The end of the silo: Why Unified Planning is the new standard for brand growth

The end of the silo: Why Unified Planning is the new standard for brand growth

Tony Prentice, Director of Client Partnerships and Sales

Effectiveness will reign. Unified strategies will power growth and success will start and end with the customer. 

The market is navigating a challenging stride with forecasts characterised with caution. In this environment, traditional silos between brand and trade are no longer just inefficient - they are a barrier to brand growth. To win, these silos must come down in favour of a holistic customer experience. 

For the year ahead, it’s the most effective and accountable media channels that will drive brand growth and those channels start and end with the customer.

The silos are going. 

Last year, I said that I was most energised about the prospect of sitting in the room with clients - sales and marketing - blurring the lines between brand and trade in Retail Media. 

Well, I’ve been in that room. Retail Media - for the players doing it right- is removing the divide, with the depth of customer insight that can only be gleaned from a Retailer. In fact, across our clients, most believe that we are a vehicle for both brand building and sales. While the divide won’t come down immediately, and there will be growing pains, dismantling those silos leads to a singular truth: better customer outcomes drive better brand results. 

The intersection of ‘known’ and ‘bought’ 

Retail Media sits at the critical intersection of making brands known and landing them in the basket. It provides visibility into what is happening at the shelf and within the category, fusing typically siloed plans into effective, customer-led media solutions at scale. 

This is unified planning at its best with a level of effectiveness and accountability that brands have long craved, measuring not just ‘clicks’, but how many people purchased, how many became loyalists and how to optimise for the future, with the end result - a unified view of brand growth.

Whether it is ‘brand’ or ‘performance’, every dollar must be in service of a shared customer outcome. But unified planning isn’t about moving the money, it’s about aligning the strategy and moving the message. Why? A unified plan is wasted if the creative remains siloed. We should ‘t just be showing a ‘brand’ ad on TV and a ‘price’ on the shelf. Retail is the moment brands are chosen and true effectiveness comes when a brand’s distinct assets carry through the customer journey, across all touchpoints.

This feature first appeared in AdNews.

Retail Media will be known as more than a performance channel 

Retail Media is evolving beyond its reputation as a ‘performance-only’ channel. Because it is built within a retail ecosystem, it offers a holistic view of customer opportunity wrapped in a short and long term media solution. 

Our commitment to brands is to analyse the role of every channel at every stage of the journey - validating both the brand equity and the performance impact of every touchpoint. 

Justine McKenny, Senior Director, Head of Marketing from The LEGO Group reflects on the opportunity for this shift perfectly “For a brand like ours, the ability to connect relevant shoppers across their full journey represents a compelling opportunity. A unified approach opens the opportunity to better service the customer and crucially, to make our media work harder by connecting brand and performance under a shared goal. This convergence of strategy is genuinely exciting and I’m looking forward to our teams testing and evolving this approach.” 

Effectiveness must reign 

We have a saying at Woolworths Group, that if you’re not directly serving a customer, you’re in service of someone who is. In our world, everything starts and ends with a customer and that’s when media is most effective. In a cautious market— the need for proven value and return on every advertising dollar is only heightening. To deliver this accountability, we’ve taken a deep dive into over 3,000 campaigns with Cartology’s Insights and Effectiveness Playbook to help brands make their campaigns work harder to drive brand growth. 

Here are the five core principles to success: 

• Launch with power. New product launches with Retail Media support achieved 70% higher sales and 75% more customers 

• Start with digital. Customers are won and lost at the digital shelf with 70% of connected customers purchasing items in store after researching online 

• The power of search and display combined. Combining search and display media boosts engagement, delivering up to a 28% higher click-through rate 

• The full journey is your critical opportunity. Full journey campaigns deliver twice the number of new customers and a 35% lift in average weekly sales 

• Make your ROOH work harder. ROOH drives penetration and works even harder when aligned to your promotional calendar

Retail Media with its context to actual customers and proven commercial intent means we’re talking to customers who are days, minutes, seconds away from a transaction at every touchpoint. It works well, when it works for the customer. 

In a market where every dollar needs to work harder to win the hearts of customers, partnering needs to be deeper. Trade, marketing, brand, shopper, retailer and commercial - It all needs to come together, with holistic goals and a customer-led media strategy. That is where we will see budgets work their hardest to deliver success and we have an end to end model, enabled to meet our partners where they are in a way that works best for them. 

Success isn’t found in a silo, it’s found in a unified view of the customer and the opportunity for brands.