Have you ever been approached by a promoter when you entered a store? They are the ones who promote a specific brand inside a store. For e.g. the last time I went to a supermarket, I saw a lady who held a tray of little glasses filled with some really interesting flavours of aloe vera-infused cold pressed juices. I actually bought two after I tasted them, even though these items weren’t on my shopping list. For brands, that’s the power of having a face-to-face interaction with a consumer. When you win over the trust of the customers by providing a great experience with your products, sales will definitely climb.
Over the years, promoter-led retail execution has evolved into a structured, tactical approach for increasing in-store sales. Let’s find out how Saffola is harnessing the power of promoter-led marketing activation to boost its POS sales.
Since 1960, Saffola’s mission is to create a Heart Healthy India by inspiring and educating people on the importance of taking care of their heart. The brand encourages and applauds its customers to discover their own ways of being fit & heart-healthy so that health becomes not only a journey but a sustainable part of their life.
In the last couple of years, spurred by the pandemic as well, Saffola has been pushing to strengthen the positioning of its brand as a preventive, healthy lifestyle advocating food product-not just an edible oil- by introducing health and wellness products under the range like masala oats and oodles (oats noodles) and many more.
Capitalizing on the, “Jo dikhta hai, woh bikta hai” concept, the company wanted their consumers to have a more ‘see, taste, smell’ sort of an experience with their new products.
To bring their products closer to the consumers, the brand partnered with Mr Viru Mhatre’s Ingenious Management Services to deploy the best on-ground promoters to carry out a strong execution of POS activities for their newly launched categories.
Saffola gave Viru’s team a list of stores across Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities where they wanted to run their product promotions. They also had a very basic technology solution to track promoter performance as well as retail sales. The challenge was that other than monitoring attendance and stock taking, there wasn’t much else they could do. The UI/UX was bulky, there was no provision for extracting detailed analytics, notifications (e.g. out of stock reports) had to be created manually every day and dashboards were maintained in excel sheets.
This meant that they did not know how much time the promoters were actually spending in the outlet or how many customers they were meeting every day or if their shelves were properly stocked or if the campaigns were running effectively.
As Viru explains, “We realized that to achieve the scale and effectiveness that Saffola wanted for its campaigns, we needed a strong technology partner by our side.”
As the brand was growing at an aggressive pace, the Saffola team needed a full-service solution that offered:
The FieldAssist team took a detailed ‘Train the Trainer’ session for over 50 Saffola promoters, and then these promoters further trained the remaining members of the in-store team. After deploying ModMart, Saffola increased its promoter presence from 60 to 100+ today, which is expected to jump to 800+ promoters across all product lines in the coming year. Today the team is able to achieve:
ModMart’s geo-fencing feature makes promoters more accountable by authenticating every store visit via GPS location. For e.g. If a promoter is not within a few metres of the store, the app does not allow him or her to log in the attendance. Even if they try operating from a different store, the system will not allow them to mark their attendance.
Saffola now knows which designated SKUs must be made available at which outlets for maximum offtake. As of date, multiple SKUs with variants in each one of them are getting sampled in outlets every day. Promoters capture ‘Out of stock’ SKUs on the app where the mid-manager gets notified immediately so he can take corrective action in real-time.
Now all active campaigns are visible on a single screen and managers can know the live status of each outlet. Whenever Saffola runs a campaign, they make a training video and share it on the app so the promoters know exactly which products to focus on.
For e.g., one of the campaigns it runs currently is peanut butter sampling, where promoters get consumers to sample the peanut butter and collect their feedback, which the mid-managers can see in real-time.
The dashboards that the Saffola team used to maintain on excel sheets are now available on the app’s dashboard itself. The daily ‘Out of Stock’ report which was made manually earlier is now automated for each outlet. The mid-managers can track and know which supervisor is tracking which outlets, and what corrective action needs to be taken. ModMart also helps Saffola’s promoters capture competitor activity very effectively for e.g. how many pasta brands or peanut butter brands are in each outlet, how many of them are running which kind of promotions etc.
Saffola can easily measure planogram adherence on tertiary offtake across different stores. They also have better insights on high-visibility product placement to increase purchase behaviour.
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