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Distribution Channels: Ensure the success of your products

October 1, 2020

Distribution Channels:
Ensure the success of your products

Making sure your product reaches your desired customers is not an easy task. Gone are the days when one only needed to produce the product for it to sell. Today, one would need to plan where to put the product, or how to get the product to the consumers. For this purpose, Marketing companies use the tool they call Distribution Channels.

What is a Distribution Channel
A Distribution Channel is a set of steps that are taken for the product to reach in the hands of the final consumers. These steps may be offline, online, through some intermediaries, agents, or retailers.

To understand it with more clarity, imagine Colgate produced thousands of toothpaste and displayed it outside the production plant in hopes of selling it. Doesn’t make sense right? Now we know that Colgate is one of the largest brands selling toothpaste in India. The reason is that they employ multiple distribution channels at a time. Possessing the knowledge of where, how, and why to position their product so as to maximize its reach. Thus, making Distribution Channels one of the most rewarding tools if applied correctly.

How to build a distribution channel
The simplest way to create a distribution channel would be to answer a series of questions about your product and the targeted customer. These could be
1. Is your product a stand-alone product or needs supplementary service?
2. How can it improve the shopping experience?
3. What do your customers need?
4. Are your customers familiar with the type of product, or do they need to be educated or trained for its use?
5. What is the fastest positioning that meets your customers’ demands?
6. What should be the tone of the product?

These are only a few questions that could make sure that the channel you create makes the most impact. It is not always necessary that one product employs one Distribution Channel. There can be different Distribution channels running at the same time to reach maximum customers.

Idonneous Marketing Services has helped achieve scalable success for many products from the first moment by employing an efficient Distribution Channel every time.

To know how you could utilize most of your resources, call us at – 022-6699668 / 022-6699672

Beginners Guide to Field Marketing

September 25, 2020

Beginners Guide to Field Marketing

It is a common misconception that conducting events is what Field Marketing is all about. Instead, Field Marketing is a broad domain that involves working on-site to connect with the markets, be it customers or business. Therefore, it consists of all the marketing activities that include contacting the customers face to face.

Though Field Marketing seemingly looks easy, there is a lot of work that goes behind the doors. For those who are starting in Field Marketing, here is a step by step guide one must follow –

#1 Strategize
One is foolish for jumping into war without a strategy. The same goes for Field Marketing. Planning a campaign, reevaluating it, then going through it again might seem like a waste of time, but in the long run, it ensures that you make the least mistakes.

The questions that one must have answers to are: what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it. You must be very clear on what the goals of the campaign are. So think, think again and again before you start. Ensure that you are clear on what goals you have set.

#2 Streamline
Imagine that what you planned does not conform to what you execute. And then the follow up you get is entirely disconnected to the other two. It is vital that you streamline all the internal stakeholders involved in one campaign. This means that there should be an alignment between sales, marketing, and other departments involved have the same definition of goals you have set.

#3 Communicate
Communication is the key! A bit cliche yet true. Communicate to people what you want to sell. Make a connection with the consumer with communication. This not only includes the what’s, why’s, and how’s but also where to connect. Imagine marketing whey protein in a book club, doesn’t make sense right? This is helpful as the narration of your campaign should change with the place you chose to market your product.

#4 Involve
Involve your Customers! They are your god, and when god show mercy, it rains. Use customers as advocates for your brand. Many times we forget to include follow-ups, from the customers, as a part of Field Marketing. Follow-ups may include asking them for verbal feedback or even filling up a feedback form. The easiest way to achieve this can be through customer advocacy programs.

#5 Measure
Remember the goals you had set? Now is the time to analyze the output you achieved against the goals you had set. This will help you learn whether the methods you have used have given you the result you wanted to accomplish. You will have an insight into what not to do in the future or fix any issues that came up or were reported by your on-site personnel.

Idonneous, a pioneer in Field Marketing, provides the best services and complete solution to increase your brand value. To know more, connect with us at- idonneous.com/contact

How Merchandising Programs Work

September 17, 2020

How Merchandising Programs Work

Have you come across beautifully arranged products in a retail store? And it tempted you to at least have a look at them! Well, that arrangement is called Merchandising which involves displaying products gracefully in order to make a sale.

Planning a right merchandising strategy depends on many factors like available space, product quality, the arrangement of spaces, and whether the merchandising is taking place online or an offline store.

Types of Merchandising

  • Product merchandising- Any promotional activity that relates to a product is referred to as product merchandising. It can take place in a digital store as well.
  • Retail merchandising- It refers to the promotional activities that apply in a physical retail store. Not only in a brick and mortar shop, but retail merchandising can also be seen in annual pop up events.
  • Visual merchandising- In the retail industry, Visual Merchandising is generally used to enhance and show the appearance of products and services being sold. The benefits are highlighted and include elements of lighting, space, attractive colour layouts, and designs.
  • Digital merchandising- It involves all the marketing and promotional activities that are needed to sell a product or service online. It may include site performance, email marketing initiatives and attractive digital displays.

Lighting in Merchandising
Just as in film production, different types of lighting is used to highlight characters, features of models and convey moods, lighting is also used in Merchandising to create an attractive display and influence customer to purchase the product.
Lighting can significantly be used to highlight certain colours of a product and its features. For example- Apple uses a clean white background to display and showcase their steel grey laptops. At the same time, a black background is used to convey the luxury of its products!

Idonneous Marketing Services works in providing innovative solutions in Merchandising. We are nationally known and have worked for many big brands. If you too want to explore this area for increasing direct sales at POS connect with us on – 022-6699668 / 72

Importance of Vendor Efficiency Programs

September 11, 2020

Importance of Vendor Efficiency Programs

Vendor Efficiency Program, sometimes also referred to as Supplier Efficiency Program is a process of observing and analyzing the performance, quality, and reliability of your vendors. Monitoring vendor efficiency allows your company to improve productivity and profits by reducing stock levels and inventory costs. A proper vendor efficiency program can also help in increasing customer satisfaction.

Being able to monitor all of the active vendors across the organization effectively is the real challenge. Doing so requires actual data about how the vendor is performing. Thanks to technology which helps to bridge the gap so that you can create a system that operates smoothly and also helps you in keeping an eye on how your vendors are affecting your business.

Vendor efficiency program is created with a series of key performance indicators (KPIs). These KPIs are agreed upon and outlined in advance between buyer and seller.
Some of the common KPIs include:

  • Payment terms
  • Prices
  • Quality of products
  • Frequency of price changes
  • Delivery lead times
  • Vendor financial stability
  • Competitiveness with other vendors
  • Communication lag times
  • Breakages
  • Under and over deliveries

When a company adopts a vendor efficiency program, they’ll find more than cost savings. Vendor efficiency program can generate strategies for the risk management by lowering overall risk exposure and improvement in terms of products and services. Streamlining administrative processes can save the company and the suppliers a company works with money. By identifying the root causes of problems to solve them quickly, it’s reasonable to expect higher levels of customer satisfaction.

When appropriately implemented, vendor efficiency program improves performance for both the purchaser and the supplier. By enhancing the quality, lead times, contract compliance, responsiveness, and other major KPIs, you’ll see higher profits and greater customers satisfaction.

Want to know how the vendor efficiency program can work for your company?
Call us on 022-6699668 / 022-6699672

Consumer Advocacy at Corporate Venues

September 7, 2020

Consumer Advocacy at Corporate Venues

Ever notice the person standing next to you in the supermarket aisle reading the ingredients off of a cereal box? Noticed, right? We all have seen people around us becoming more aware of what they are investing in or consuming. This is due to increasing attention being paid to what and how things are being produced. Think of how a company representative tells you that if you buy this call plan, you could save X amount more instead of what you initially planned on buying; this is Consumer Advocacy.

Consumer advocacy is when a person or group fights for the rights of a consumer rather than focusing on company revenue. The phenomenon started gaining popularity around the late 20th century, specifically the 1960s. Today Consumer Advocacy is in the spotlight as many corporate giants are going for the in-house Consumer Advocacy department.

The Capitalist economy that solely focused on the revenue generation is now fading out slowly, and being replaced by the Post Modern World which is an active society worried about the consequences of consumer culture on the earth and beyond. This can be seen when Corporate Social Responsibility is the go-to way all the brands advertise their products. It is being employed through changing Organizational culture to be more transparent and ethical, feedback loops, etc.

Consumer advocacy is considered during the planning of marketing, and it has a separate budget in many of the corporates. All the big companies want to invest in winning customers through experience.

Idonneous Marketing Services is known for running the consumer advocacy campaigns to connect with people and win their heart by suggesting them the right plans and products of a particular company. This helps in creating goodwill in the market. It also turns out to be a win-win situation for all.

If you too want to run a consumer advocacy campaign with us, call on – 022-6699668 / 72

Mondelez – Addition of new chemist outlets

February 20, 2019

Leading Multinational Confectionery Company-Mondelez

Objective

Detailing and seeding chemist outlets across 6 leading metros for primary sales with showcasing of entire product range for period of 4 months.

Activity

The promoter had to visit unique chemist outlets across the locations and detail the entire product portfolio to the shop owner. He also had to explain about the various trade / promotion scheme of the company. The promoter had to take minimum sales order from the chemist outlet and Idonneous also had to ensure delivery of the orders taken. The main focus of this activity was to increase the market share of the company in the chemist RLA.

Results

Increased number of chemist shop owner as customer for the company and approximately 9000 new Chemists were added.

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