In addition to my role as Gravy CEO, I serve on the board of a flu and cold treatment company called Flunada. I was having a conversation with Flunada's CEO recently and he was telling me that business is going great and their products are now on the shelves in thousands of retail locations, but there was one thing keeping him up at night.
Well, you can imagine that with a consumer healthcare product, what he’d say next could run the gamut from regulatory risks, consumer impact, testing processes, etc. But he said it was his marketing strategy and not knowing which of his targeting strategies are working best to drive offline sales. He elaborated that he’s spending large sums of money marketing his company’s product, but he has little insight into what is working and why.
I loved the analogy he gave. He said, “It’s like being on a deserted island and seeing planes passing by overhead, but the only way to signal them is to light money on fire and hope they see the flame.” He added, “If there was a way to attribute our ad exposures to in-store visits…that would be nirvana.”
Being in the marketing space myself, our chat brought to mind all of the discussion, expense, and energy currently going on around ad attribution in a multi-channel world. Terms like Ad Attribution, Multi-Channel, Cohort Analysis, Multi-Touch Attribution Analysis, First Touch, Path-to-Purchase, Last Touch, Intent, Multi-Device, Multi-Platform, Exposure Optimization, and more began spinning around in my head.
These are all relevant terms used for addressing the broader attribution challenge, but for marketers selling products and services locally it occurred to me, “Aren’t we over thinking this a bit?”
With location-based marketing solutions now a reality, Retail, CPG, Restaurant, and Hospitality marketers can now collapse the path to purchase between serving an offer and driving a visit down to real-time and account for the attribution with precision.
They can also do this beyond just location and time. For example, a restaurant serving an offer to mobile customers to visit their nearby location just as they leave a movie theater at 6:30pm on a Friday night. They can send personalized offers catered to customers’ individual preferences, with anonymous behavior history profiles. Using the same example, the restaurant can deliver an offer for a glass of free red wine to a customer with a history of attending wine tasting events and visiting wineries. Tied together, marketers not only get conclusive attribution on their marketing spend, they get the added benefits of decreasing media spend waste, conversion improvement from offer relevancy, and perhaps most importantly, increased customer loyalty and lifetime value as a result.
I subsequently shared these thoughts with the CEO of Flunada. He’s now sleeping better at night . . . but I do wonder how much time he spends thinking about being stranded on a desert island, and why he plans to have so much money with him.