Vendor View Roundtable: Engaging the New General Market

The New General Market is not about demographics — it is a cultural shift and a change in the consumer mindset that has been brought on by the growth of multicultural and millennial consumers and the impact they are having on ALL consumers. It is changing the rules for how brands market. For this virtual roundtable, DSN talked to leading CPG executives about how to better engage the New General Market.

Kristine Urea, VP category management and shopper insights, Nature’s Bounty: Consumer need states and solutions are the main drivers of change in the industry — from innovation to marketing. Generally, millennials are looking for ways of coping with today’s hectic lifestyle and proactively managing their health to build a longer, healthier life, while boomers are concerned with healthy aging and the treatment of emerging or chronic health conditions. There is no one-size-fits-all approach. … However, there are general trends that are more universal, such as a move toward customization. Consumers are looking for products that are solutions for them and for the issues they are facing. …

The desire for clean products, ingredients and labeling transparency, and ‘free from’ living is driving substantial change to product and packaging innovation. [We] have made changes to the way we label and name our products. … We are trying to get consumers the ‘need to know’ information about our products, their ingredients and their benefits in a clear, easy-to-find and highly transparent way.

Doug Straton, VP digital, e-commerce and data, Unilever: Consumers expect personalization. They expect us to ‘know them,’ to understand what they value and then serve them relevant content and messages at the right time and in the right channel. Unlocking the power of personalization requires organizations to move from data-poor to data-intelligent — to the point of being able to predict purchase behaviors. Leveraging data-derived intelligence at Unilever, we can personalize content at scale, driving value for our consumers and back to the business.

Michael Law, senior director, customer strategy and planning, Edgewell: As we think about forming a relationship with this new consumer, I think the most valuable asset that Edgewell has is the diversity of our colleague base. We try to recruit and train folks from all different walks of life to represent the communities we sell to, which allows us to look at things through multiple lenses.

Edgewell also invests heavily in shopper insights — we try to understand each unique consumer segment because we know that America is a very diverse population. This research allows us to uncover insights that we believe the larger brands in the category — because we are a challenger brand — may have overlooked.

Bob Wiltz, chief customer officer, Paris Presents: Our most valuable asset is definitely our people. In our organization, there is a real analytical kind of leadership that we get out of the people we hire and bring into the company. So when we look at building a brand today, it's important that brands not only deliver on performance or their promise but that you actually build an emotional connection. And the talent that we’re bringing on board — the brand marketers, those in product development, those in sales — all have that emotional connection; they’re actually users of the product. So as a result, they are able to design in and build that into the brand. That's what our talent brings into our organization.

Kathleen Leigh, marketing director, Purell Consumer/GOJO: Building a relationship with the new consumer considers a number of different factors. But one of the things that we find really important is social media and listening.

One of the things we’ve found is [the importance of] understanding that consumer so we can have a better connection, but also to have the ability to refine some of our product offerings because of what we are hearing in a two-way conversation. We find that to be essential to our growth.

Ann Boyles, VP, Kao USA: A strong desire to understand consumer behavior is at the foundation of our company and is part of the culture of Kao. Our parent company is Japanese, and Gemba-ism is a Japanese concept that refers to getting as close to the behavior of a consumer as we possibly can. That manifests itself in the desire to have some really deep understandings across all functions of our business. Over the course of 100 years, it has created some amazing research and development that has shown up in many of the products that we have, but also in our business processes [and] in the way we go to market, as well as our relationships with our retailers.

John Rizzo, VP sales, Allegro (a division of Conair): At Allegro, we basically build custom cosmetic bags for almost every customer we have, so we are building an intimate relationship with the consumer through fashion and through design. We do it twice a year — we follow fall and we follow spring [trends].

So our biggest asset is our ability to see the trends and then turn those trends into something that is fast-fashion in the form of a cosmetic bag; it is really very interactive with the consumer.

Simon Duffy, founder, Bulldog Skincare: We had spent the previous two years dedicated to painstaking product research and development. When I look back to the founding decisions we made then — to focus on natural ingredients, to find better practices in sourcing and manufacturing, or to avoid certain ingredients we hated such as microbeads, artificial colors or ingredients derived from animal sources — I’m proud that we are still committed to the same principles.

I think what we are seeing now is more demanding consumers. It’s getting much harder for brands to maintain an artificial division between the image they seek to project and the actual behaviors of the company. It’s much easier