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30 March 2005
Hollywood, FL
Target Stores, General Mills and Acosta Sales and Marketing Company today were named winners of this year’s Consumer 360 Awards, co-sponsored by three VNU business publications: Progressive Grocer, Convenience Store News and Brandweek. The awards were presented at the Consumer 360 conference hosted by ACNielsen U.S. and Spectra, businesses of VNU.
The prestigious Consumer 360 Awards honor the retailer, manufacturer and sales agency in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry that have demonstrated the best understanding of the consumer in their merchandising activities as voted by their peers.
Winners were selected by a poll of readers of Brandweek, Progressive Grocer, Retail Merchandiser and Convenience Store News. Retailers were asked to choose the manufacturer winner and manufacturers picked the retailer winner. Both manufacturers and retailers voted on the sales agency.
Target Stores
This year the manufacturer community awarded Target the Retailer of the Year award. Target demonstrated the best understanding of the consumer in its year-round merchandising activities and for being able to connect actionable consumer insights to gain a competitive advantage in an environment that demands increasing efficiency.
General Mills
Retailers recognized General Mills as Manufacturer of the Year for its commitment to understanding its shoppers and translating those insights into innovative and actionable merchandising strategies that generate profitable volume growth.
“We develop shopper insights by leveraging our proprietary tools and capabilities to combine scanner data with ACNielsen Homescan household panel data and attitudinal data we collect through Internet surveys,” said Al Fan, director, Category Management, Refrigerated/Frozen Categories.
General Mills is committed to providing shopper insights not just for its 26 categories, but also for the aisles and departments that its products compete in, such as the Breakfast aisle, the Baking aisle, the Dinner aisle, the total Dairy and total Frozen departments. “We are expanding our understanding of the total store and will continue to deliver insights that help our customers optimize space allocation, aisle placements, and adjacencies that will increase total store performance,” said Fan.
For example, General Mills has leveraged shopper insights for the Breakfast and Dinner meal occasions to create customized merchandising events during its Salute to Savings promotion. It also assists retailers with insights for meal occasion go-to-market strategies.
“We gave developed insights around broad consumer trends like health, convenience and changing demographics, which have been leveraged to create innovative merchandising platforms such as Brand New You, Box Tops for Education, and Save Lids to Save Lives,” said Fan. “In addition, these insights have led to innovative new product ideas like the Whole Grain message on every Big G cereal, Yoplait Healthy Heart yogurt and Perfect Portions.”
Acosta Sales & Marketing
This is the third time Jacksonville, FL-based Acosta Sales and Marketing Company has won the award. (Acosta previously accepted the Consumer 360 Award in 2003 and in 2000, when it was called the Category Masters award.)
Michael Bernatchez, senior vice president, Corporate Marketing, said the key for Acosta is finding the right program that utilizes and supports the retailer’s merchandising assets and their go-to-market strategy, while still meeting the brand objectives and addressing consumer purchase dynamics.
Bernatchez emphasized the importance of utilizing data to help build the plan and evaluate results. “Our Asset Knowledge Suite [AKS] tools that capture scan data trends and performance along with the use of our ACNielsen Homescan panel data allow us to build the best plan possible,” said Bernatchez. “Retail POS data, panel data and Spectra’s geo-demographic data allows us to make good merchandising and display recommendations based on historic volume performance and household demographics in key markets.” Acosta also uses its post-promotion analysis (PPA) tool to evaluate promotions and work with the retailer to make the adjustments necessary to help meet sales and profit objectives at the brand and category level.
“In the last couple of years, we’ve focused our efforts on working far enough in advance to identify potential co-marketing programs that can act as an overlay to a standard merchandising event that helps build consumer excitement and ultimately drives more interest, sales and traffic around the event,” said Bernatchez, who noted that these events can be single or multiple brand events positioned around either solution selling, such as household solutions for cleaning, or seasonal selling, such as grilling for barbeque.
Bernatchez expects that the recent retailer initiatives by Kroger and Ahold to mine their loyalty card data will increase. “This new level of consumer insight will bring many new opportunities for manufacturers and sales agencies to bring new levels of merchandising, assortment, pricing and shelving recommendations based on very granular consumer insights,” he said.
Acosta has 10,000 associates, 1,300 clients and controls $40 billion in annual aggregated CPG sales.
Brandweek is the only newsweekly dedicated solely to the needs and concerns of America's top brand marketers. Progressive Grocer has been the comprehensive source of information for food retailers for over 80 years. Convenience Store News is the leading media brand in the c-store industry.
For more information, contact Don Longo, Director, Editorial & Content Development, Retail Group, VNU Business Publications 646-654-7489
About VNU
VNU is a global information and media company with leading market positions and recognized brands in marketing information (ACNielsen), media measurement and information (Nielsen Media Research) and business information (Billboard, The Hollywood Reporter, Computing, Intermediair). VNU is active in more than 100 countries, with headquarters in Haarlem, the Netherlands and New York, USA. The company employs 38,000 people. Total revenues amounted to EUR 3.8 billion in 2004. VNU is listed on the Euronext Amsterdam (ASE: VNU) stock exchange. For more information, please visit the VNU website at www.vnu.com
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