Welcome aboard!

Sales &
Distribution Market
Project

Note: this task has been created for those groups who would
not be able to visit the market due to COVID restrictions
Your Brand: Hershey’s
Milkshake
 Contex
t India Private Ltd. is a 100% Subsidiary of The Hershey Company, a 100+ year old company. It is
Hershey
the largest producer of quality chocolates in North America and a Global leader known for bringing
happiness to the world through its chocolates, sweets, mints and other great-tasting snacks. The
company has more than 80 brands around the world including iconic brands like Hershey’s, Reese’s,
Hershey’s Kisses, Jolly Rancher, Ice Breakers and Brookside.

Hershey India is present across multiple food and beverage categories with its iconic brands:
Hershey’s Syrup, Hershey’s Milk Booster, Hershey’s Spreads, Hershey’s Milk Shake and Hershey’s
Cocoa Powder.

Hershey India brands are available across outlets in leading cities. It has sales offices located in
Delhi, Mumbai and Chennai.

Hershey’s Milkshake is the 3rd Biggest Milkshake brand in India. The clutter in the category can
be understood from the fact that while we are in the top three, we have ~5% of the market
share.

This makes winning in the store very crucial. So the company’s objective is to improve the presence in
the store, communication in the store and shopper conversion in-store to grow the brand.

In this project, we will help out Hershey’s Milkshake in this objective.

 BRIE
F
The objective is to identify opportunities & suggest solutions to grow Hershey’s Milkshake in
the stores around you.

TASK
You will be working on the following 4 tasks –
1. Working the market & category landscape
2. Identifying growth Opportunities

In this task we will focus on the first part – Working the market and Category Landscape, as well
as the second part- Identifying Growth Opportunities
Working the market
& Category
Landscape
 Why is this task Group

important?
As an ASM, you will begin any retail project or job by doing the following tasks, which are also
the objectives of this project -
Submission

1. Understand the brand, its SKUs and category better

2. Working the market.

To do the above, here are the steps that we will follow in this task –

3. Understand the brand through an Ecom research

4. Create a questionnaire for retailers to understand their perspective with respect to service
from distributors, as well as schemes, processes, service of competitors, demand from
consumers etc.
5. Analyze the Hershey’s Milkshake Market Data sheet provided to you. It has SKU level Audit,
Retail Immersion Data and the Shopper Engagement Funnel.

Post this submission, in the next week, you will receive inputs on this work through a feedback
session.
 Step 1: E-commerce Group

Research
This will give you an understanding of the different
Submission

SKUs of our brand and its competitors out there.

This sheet will help us quickly recognise
brands/SKUs and collect data when we later visit
the market.

Follow the below mentioned steps:

1. You will be working on a growing brand

from the
Hershey’s portfolio which is Hershey’s
Milkshake..

1. Visit various E-commerce platforms to research

about this brands’ different SKUs/variants of
our brand and its competitors and jot down
the grammages and the price points of each
SKU/variant.
Output: Data sheet with Ecom Brand level data in
the format shown here.

File Nomenclature:
All steps of the Submission will be a common excel called <Group
 Step 2: Retailer Group

Questionnaire Submission

At this stage we require you to conceptualize on what all would you like to ask a retailer when you
visit the market with the objective of growth your brand – Hershey’s Milkshake.

Create a questionnaire that you would like to use to interview the retailers. Put questions in
an order and .in a language that you believe will best help you to get answers from the retailer
(Max 15 questions). Think about all the factors that you would like to focus on to identify gaps,
opportunity areas.

Note: You will conduct the Retail Immersions by visiting the market.
Visit 10 Retailers including Kirana, Self Service Stores & Super Markets

File Nomenclature: All steps of the Submission will be a common excel called
BP1_<Group Name>.xlsx. For the Retailer Questionnaire, you can have a sheet
in the excel called – Retailer Questions. This is a group submission.
 Step 3: Analyze Data from the Group

market
The Hershey’s Milkshake Market Data sheet has the
Submission

following:

1. SKU level data (for Kirana, Modern Trade and Food Store)
2. Retail immersion data
3. Shopper Engagement Funnel Data
 3.1SKU Level Group

Data
This data usually has the following information at a SKU level for our brand and all our
Submission

competitors.

● Price
● Quantity (In terms of ml or grammage)
● Offtake (Qty sold each month for every SKU)
● Shelf Space taken by each SKU (In the next sheet you will learn how to calculate Share of
Shelf)
● Market Share
● Forward Stock Share
● Any new SKUs you found that had not discovered earlier while doing E-com research
● Expiry Date of the SKU

Our objective is to identify all growth opportunities from this data.

- We need to stock more this SKU more in Kirana
- We need to get people buying this smaller pack to buy the bigger pack
- We need to get a better share of shelf for this variant
- etc.
 Importance of Calculating Share of Group

Shelf Submission

Share of shelf gives you an understanding of the visibility of the different SKUs & brand within each
channel. An ASM should always strive to increase the share of shelf as it leads to better visibility
leading to better sales.

Here is how the share of shelf is calculated:

Share of Shelf % = No.of units of your products in the 1st row of the shelf facing the shopper X100
Total no. of units of all products in the category in the 1 st row facing the shopper
 Importance of Calculating Market Share
Market share is a measure of the consumers' preference for a product over other similar products.

Here is how the Market Share is calculated:

Market Share % = Sales of Your Product X100

Sales of Category
 Few KPIs of the Brand

Importance of Calculating Forward Stock Share

Forward Stock Share is a critical part of the Planogram of a store to ensure that
optimal space is allocated to each product in the category shelf

Here is how the Market Share is calculated:

Forward Stock Share(FSS)% = Share of Shelf X100

Should ideally be  100%
Market Share
 3.2 Retailer Immersion Group

Data
Usually this data involves the following:
Submission

● From where does the retailer get the stock: a distributor or somewhere else?
● How often does the salesman visit?
● How much time does the delivery of the goods take after giving the order to the salesman?
● How many days credit is given by the distributor?
● What margin does the retailer get for different brands for Hershey’s Milkshake &
competitors?
● What is the policy related to goods that get expired or damaged at the retailer?
● What are the company programs for retailers (retailer incentive schemes)? Are they
target based? Are there any visibility related programs for the retailers?
● Please click photographs of any visible promotions and POS & POP visibility that you
see
● Are there any other problems in the service that the retailer faces?

From this data sheet try to come up with growth opportunities:

● We are not providing enough margin

● Our service is poor, salesman needs to visit more frequently
● Credit is too less as compared to competition
● No target based loyalty programs to push the retailer to stock us
 3.3 Shopper Engagement
Funnel Group
A shopper engagement funnel is crucial to be made for Modern Trade. Here we create a shopper Submission
engagement funnel to find the bottleneck stage where the maximum drop happens and to understand
why consumers don’t move to the stage by interacting with them. This will give you insights on what you
can do at specific levels of funnels to decrease the drop & increase conversions.
Make sure the funnel covers the following:

a. Number of people in the store

b. Number of people who visited the aisle
c. Number of people who interacted with the product
d. Number of people who bought the product

● We start by getting an estimate of the number of people who would enter the store in the 2-3 hours
that you are there. It can be done by asking the security guard or by just counting the people that
walk in the store. This gives us the top shelf of the engagement funnel.

● Next we stand in the aisle of the store and for every person who enters the category aisle, we note
down their behaviour. Which product shelf do they reach (our's or competitor's), do they interact
with the product, do they put the product in their basket, etc. These give us the rest of the shelves
of the engagement funnel.
Identifying
Growth
Opportunities
 Identifying growth opportunities Group
Submission

Follow the mentioned steps below:

1. Opportunity for GT – Data to be used for this would be in SKU level data, Retailer
Immersion Data
2. Opportunities for MT – Data to be used from SKU Level Data, Retailer Immersion Data and
Shopper Engagement Funnel (this has been collected only for MT as in a GT you can’t
make a funnel as it is not a self-serve store)

Use the next slide for reference on how to collate your opportunities.
Output of this stage: Growth Opportunities summarized along with the data sources used
 Identifying growth opportunities Format Group
Submission
Here is how your opportunities should look like.
Please Note: These are just a few examples for your reference. For each data source
try to hypothesize as many opportunities as possible.
 SUBMISSION Group

FORMAT
Create an excel Group Name>.xlsx that has the following raw sheets.
Submission

● Ecom Brand Level Data (raw data sheet)

● Retailer Questionnaire
● SKU Data (raw data sheet)
● Retailer Immersion Data (raw data sheet)
● Shopper Engagement Funnel (raw data sheet)

Now collate a PPT (Group Name>.pptx) in which you dedicate one slide each to each of the raw data
sheets from above.

In this slide you have to summarise your insights from each of the raw data excel sheets. All of these insights
need not be opportunities, you can point out any minor threats, strengths, weaknesses of our brand or any of
the competitors, or any other trends or understanding that you can derive from the data.
Add another slide to the PPT which summarises all the major growth opportunities that you have been
able to find.
Make sure that you choose the correct files to upload.
 How (not)to divide your
work?
Hey! We all know that with the many case submissions and projects going on in B-Schools, we tend to assign
the work to each member and then put the individual pieces together and Voila! the submission is ready!

That’s not what you do here!

We have made groups because marketing and sales is always done through discussions. So work on the
assignment together or individually, discuss and debate before reaching to final conclusions and then submit it.
Even if there are differences of opinion, bring it out in the feedback sessions or on the discussion forum or to
your buddies or on the Whatsapp group with the extended community.

Individua Group Group

l Work Discussion Submission
Remember the value that you derive from the program is on you. Ask questions. Debate. Find edge cases.
Get out of your comfort zone.
The learning that you get out from the program is completely dependent on how well you immerse yourself in
the process described above. All our experience with thousands of students tells us that the more you do it, the
better you get. So please do it well because what you learn from here will be asked to YOU individually in your
interviews. It will impact what YOU do in your case submissions. It will be applied by YOU in your workplace. We
are here to enable the learning.