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My intent is to Educate, Celebrate and Elevate the Consumer Relations function in CPG (Consumer Product Goods) companies, especially for Brand Specialist and Analysts roles and responsibilities... !
Welcome to the My Curious Colleague podcast with your host, me, Denise Venneri. We'll be talking all things consumer relations with a focus on consumer product goods organizations and the brand specialist and analyst roles and responsibilities. So if you like CPGs, like I like CPGs, marketing, insights, and caring deeply for your consumers, Well, take a listen.
Denise Venneri:Hello, my curious colleagues. In this week's episode, I'm curious about the benefits and challenges of gaining a line of sight to your brand's marketing plans.
Denise Venneri:If you're lucky enough like myself to have been part of a contact center, you may have had a responsibility or had responsibility for gathering your brand's marketing plan details for the year. I have found out, in my opinion, that this, at times, can be challenging, but a noble task at that. Let's begin with the why on how this information helps your manager, your contact center, your consumers, and ultimately, your brand's business. Understanding the why can help you sort of impart those reasons to your marketer or other internal clients that may not quite understand this this piece of of the business. So for your manager, this helps your manager anticipate the volume into your contact center, and that goes directly to projecting staffing to appropriately support the volume.
Denise Venneri:Now your manager is going to look at other things, past volume, things like that, in order to adjust the volume appropriately. But a manager may evaluate the staffing model at some, you know, frequency, could be minimally annually. It could be even monthly. I'm not sure. Knowing the types of initiatives that are going to be launched down the road helps.
Denise Venneri:Now I say that because it's it's then once you understand what's coming down the pike, that there's this opportunity to expand or contract the staffing as needed. Now for your contact center and you, what are the benefits? Having this understanding of the what and the when of the marketing plan initiatives allows you to plan for many activities. First one is ensuring that your knowledge base or the database that the agents use, ensuring that this knowledge base is up to date with all the products, images of the packaging front, back, side, and information related to a launch so that your agents can leverage this information easily and feel confident when interacting with your consumers. Now the second reason is it ensures that you can identify beforehand any initiatives that require training for your agents, ideally, by the brand so that they can personally educate and engage with your agents.
Denise Venneri:And the 3rd point is this provides information pretty much kind of on the back end so that once you understand the initiatives and the related UPCs, they can be added or deleted from your product hierarchy in a timely manner. This way, your agents will be able to pick or select in your CRM the appropriate UPC when they receive their first contract. Now, of course, there's gotta be something in there for your brand because they're the one who's helping you understand their plans. And this really gives your brand an opportunity to prepare any FAQs or frequently asked questions, prepare any training slides, and this gives you this opportunity to to review and provide any guidance beforehand regarding the documents. It also ensures you and the brand that feedback can be provided back to the brand so that all can understand and assess the consumer reaction and acceptance of those initiatives through various reports, databases, and analyses.
Denise Venneri:And how does this benefit or what's the reason for your consumers? And that is having accurate and timely information to share with your consumers contributes to an experience you can be proud of. And improving the confidence of your agents that I mentioned earlier comes through definitely when engaging with your consumer. This episode is sponsored by the launch of my very first website at www.mycuriouscolleague.com. There, you'll find links to episodes of all my podcasts, YouTube videos downloadables, and links to the podcast accolades and rankings.
Denise Venneri:There's even a store feature for future products. Right now, my official sticker is available. It's It's the official sticker with the hashtag CPGCX tag on it, and it is free. So go now to the website to order sticker and show your pride in our function and share your support of My Little Podcast.
Denise Venneri:So to recap, we spend a couple minutes here talking about some of the whys you need to to gain this line of sight to your brand's marketing plans.
Denise Venneri:Now, next, let's talk about what you should be gathering for this line of sight to the marketing plans. And you may be surprised at the granularity that you may need as you're going through this exercise yourself. So I'm gonna run through, like, the types of information at a high level, and then perhaps I'll dig into the specifics in a later episode if you all are interested in that. There's about 9 types, but your business, of course, could vary on the types and the granularity, as I mentioned, that may be needed. So the first sort of type is what I'm gonna call new brands and sub brands.
Denise Venneri:The second one is line extensions. Notice that this is different than the new brands and sub brands. Line extensions in my mind is sort of that you have an established brand or you have a brand already, and you are adding to the line, hence the name, with maybe a variation in flavor or or some sort of attribute that you're adding to that particular line. 3rd is changed products. Reformulations is in here in my mind, you know, any product changes, but also any packaging changes would go in this particular section.
Denise Venneri:4th is discontinued product products, which I think might might surprise some of the marketing folks. It really helps you when there's a where to buy with the consumer and any cross sell opportunities that could be established. Pricing changes is number 5, and this directly can impact your reimbursement process. The next few types really could be considered part of the communications piece of the marketing plan. So number 6 would be advertising.
Denise Venneri:Of course, that's standard TV spots or even linear TV spots. 7 is digital posts. And it's important to understand this because the timing could impact the responses that you provide on content. 8 is promotions and sweepstakes. Often, this is missed by the marketer because they're not aware of the potential impact, albeit small, to your contact center.
Denise Venneri:So holding their hands and asking for that type of information is important. And then lastly, website refreshes and revamps. Now I realize this is just a top line of my thoughts on this topic. And if you have a responsibility for gaining a line of sight to your brand's marketing plans and want to share on a future episode, do reach out to me on LinkedIn. Thanks so much for your time.
Denise Venneri:If you've learned even a kernel of an idea or was inspired by this episode, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast on Apple Podcasts. Be sure to share out the hashtag CPGCX because CPGCX really and truly rocks.
Doug Venneri:You have been listening to the My Curious Cali podcast with Denise Venneri Thank you for your time.