I used to sell Cheerios.
A billion-dollar brand, consumed by everyone from babies to grandparents, with a borderline unrivaled retail presence. Sounds like just about the easiest product to sell on Earth, right?
Except it wasn’t. Our challenge with the brand - like the majority of power brands - wasn’t about convincing retailers to put our product on the shelf. It’s not just that they wanted it there, it’s that they NEEDED it there. Our challenge, in essence, was OPTIMIZING our sales.
Who needed the product, and when? What mechanisms did we need to use to keep our product available and front-of-mind to consumers constantly? How did we keep them returning and entice them to expand their consumption?
We didn’t need to sell the product; we needed to continue building our relationship with consumers.
We had a seemingly limitless amounts of data. Sales data, marketing insights, consumer trends, demand forecasts, environmental impacts on sales....you name it, we had it. And we spent countless hours analyzing.
We had seemingly endless ways of reaching consumers. Commercials, digital content, promotions in retailer circulars, and a really awesome mascot (shout out to Buzzbee). Our presence was unavoidable.
And yet, we still never felt optimized. We’d gripe about ineffective merchandising deals, incorrectly assumed product life cycles and below-expected ROI on targeted ads. Why?
When I first met the (then small) team at Adrich, I figured it out.
We could talk to the consumer a million ways and look at sales and historical data to understand what they DID, but we couldn’t actively see what they were DOING. In short, despite our unbelievable abilities, we didn’t have ACCESS.
Access. That’s what sealed the deal for me to come to Adrich. As I sat there and thought through the possibilities - “imagine what we could do if we knew what was actually happening with our products in consumer homes, knew exactly when they were about to run out and could overlay the two of them on top of each other to build customized sales and marketing plans for every single consumer” - it all became so clear.
This is how brands will get ahead. This is sales and marketing at previously unachievable levels. And this isn’t the future; this is today.
I’ve been here ever since.