CPG Marketers: 3 ways to build sales momentum on E Commerce

While E commerce has disrupted the retail industry with creation of a highly intuitive and informed marketplace, CPG has been one of the sheltered industries. However, those blissful days are over as ‘Convenience’ replaces ‘Price’ as the key differentiator for the CPG industry, ensuring it takes bold steps on e commerce in order to build its sales momentum.

As a graduate student in Northwestern University IMC Program, who has interest in understanding the different brand strategies and its impact on the CPG industry, i have found 2 articles which summarises it well.

The first article CPG Brands Can't Approach E commerce Like Every Other Brand is an interview with Jennifer Silverberg (CEO of CPG e commerce technology suite SmartCommerce) which highlights the key challenges of inspiring trial purchase of new CPG products considering the consumer is no more walking past the store shelves in the e commerce era, additionally there would be constant struggle that CPG brands would face for becoming habitual purchase online. Moreover, it also highlights that the only way to generate trial and convert it into habit and eventually brand loyalty is for CPG brands to make consumer decision journey as smooth as possible.

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The second article Amazon: CPG friend or foe? by Alizia Freud, mentions the e commerce giant Amazon's strategy of tapping CPG product sales to boost its online growth and that CPG needs to take advantage of these potential online sales, utilise the product search engine that Amazon has become. Additionally, they could also potentially leverage the consumer data to come up with sharper marketing strategies to generate results.

Based on my review of these two articles and the work that I have done at Northwestern on the topic of CPG, I have developed 3 key action items for you to consider.  They are: 

• Leverage Shopper data - CPG can use the immense reserve of consumer data to target the consumers when in buying mode
• Make purchase frictionless - The three stages of trial, habit and brand loyalty could be accomplished in one swoop by CPG on E commerce 
• Think E commerce - E commerce has become the new product search engine and its time CPG taps it to its advantage. 

The quicker CPGs take steps on the e commerce road the sooner they would be able to boost their sales by leveraging the online platform.

Snigdha has past experience in Employer branding and communications in the CPG industry. Currently she's pursuing a Master of Science degree in Integrated Marketing Communications Program, at the Northwestern University and graduating December 2017.

You can find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.