21st Century Fmcg Consumer Marketing: Creating Customer Value By Putting Consumers At the Heart of Fmcg Marketing Strategy

By Manal Haddad

An effective marketing strategy helps in aligning company goals to its strategies, improve overall performance and perk-up sales and revenues. The evolving nature of consumer needs and requirements in the FMCG industry means that companies today have to completely overhaul their current marketing strategies and make it relevant to the current times.

This book will provide detailed insight into the thinking of today's consumers towards FMCG products. The book will highlight the paradigm shift in consumer mindset that has created challenges and opportunities for the 21st century companies. Fundamental issues, risks, and challenges will be looked into to provide answers to the three magical questions: What's changed? How to Adapt? and What's Next?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jan 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483444352

Book preview

strategy.

CHAPTER I

How Consumer Marketing Has Evolved in the 21st Century

In this Chapter, You will Discover

✓ How Marketing Landscape has Changed Today

✓ How to Effectively Connect with the Customers

✓ Building Brand Equity Using Modern Ways

✓ The Power of Social Media in Building Brand

Beginning Play

A survey conducted by Bain & Company in 2013 found that around 80% of consumers believe in superior customer experience¹. But when the customers were asked how companies fared in fulfilling this need, only 8% of the companies were found to be really delivering according to the changing customer need.

As mentioned in the beginning of this book, marketing in the 21st century is all about creating superior customer experience. Consumers today have greater disposable income, more choices, and a completely new spending pattern.

In order to market to these individuals, marketers need to devise marketing plans and strategies that conform to individual taste and preferences with the end goal of creating a pleasant experience.

How is this possible with the FMCG products? In other words, how can a firm create superior experience with convenience goods such as meat, vegetables, fruits, soft drinks, pre-packaged goods, and others?

The answer is simple. Focus on delivering superior quality products and building superior consumer brand value.

Superior quality in context of the FMCG products is easy to understand. You just have to ensure that ingredients of the goods are perfectly safe for the consumers.

Understanding how to deliver superior brand value is a little complicated though. Marketers need to realize that customers have many options available to them when it comes to FMCGs. In order to grab their attention, you need to deliver a unique value proposition that resonates with the customers.

The main aim of building brand value is to create customer loyalty. Once customers become loyal to the brand they will stick with the brand throughout their life.

But isn’t creating brand equity an age-old technique that has been in use since decades? Then how is it applicable for 21st century marketing?

Although the main principles of brand equity for the FMCG products are the same, the way that it is created required application of innovative new tools and techniques.

In the past, brand equity was viewed as a two dimensional construct where the marketers attached feelings and importance to the brand. Today, however, creating brand equity requires a three dimensional approach where the marketer not only attach feelings to the brand but also connect it with personal lives of the customers.

Building Customer Value Through Connections

Building brand value in the 21st century requires devising strategies and plans that affects lives of customers in a meaningful way. The marketing technique encompasses marketing initiative that has one or more non-economic benefits related to social welfare using resources of the company.

There are three main benefits of creating brand value through this approach. Firstly, it improves employee morale as they feel happy about being associated with a program that does good for the society. Secondly, the brand building approach draws attention of the media that results in free publicity of the product. And thirdly it contributes to enhanced image of the product in the eyes of the public.

In order to create brand value using this technique, marketers need to tap into social issues that greatly influence a society. In the US, for instance, many people are concerned about Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, unemployed individuals, victims of natural disasters, etc. Marketers can devise programs related to these social issues to connect with the hearts of the customers.

In context of branding, marketers can choose a social cause using two distinct paths: Complementary and Commonality.

Complementary Approach refers to partnering with an NPO working for the cause of the society that shares similar meanings and elicits the same feelings that the company wants to associate with the brand. By partnering with the NPO, the firm leverages the good image of being ‘nonprofit’ to enhance its own brand image in the minds of customers.

The complementary approach to creating brand value is appropriate when the company do not have the resource, knowledge, and capital to undertake a comprehensive program for a social cause on its own.

This approach is the preferred way for creating value only if the nonprofit organization’s goals and image aligns with what the company wants to create for its own brand. For instance, an FMCG company can associate with NGOs like Make-a-Wish Foundation, Muscular Dystrophy Association, and Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation and others that work on social causes and issues consistent with the brand image the company wants to project to the