhelm the resources in your marketing department. As a marketing leader, one of your key responsibilities is to ensure marketing program visibility. This means you and your colleagues must have a comprehensive view of campaign plans, schedules, assets, progress, and results. Aside from the obvious impact visibility has on the strategic vision for the organization, visibility also helps you ensure alignment among marketing teams, streamlines reporting to stakeholders, and improves marketing performance over time. However, it is difcult to gain complete visibility to all the gears turning in your marketing department when there is no shared system to capture, track and report on all the elements associated with your campaigns. Maintaining an up-to-date view of campaign elements is an immensely resource intensive task for most organizations, whove had to make do with the tools on hand. The net result is that this activity gets neglected and leads to a persistent level of uncertainty within the organization. Some other consequences you might already be experiencing are:

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Decelerator 1: Uncertainty Continued...

Excessive administrivia Marketing leaders are often responsible for merging calendars, documents, reports, and performance dashboards. That means a lot of manual document updates and other unnecessary administrative work if there is no central system of record in place. The decidedly non-strategic role of cutting, copying and pasting was not part of your job description, and it is not an activity thatll move your career or the company forward. Meetings, meetings and more meetings Uncertainty within the company has the snowball effect of generating more and more meetings. Whether the meeting goal is agenda setting, status updates or some other purpose, you or your resources are pressured to schedule meetings to achieve consensus and coordinate action. Slowly but surely, the barrage of meetings eats into the workday and the marketing team nds itself working longer hours and eventually putting in overtime hours. High risk reporting You are challenged to quickly pull together disparate sources of data to give reports to key stakeholders. If you must hastily assemble information from multiple teams and multiple versions, the potential for errors and inaccuracies is extremely high.

Collectively, such factors represent a massive waste of your time and resources. You also risk under-performance whether its tied to supporting your executive team or managing campaigns.

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Decelerator 2: Discontinuity
Imagine its time for annual planning and the marketing leadership team is developing a grand strategy, a marketing plan and a series of high-level campaigns for the year to come. These could include campaigns for the Super Bowl, Black Friday, and other various holidays. Campaigns, in turn, must be translated into tactics. You and your team are tasked with providing the messages and assets for TV, radio, print, email, social media, and the stores themselves. Making sure the message across each is consistent conveying the same (or supporting) messages to your audience through each channel. Heres the challenge: This plan and its associated campaign elements will perpetually change throughout the year as budget, timing, messaging, pricing and channel mix are revised. Whats worse, each channel may have a different team managing its own respective calendar of activities. And since plans have been revised throughout the year, its impossible to know for sure if you have access to the latest version of a campaign and all its associated elements. And this is just the beginning. Over time campaign complexity compounds geometrically even as your budgeted resources remain at (or, possibly, contract). There will be new demands in terms of localizing your messages, offers, and campaign assets and campaign renements that require a rapid response. However, your organization will be severely weakened by an inability to maintain campaign continuity and asset version control.

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Decelerator 3: Misalignment
With the advancement of localization, the pervasion of price transparency, and the need for omni-channel presence, marketing and merchandising organizational structures and processes are rapidly evolving. Delivering a unied customer experience has never been more important, and retailers who have these processes well dened have experienced 3% or better store sales growth over comparable outlets. Despite these requirements, fewer than 50% of retailers involve marketing in their merchandising strategy, and vice-versa. As a marketing leader, you are challenged to maintain alignment between the marketing and merchandising goals . While marketers are responsible for translating company strategy into marketing messages, merchants are responsible for setting product strategy that supports retail programs and are matched to market demand. Both marketers and merchants should be aligned to the same customer and messages. Unfortunately, marketers and merchants are often misaligned. In fact, the potential for conict, miscommunication and under-performance is exceedingly high. The main issue is that marketers and merchants dont have proper visibility into each others plans. Additionally, the parties struggle to communicate and collaborate effectively. Plans, schedules and program themes may be misaligned. Meanwhile, benchmarks for determining sensible merchant requests from marketing may also be missing leading to sales forecasts merchants are unlikely to meet.

This communication breakdown often results in under-performance when product and advertising arent aligned. At the store level, this misalignment leads to out of stocks, lost sales and trapped inventory.

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Decelerator 4: Imprecision
A recent survey conducted by Vision Edge Marketing, ITSMA, and Forrester revealed some shocking results regarding marketings relevance to the business. Here are just a few: Most marketers dont know which metrics their stakeholders care about Less than 10% of senior executives are relying on marketing data to make decisions The C-suite cant relate marketing activity-based metrics to business outcomes

Clearly, measurement is a core driver of strategy, performance and continual improvement. So, what is the current state of retail marketing measurement? It varies across the board. Different metrics serve different purposes:

Forecasting Metrics Most retailers would be happy with 60% accuracy though such imprecision is hardly ideal. With these measures, the company can forecast turnover and inventory requirements. Otherwise, you may be suffering reduced sales due to out of stocks or overstocks leading to trapped inventory.

Media Metrics The objective of media metrics is to determine the value of each media channel in driving sales. And while retailers often still heavily rely on print, digital channels can cost one-tenth to one-hundredth the amount for the same outcome. You have to track your ad to sales ratio to ensure you are investing in the right media.

Operational Metrics When you take a more sophisticated view, you track your market basket. You want to know your average basket value and what drives customers to come to your store. You may also look at lift metrics, which can be determined through multiple means, to clarify what actions drive results in a particular promotion.

Brand metrics Brand people look at market share. If youre interested in these metrics, you may also measure brand to increase customer loyalty and improve long-term health.

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Decelerator 4: Imprecision Continued...

The biggest issue with these metrics are their inconsistency of measurement. Rather than looking for improvement against a dened measure, marketing departments relentlessly pursue the perfect measure. However, every time you change the metric youre tracking, you start over in terms of trend analysis. You whipsaw the organization on whats important; you lose track of whats important. Of course, most retailers cant live off one measurement. Market share is a long-term measure. You have some promotional or event metrics. You need different types of measures. The key is consistency. There is no totally wrong approach in terms of which measures you decide to track. But complexity can be a problem. Its best to be clear on what you need to measure and stick with it over time. Without consistency, you have no means to compare or rene your performance over time. You will face perpetual imprecision. The goal is to get better, not change the metric to look better.

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The Solution: High Performance Marketing

So what does it take to address these decelerators and introduce accelerators? Youll need a high performance engine tuned to the demands of todays retail marketing environment. As leading retailers have discovered, there are three core components to this engine:

The Central Marketing Calendar

The Digital Media Review

The Executive Metric Dashboards

Together these components form the basis of an omni-channel solution that enables you to dramatically accelerate -- meeting the increasing demands you face in todays fast paced, high-stakes, retail marketing race. They enable you to apply the accelerators necessary to win at a time of rapid change, increasing localization and growing customer expectations. So what do these components contribute individually to the overall solution?

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Four Accelerators of Retail Marketing Success

Leveraging this omni-channel marketing solution (and its core components), youre in a strong position to generate high performance outcomes. Whats most important is your opportunity to turn yesterdays performance decelerators into tomorrows performance accelerators:

Visibility

Continuity

Alignment

Measurement

By committing to the rigorous, disciplined and sustained application of these accelerators, you enable your marketing organization to overtake competitors and responsively meet new market demands. You elevate yourself as a strategic leader -- and champion of operational excellence. Lets explore how each of these factors plays into overall marketing performance.

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Accelerator 1: Visibility
As the experience of top performing retailers suggests, there is a set of proven practices that enhance visibility of key marketing activity and, therefore, marketing performance. Such actions enable you to perform in a more strategic and valued way within your organization. The following outline a short list of the best practices of the worlds top retailers to achieve visibility. Take these steps today, and elevate your visibility:

Characteristics of a successful marketing calendar:

1. Accessible any time and any where 2. Used by all marketing teams as the system of record 3. Presents omni-channel marketing activity in a simple format 4. Maintains historical records of past campaigns 5. Allows you to see connections between activities and campaigns

Introduce a central marketing calendar and make it accessible to all.

The greatest common denominator that differentiates the very successful retailers from the not-so-successful ones is a centralized, accessible marketing calendar. With a unied marketing calendar that is available to all stakeholders , you ensure the most relevant and recent information about campaigns is all in one place. Link all key resources to the calendar and ensure it is constantly updated and always accessible. This creates one version of the truth, while enabling you to ensure all internal marketing and agency teams are coordinated and performing at their best. Technology has improved dramatically in this area, so there are no excuses for continuing to work out of Microsoft Excel or any other dinosaur legacy software.

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Accelerator 1: Visibility Continued...

Encourage and enable active usage by operational teams.
Your marketing calendar is not useful unless its actively used and updated. You have to educate your channel marketers and other members of your campaign team. They have to know the importance of updating the calendar and ensuring assets/collateral are kept current. Just be prepared that the value of this practice may not be immediately obvious to your colleagues. With this in mind, you may be required to provide incentives to encourage participation and compliance. Rallying your team behind the goal of omni-channel visibility makes you the coach, the leader. Removing the pressure and uncertainty from the shoulders of the team to allow them to focus on being excellent marketers will make you look like a hero. No marketer ever said I want to NOT know what the vision is for each campaign.

Advise executive decision-makers on value of visibility.

Lastly, youll want to clarify the importance of real-time access to your marketing calendar and related dashboards to your executive team. You want to impress upon them the ability to accelerate decision cycles and enhance their decisions. Of course, they also need to understand the value of alignment, which becomes particularly critical and challenging as markets demand ever more localization in message, format, and offer.

Be a champion for making marketing responsible for the Marketing ROI, while supporting executive leadership in the creation of high-level marketing strategies. The business will respect your commitment and welcome the opportunity to drive sustainable, repeatable results with open arms. Visibility is the key.
Promote visibility and win the praise of team members and executive leadership alike.

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Accelerator 1: Visibility Continued...

Case in Point: Apparel Retailer Turns Visibility into Results
In the case of one apparel retailer on the East Coast, it would take the marketing team two days to perform a simple review of live customer facing programs due to lack of visibility. The marketing operations leader would hold review meetings at the beginning and ending of the week that were 90 minutes each, and took the marketing team hours to prepare for. Meanwhile, the team relied on a complex Excel spreadsheet dubbed the Mother Ship for visibility and coordination purposes. With support from CrossCap, the marketing ops leader at this retailer introduced an automated and centralized marketing program calendar available to all team members all the time. Today, the meetings are just 30 minutes each with minimal preparation enabling the team to spend more time focused on operational objectives. The solution also has dramatically reduced the volume of coordination emails and calls. Now, the marketing leadership spends more time focused on strategy, program enhancements, and campaign optimization. By adopting an advanced solution to the problem of visibility, he visibly increased marketing performance.

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Accelerator 2: Continuity
So what does it take to turn the decelerator of campaign discontinuity into the accelerator of campaign continuity?

Leverage your master calendar to capture all campaign activities.

Your challenge begins by pulling together all discrete campaign calendars into a single version. Once campaign plans and dates are compiled, there is a single source of information to keep everyone aligned and on track. The tendency of many retail marketing organizations is for individual groups (tied to discrete channels) to keep track of their own calendars requiring labor-intensive, brute-force effort to merely compile all planning information. You should, instead, create one master calendar. While some companies choose to do this by compiling (and continually updating) a master spreadsheet, you should consider more advanced solutions (such CrossCaps Marketing Calendar) that automates many of the actions and activities associated with calendar management. Whatever approach you choose, the key point is that your master calendar claries to everyone in your organization the updated plans and schedules for your campaigns going forward essential to campaign continuity.

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Accelerator 2: Continuity Continued...

Ensure your calendar is visible to the right team members.
If you dont have a central location for your master marketing calendar, you may be throwing innumerable wasted hours at the problem of alignment. You may end up sending around a series of spreadsheets and then deploying team members to grind away on updating, reconciling, and sharing them. You can take a critical step toward addressing this problem merely by ensuring all documents are kept in a single place. You have options in terms of how you might handle this challenge. Create a folder within Sharepoint or some other collaborative platform. You may use widely available, cloud-based tools, such as DropBox or Box.com, or an advanced calendar solutions, such as those provided by CrossCap, to make all key resources visible to your teams and decision-makers in a central location accessible any time, and from anywhere. This will not only support alignment, but also reduce the necessity for repetitive meetings and added administrative work.

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Accelerator 2: Continuity Continued...

Compile examples of all campaign elements for comparative purposes.
Youre also challenged to review each marketing collateral asset for continuity of look and feel, continuity of offering, and continuity of message. Otherwise, you create confusion in the marketplace. To address consistency issues, you need to line up campaign assets and elements in way that gives you a single, comprehensive view. With your campaign assets centrally located, you can point decision makers to them for review, circumventing the additional meetings required to gain agreement. What you need is a solution that allows you to easily compare collateral pieces (videos, radio ads, banner ads, display ads, FSIs, etc.) to ensure continuity. But how do you present these elements? You can create a spreadsheet or PowerPoint presentation that captures screen shots of campaign elements and lays them out for comparison purposes. Or you can consider a purpose-built, retail collaborative tool that allows you to easily compare collateral, such as CrossCaps Digital Media Wall. Ultimately, your objective is to achieve visual clarity and a birds eye view of campaign elements, regardless of format and across all channels. You gain the ability to compare, contrast and edit campaign elements to ensure continuity and enhance presentation. This is the path a growing number of retail marketing leaders are now taking. But its clear that some solutions to campaign continuity are more advanced than others. The most advanced approaches dynamically maintain the linkages between strategies, campaigns, and channels. Through marketing automation, they maintain continuity across teams. And they can pull together comprehensive reports on a broad range of campaigns at the click of a button.

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Accelerator 3: Alignment
Solutions exist that can end the back and forth between marketers, merchants and inventory managers as well as the ensuing friction and failure. All parties can gain real-time access and extensive visibility into each others plans. This brings a systematic approach to promotion activity. Smart approaches enable clarity and consistency. They also bring rigor and discipline as decision-making becomes data-driven. Unsurprisingly, greater precision of this sort results in greater lift in the eld. In order to reach these new alignment heights there are three key actions you must take rst:

Checklist for building promotional history:

1. Store all the promotional offer details, including SKUs, unit quantities 2. Tie the promotions to the various activities they were featured 3.Connect competitive price analysis to the offers so the organization can see where they either beat or lost to the competition

Get Pricing Strategy Right.

A major strength of leading retailers is the consistency in omni-channel promotional pricing strategy. These retailers exhibit strong communication between merchandising, planning, marketing, and inventory to create a stronger cross-channel promotions strategy. How do they do it? They leverage metrics that relay sales lift and pricing history data visually from previous years to support the planning process. They know manual processes negatively affect pricing integrity across multiple channels. By leveraging technology they can align on pricing promotions strategy with the additional benet of aligning marketing and merchandising.

Take an Interest in Merchandising.

The most successful retailers have merchandising and marketing together in a weekly alignment meeting especially the planning meetings. Retailers who cannot afford to miss any opportunities insist that a marketing analyst sits in every merchandising meeting. Those who under-perform hold separate marketing and separate merchandising meetings. Ditch the siloed approach and make merchandising your best friend. Share This Ebook!

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Accelerator 3: Alignment Continued...

Think Localization.
Our experience shows that 70% of the leading retailers invest in greater localization. How do they support that? Theyve ditched old methods and embraced integrated marketing and merchandising technologies that help them automate their market versioning and combine it with merchandising, signage, displays, events, and an omni-channel presence into a unied strategy. At the end of the day, the two core issues come down to visibility and strategy. Most retailers do not have a formal marketing or merchandising strategy process nailed down. Often, it is because they lack the technology to facilitate the collaboration and the technology helps dene the processes. Marketing needs a central calendar that highlights what promotional events will be happening and when, tied to theme, length of time, visuals, etc. And, merchandising needs a central location that provides information as to what specic products should be promoted and at what price point, as informed by historical pricing and promotion data.

3 Easy Steps To Get Marketing & Merchandising On The Same Page:

1. Align on customer driven strategy 2. Share a current view of marketings activity 3. Host collaborative offer planning sessions

Case in Point: Performing with a Scorecard

In the case of one large retailer in the Midwest, marketers and merchants were relying on subsidy dollars to drive sales and inventory turns on a grand scale. In the absence of a shared repository of marketing resources and a scorecard reecting marketing performance, no one had visibility into the true impact of these subsidized campaigns. When a performance scorecard went live as part of a solution provided by CrossCap, it suddenly became clear how dependent merchants were on subsidy dollars to attain their margin objectives. Furthermore, it demonstrated the promotional misalignment between the marketing strategy and the subsidized promotions. This nding completely changed criteria for supporting merchants with subsidy dollars. Share This Ebook!

Ultimately, the shift in behavior made possible by visibility into marketer-merchant arrangements girded the company for difcult economic times. With the valuable insights and measures it attained, the retailer became far less dependent on subsidy dollars alone to meet its objectives.

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Accelerator 4: Measurement
What gets measured gets managed, according to the late management theorist Peter Drucker. Thats why you need a scorecard or dashboard view of your metrics. You need it to escape the realm of imprecision and drive continual performance gains. The dashboard/scorecard approach captures and presents your KPIs (key performance indicators). Its something executives and other stakeholders can get comfortable with across the company. It tells you where you stand and gives you a strong sense of where you are headed. The C-suite needs this to provide them with actionable dashboards and win the hearts and minds of senior execs. While some retailers rely on a combination of Excel, PowerPoint, Word les and SharePoint to make their measures accessible to key decision makers, its clear this approach has severe limitations in terms of keeping measures updated and accurate. Advanced scorecarding revolves around providing a visually rich and easily revised presentation of KPIs. Your dashboard should provide retrospective views of past performance lined up against prospective forecasts. It should enable you to easily and clearly compare performance in different channels. Of course, it also provides a compelling venue for other metrics be they market basket analysis or lift models and measures. Even brand metrics can be vividly laid out for active consideration.

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Accelerator 4: Measurement Continued...

Ultimately, rigorous management of marketing metrics enables you to enhance forecast accuracy increasing inventory turns while reducing your ad spend. You can isolate promotional effects such as halo, cannibalization, and pull forward. You can ensure you are taking the necessary steps to maximize trafc and sales. Youll have an effective media mix that strikes the right balance between attracting new customers and deepening loyalty with existing ones. Whether youre a marketer for WalMart, Kohls, Old Navy or a smaller retailer, your ability to optimize your marketing spend comes down to consistent measurement, analysis and action. As leading retailers have learned, marketing organizations can go from a disjointed and uncertain state to one in which they have clarity and condence. Indeed, you can create an executable dashboard that provides both short term insights and long-term perspective.

Must Have Retail Dashboard Characteristics:

1. Track these KPIs: Sales Lift, Subsidy, Gross Margin Lift Over Base. 2. Ability to drill down to SKU level information. 3. Logging of the source of the report data and the timeliness of it. 4. Report terms should reect internal language. 5. Easily exported into Excel or other spreadsheet of choice.

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From the Marketing Fast-Track to Your Career Fast-Track

The accelerators explored in this executive guide are critical factors in achieving retail marketing excellence. Properly managed, theyll enable your organization to thrive in anincreasingly fast, complex, and demanding retail marketplace. You will have the capabilities you need to build your brand, enhance sales lift, and strengthen protability. By gaining visibility, consistency, alignment, and measurement precision, you set the stage for high performance marketing and continual improvement. These accelerators enable you to automate or eliminate tactical, routine work while reinvesting your time and resources in activities that have a strategic and growth-focused impact. At the end of the day, this is how your personal performance is evaluated not how often youve copied and pasted from one Excel sheet to another. What makes you a hero in this hyper-competitive race is your ability to step up the speedometer and put your organization at the front of the eld by becoming a leader. Career success begins with clarity, your ability to separate signal from noise. Once you understand the key factors you must focus on to drive results, you can turn them into performance accelerators. And, once you can consistently drive your marketing organization to top speeds and measure the impact, youll be in a position to consistently claim the prize.

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About CrossCap

CrossCap is the go-to retail marketing strategy management solution for enterprise retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Safeway. Retailers trust CrossCap software to manage omni-channel campaign planning, execution and analysis. CrossCap empowers marketing, merchandising, and store operations teams through alignment of marketing strategy. Our solution provides unprecedented visibility and control of marketing programs from headquarters to the store.

Headquartered in San Francisco, with ofces in New York, and Toronto, CrossCap serves as the foundation for managing marketing strategy for Top 10 retailers and Fortune 1000 retailers alike. For more information, visit www.crosscap.com

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