How Challenger Brands Can Grow Distribution at Major Retailers – a Discussion with Roberto Carli of Alloy – Episode 11

This is CPG Insiders, the podcast that helps consumer packaged goods companies survive and thrive in business.

Now your hosts, Mark Young and Rob Taylor.

Welcome everyone to this edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your host, Mark Young with my co host, Dr. Not Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Hyde.

Dr. Hyde.

Dr. Hyde. When did you become a doctor?

This good for you?

Honorary.

Honorary Dr. High Degree. Well, Rob Taylor. Thanks. Rob and I just came back from a business trip. I was just saying something we do initially. Interesting ways of getting places.

The helicopter is still my favorite, but. Yeah, we went on a new business trip to Florida and we rented some motorcycles and rode over and always makes quite an impression when you show up in a vehicle that's not a car. Next is some sort of spaceship, SpaceX something.

I think we kind of terrorized my condo down there too with four Harleys ripping through our indoor. Our inside parking structure. It was kind of loud.

It was pretty loud.

It was pretty loud. But we had a good time anyways. But it was business. But doesn't mean you can't have fun.

No, you gotta have fun. What's the point?

And we actually. I gotta throw this in. We actually stayed at a haunted hotel.

Well, yeah, Matt and I were discussing that earlier. Matt from our office. We're not quite sure since neither of us had experiences. I was disappointed.

I don't think you were capable of knowing if I was a ghost when.

You were more than capable.

I don't think you were.

I was so tuned in.

So anyways, yes, we're just not always at normal here. But we're going to talk to somebody who supposed to be normal today, Rob.

Yeah, we'll see.

We'll find it out. So we're going to talk to Roberto Carley. Now, Roberto is with the company Alloy. And you and I have spent some time around Alloy and learning about them and we're going to cover some really interesting stuff. So if you're in the CPG business, you want to pay attention this. If you're not in the CPG business, it wouldn't make sense that you're listening to this program. But other than that. Roberto, welcome to CPG Insiders.

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me here.

So let's start off by telling people what Alloy is.

Yeah, sounds good. Well, first of all, I'll start off by debunking the myth that I'm actually normal. I did have a similar experience going out to a customer a few months ago. I ended up having a meeting in Amsterdam and it turned out that the most efficient way to get to the customer's headquarter was by renting a bicycle at the hotel. The weather was just perfect. So I did show up in a bike. It's not quite as cool as a Harley, but then again, we are a bunch of nerds here, so I don't think I could rock it anyway.

I like that.

There you go. Just wanted to add it onto the pile.

I like that.

Eventually we'll get down to probably a mule or something.

That would be cool, too.

So, Amsterdam. So you guys were in Amsterdam doing business? So you're doing business all over the world?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. We got primarily North America in the eu. Amsterdam was a fun trip. It's not where I spent the majority of my time.

Right, so tell us what Alloy does for people. Because, see, here's the thing. We have a lot of different types of people that listen to this program, and a lot of, you know, some of them are very sophisticated marketers, some of them are Challengers, and they're new to the business. So there's a lot of things out there in the way of data and platforms and research that not everyone's familiar with. So catch us up on Alloy and what it can do.

Yeah, sure. So we're a technology company, and we work with manufacturers of consumer products, primarily cpg, actually, as well as consumer electronics. And it's interesting, we span the whole gamut from Challenger brands and outright startups that are just starting to move beyond direct to consumer and branded websites, all the way to some of the largest CPGs in the world. We do different things for different people, but the mission of the company is to think of the entire journey that your product takes from the moment it gets manufactured to the moment it reaches the hands of the consumers. And think of that journey as one smooth path connecting everything that happens to the product when it gets manufactured, when it's out of the inventory, when it gets shipped out to the retailer's warehouse, when it makes it into the store, when it makes it to the hands of the consumers. From a practical perspective, this means that we help a lot of Challenger brands overcome the quantitative and the data and the analytic hurdles of doing business, sometimes for the first time, with sophisticated retailers and sophisticated buyers that work there.

Mm.

Yeah, because when you're dealing with somebody like Walmart or Walgreens, I mean, you look at Walmart's data system, their data system is bigger than the US Military's.

Yeah, that stuff.

So you have buyers who are expecting you just because you're a startup. Or a challenger brand does not mean that that buyer is going to take their game down. They're expecting you to come in and play in their language and to play on their level. Right?

Yeah, that's actually absolutely right. Look, I mean, it's 2019. Challenger brands have a lot of advantages versus what it used to be. Right. So we like to joke around that what it takes is these days, if you got a good product idea, there's a lot of steps on it. But ultimately, somebody with a laptop can connect enough things to almost launch a brand from end to end. Right. But there's a lot of components that go in the middle. So. So part of it is it's never really been easier. It's still hard, but it's never been easier to launch a brand and to have David compete with Goliath as it is right now. But at the same time, there are certain rules that you gotta play by, and in particular, large retailers are absolutely one of them. They share a lot of data and they have very high expectations of every vendor. And you're playing the same ballgames as the very large brands. You can pick.

Now, it's very interesting what you just said. You said that it has never been easier for a small company or a startup to be able to break into major retail. That's not what a lot of people think nowadays. And I think it is interesting because we know that through SKU rationalization that retailers are pushing fewer and fewer vendors. But the flip side of that, we also know that the buyers understand that innovation comes from the smaller players and that margin comes from the smaller players. So that's where our opportunity is. Our opportunity as smaller marketers is to bring that innovation, to be able to bring that higher margin. Because quite honestly, folks, if you're selling cereal from Kellogg's or Tide detergent, you're dictating to the retailer what kind of margin they're going to have. And they could be operating on 12, 15, 17 points of margin where with a startup company or a small company, they could have a product that, you know, has a 35 or 40% margin in it. So it's where the profit comes from. But we still have to be able to go into these organizations and know what we're doing. They're not going to make a lot of allowances for us not being up to their speed. So one of the tools you guys have that I think is great. So as most people listen to the show know, they understand what a POS system is. Point of sale. And I can go to Walmart and I can look at my POS numbers. I can go to Walgreens and CVS and Rite Aid and Target. But you have a platform that pulls all of this together for me. So I have this combined intelligence where I can look at all those POS numbers in one snapshot.

Yeah.

Tell us how that works and what's the big advantages there?

Yeah, that's right. Well, I think there's a couple of components. First of all, Mark, I think what you said makes a lot of sense. The fact that it's easier to start a brand these days doesn't mean that it's easy to make it successful. Right. The fact that it's easy to string parts together doesn't mean that it's easy to get into retailers. There is one. I mean, if you think about it just from a technology perspective, that's the angle that we take. Right. There's one fundamental advantage that we have right now. I mean, I've heard you just talk about data systems. I think there were a couple of guests on your show before talking about retail link and what kind of a wealth of information to provide. There are oftentimes tens of thousands of vendors. There's only one retail link. There's one platform that many retailers use to do business with all their vendors. So the key advantage there is the idea of reusability. Right. So one of the tenants that we build a company on is this idea of allowing brands to immediately integrate with the business systems and with the data system, with the technology of the retailers that they're doing business with. Right. And so, you know, there's retailers like Amazon, retailers like Target, retailers, Walmart, all the way down from major retailers or sometimes more mid scale players. So the key idea there is a lot of brands that start doing business with these retailers. Once you get your foot in, you put your foot in the door, you've got access to their data. And the way they give you access to that data sometimes looks exact. Unless you're a category captain. It looks exactly the same as the way very large brands have access to it. So can you take a system that's being built out for you to leverage that information and use it right off the bat?

Let me ask a question. So I go in and I see the retailer. Why should I go and collect all this data about what's going on in the industry? Because the buyer has all this data at their fingertips. Don't they know what's going on with my product?

Well, if there's one thing that I think the industry has thought is that buyers busy. And the fact that you have the data doesn't mean that you don't expect your partners to leverage it and doesn't mean that you're able to catch everything. And those, I think, are two important points. The first reason is if the buyers had all the data and they knew what to do with it, then there'd be absolutely no reason for them to share it with their vendors. Right. They don't have to. And they don't have to share it oftentimes for free. So, you know, there are many aspects that determine the success of brands and retailers. One of them, of course, is the product. Another one is a sales strategy, the marketing strategy. Can you grow the category? Are they at the right time? But there is one big aspect which is can you help your buyer do her job right? Can you help your retailer manage the business in a way that actually makes money for them so that it makes money for you as a brand? So this means watching things like on shelf availability means watching things like replenishment. It means watching things like top store and bottom store performance. And that's the component that we help with in particular.

So that's a common theme that we've heard from many of our guests who deal with the retailer. The buyer side is they're looking at how you make their job easier or better, how you make them money, essentially. But for the listeners, if you don't listen to other episodes, that is a key takeaway that you will hear across the board on these and how to be successful with the retail buyers.

Yeah, and I think it's important, Rob, to bring up, let's say your buyer is the topical analgesic buyer. What would you guess at, Roberto? That guy probably has what, 60 SKUs? 70 SKUs, maybe?

Yeah, well, definitely not. Not a few. You know it better than I do, but that sounds about right.

So. So here's this guy that's got 70, 80 SKUs is probably looking at 300 or 400 SKUs a year. It's not reasonable to expect him to know everything about your two SKUs, where on the flip side, you have two SKUs or three SKUs, you live and breathe them. So I think it's important for people to understand that when we go in and see the buyer, and this is a term that we've used before, and that is our job is to go in and be a hero to the buyer. We need to make the buyer look good. And the only way we can do that, we can do that with great products. But we can do that with having all the data at our fingertips. So with a dashboard like yours, the buyer could say, and help me out. I could maybe be meeting at Walgreens and say, well, let me show you what we're doing in other accounts. And maybe the shelf placement is why this account works better. Or maybe the price, maybe this retailer selling our product $1.50 cheaper than you. And look at the difference that it has on the impact. What other type of things do people use this for?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's interesting, particularly in small brands, we find out very often one of the first uses that people make, I mean, from Alloy in particular. But I think good use of data in general is helping buyers make sure the shelves are not empty and make sure that there's the right amount of product at the right place at the right time. Which is interesting because it's traditionally a problem that's so complex that you let supply chain solve it. But there's a lot you can do. So one example is we had a brand coming in in a very big, very big holiday season, right? So it was our seasonal product. They came in and they started pushing product right at the peak of the season. And they saw day to day, you get daily information that the product was selling great, right? Two or three days in, all of a sudden their sales start dropping. They find out the morning after at 9:00am you know, how much you did yesterday. Well, that kind of seems strange. I mean, they made a giant order. Like, that's not something that we could have sold through yet. How come the product is not moving? Right? They went through and now that's where you got to do the heavy lifting, Right? They will tell you whether that product is being sold or it's in stock or is on promo at every single store. So what they found out, I mean, quite simply, is that the product had done well, but it hadn't done well in every store. The same way. There were some stores that were outperformance. Those stores were empty and the DC was just not replenishing. The warehouse wasn't plunging. So I think what they could do is literally now that grants an email to the buyer. Even in the busiest time of the year, you can't ask your buyer in the busiest time of the year to go in and make sure that my product is doing well. But when you can go in and say, Well, I got two DCs in California that are not pushing products to their store, maybe somebody missed it, you're giving a buyer a chance to make more money. It goes down the inventory chain and it actually gets product pushed. You make money for both parties. So that's probably one thing that I think happens quite a bit now.

You have a feature in your product. There's this one feature I really like, and not that there isn't other features, but one of them is the feature that estimates how much sales I lost this week from being out of stock.

I do think that's cool. But I want. Actually, Roberto, I want you to describe this, because you had said dashboard, and I think right now we're kind of dealing in these nebulous concepts that these aren't emails being fired off to you, that, yeah, you're out of stock or anything, that this is a pretty robust dashboard with graphs and all kinds of information that you have at your finger. It fills your screen with different data points. But I want you to describe that a little bit and then talk about that, because that was such a cool feature that affects our clients all the time.

Yeah, well, probably part of what you're describing is, I mean, we think it's important to have actionable information, good design and good usability at the fingertips of people who do business. There's a reason why nobody's on SAP unless they really have to be. But everybody's on Facebook all the time, right? It's usable and it's intuitive and it's fast. So those are the general design philosophies that we try to go after. But I think there's just a symptom of. It's a broader thing. It isn't really about us. Right. It's about the idea that consumers right now have higher standard for technology, so they expect the same stuff at work that they would normally get on their weekends. But I think in terms of what you're describing, one of the things we really try to do to make the information actionable is a few different things. One is we try to display the information intuitively in the sense that if there's something you got to act on, I mean, let's tie up what you just asked for, Mark. Lost sales, right? If your shelves are empty, right, and you're losing, not even you're losing, your retailer is losing $15,000 a week of revenue, somebody should find out without having to go into a report and go into line 17 and finding out that the number is $50,000, right? So you got to be proactive. It's got to be intuitive to break it down, because it's not enough that I'm telling you that my shelves are empty. I need to point out, why did I exceed my forecast? Did you forget to order? Is it stuck at the dc? Right. That's the second thing. And then the third thing is that information has to be actionable for the retailer, not for the company. This information, it creates value for both companies. But the people hold their finger to the button are on the retail side. So you need to be able to express it in a way that's actionable for your partners without having to spend an afternoon turning your Excel into their Excel. So those are the kind of guidelines we take, right? Good design and usability, a focus on action and on alerting. And the third is being able to speak the language of your partners because they shouldn't have to translate your recommendations.

That's. That's a big help. So now that. Going back to that feature, now we have a feature on there that will tell me it's measuring acv, right? Or out of stocks. It's not measuring ACV because it's cost one retailer, right?

Yeah.

But it's out of stock. Yeah.

I mean, it's quite simple. Well, it's quite a simple thing in theory. Just a lot of numbers to crunch. But we call this lost sales, right? So there's actually a pretty cool story that we got around this, right? So we lost sales is the amount of revenue that you didn't make because the shelves were empty. That's what lost sales is, Right. So there's a concept that we call unconstrained demand, which is if the customer could always get your product, how much would they buy? That's your true potential. Right. That like to go above that, you got to do promotions, you got to improve product, you got to go in more stores, et cetera. But if you could always have the right amount of product at the right place, the right time, that's how much you would sell. And that breaks down into what you actually sold and what you could have and what you lost. So it's important to make that distinction. It's important for a few reasons. Number one, it allows you to focus on where the problem is. I mean, it's easy to say we're, you know, we're 95% in stock. That's a ratio, Right. And that may matter. If you're looking at the end of the year at a scorecard, it's a different thing to go in and say, you know, during our end cap or doing our promo or this particular time of the year, we lost $500,000 worth of revenue.

So because that matters to the Buyer because he's measured. He or she has measured on that performance.

Absolutely. It's joint revenue. It's joint revenue. Having an empty shelf is probably the best way to lose money, both for you and for the retailer. And suggesting ways to not let that shelf go empty is a guaranteed way to sell more because it creates the same outcome on both sides.

Let's say I'm in a Walgreens and we've got 8,700 stores and we're looking. Walgreens is saying that I want to have a product that turns a half a piece per week per store. But I look and I'm looking at the overall numbers and I'm not there. Would I use your system is a potential that I would use your system to look at those 8,700 stores and maybe go back to that buyer and say, look, if I'm in these 6148 stores, I'm outperforming your goals by 30%. Don't cut my SKU. Drop these 1800 stores from my store list.

Absolutely. I mean, that's a crystal clear example. And that's exactly what happened to one of our customers recently. They were about to walk into a tough buyer meeting. It happens. I mean, you know, you got two numbers in your head and you know that neither of those two numbers is actually going to be a good one. And so leveraging location level data is key to make sure that you cause a win win in those meetings. So what they did in particular is they found out that there was a set. In this case, it was a little bit different. It wasn't even that there were a few underperforming stores. There were certain stores now they were selling a product that doesn't sell the same way in every geography. Right. And there were a few stores that were absolutely killing it and that were basically carrying on the remainder of the network. So what they managed to do was a very easy segmentation. We didn't need to use demographic for this, by the way. It was quite a clear set of store that was already pretty well defined. And what they did is they convinced the buyer to increase the SKU count there. I mean, they cut off the stores at the next reset. They actually managed to expand quite heavily because they weren't having a whole set. And so they made higher revenue overall. So they won and the retailer won because their per store per week, as well as their turns, as well as every other metric that matters to the buyer went up as well. So that's another type of cut that's absolutely relevant.

So typically, let's say I go into Walgreens, I use Walgreens again, and they're bringing my product in. And let's say they have a three piece load in. So they're going to load three pieces at all 8,700 stores. In reality, there will be a bunch of stores that sell nothing. There will be a bunch of stores that sold one piece. There will be another group of stores that sold out all three pieces by Tuesday morning. Using your dashboard, I'd be able to go back to the buyer or the replenishment buyer and say, look, you need to change your inventory in these stores, correct? So I'd say don't put in three pieces in every store. Put in two pieces in these stores. Save that inventory. But you need to have 12 pieces in these other stores over here. How would I pull, how would I tease that information out?

Yeah. So I mean, there's a, there's a quick ratio that you can use there, right? There's a quick metric. And part of what you want to try to do is establish your target for what's called weeks of supply. So weeks of supply means, you know, if I sell one unit a week and I want to be covered for a month, I need four units at that store. So one good way of setting up that ratio is to look at every single store and give yourself a metric. Say, how many weeks of supply do you want to carry on average? Now, of course it's going to be lower if you're selling toilet paper or something that's low price and bulky. Right? And it's going to be much higher if you have a product that's compact, kind of high price point, etc. Etc. Right. So you said something reasonable. If it's too low, you end up with empty shelves. If it's too high, you end up with angry buyers. You pick that sweet spot. And then once you look at the numbers that way, it's very easy to find out which stores are averaging low weeks of supply. Either means they're carrying too little or it means they're selling too much. Regardless, it's good news, right? You got to order more and which ones are actually selling, having high weeks of supply. And so you will turn it the other way around. So that's kind of a good number and a good metric that we have our customers use to make sure that there's the right level of inventory at every store.

That level of data can sometimes be the difference between the buyer saying your product's failing and your product is a success.

Yeah, it seems like the more data now, the more sophisticated your data. And I was going to ask a question and I'm going to kind of answer it here. What levels the playing field for a challenger brand? And it sounds like having a sophisticated understanding of sophisticated information could potentially make a huge difference for you if you, even if you're a small player, you still. Information is king, right?

Well, it's a lot better to. It's a lot better to be in 6,500 Walgreens stores than to be in zero Walgreens stores. So even though it's everybody's dream, as we all know, everybody wants chain wide distribution, but in reality some products don't fit chain wide distribution. And this is the way to be able to tease that out and hold onto it. What other type of actionable information do people get from the Dashboard and the Alloy system?

You know, it's interesting. So we're talking right now about the relationship between you as a brand and a particular buyer, a particular retailer. But you were hinting at it at the beginning. Right. There's a way to take this information across your entire consumer. So basically take everything that every channel is sharing with you and using it to gain a better understanding of who your end consumer is. Right. So this is. Now this is very important because here we're starting to get into the areas where you're not just trying to play up to the level of the big brands, but you're actually trying to exceed it. I've heard you in a prior episode talk about the fact that when you compete with a big brand at Target, they're going to have an eight story building in Minneapolis. Right. Or in Bentonville, let alone. Right. You can use that for a competitive advantage because they're eight story building in Minneapolis and the one in Bentonville and the one in other places. They're not going to talk to each other. And as a new brand, you can put apples and apples. Data that comes from your own website if you're running it, data that comes from Amazon, that gives you data all the way down to the zip codes of people who bought it. Right. And data that comes from every single Walgreens and CVS store and so on and so forth and that you're thinking about. So that's something that comes up quite natural again, I mean, we know where the stores are, we know the zip codes are. So one thing that we see a lot of our young brands do is a hotspot analysis. I mean, you literally put all that stuff on A map and you find out where are my buyers coming from? Where are my high priced product being sold? Where's my mid tier product being sold? Where am I going out of stock. Right. So that's your first kind of layer. You put everything on a map and you find out where the buyer is pulling from. Sometimes you'll get where your millennials are. Some of the times you'll narrow down on a particular demographic, some of the times you find out that certain areas are just asking for lower price point products and so on and so forth. So that's kind of a very, that's a very interesting insight that large companies can't pull together. It's really hard for them to do it. They've got the data, they're leveraging it, but it's in so many silos that being able to look at it across, it's something that they don't do. They just call Nielsen and they try to get the stats right.

This would be a big help for you too, because that type of data helps you customize or fine tune the marketing message.

Yeah, I mean, that's what I was thinking is we use tools to figure out who the actual buyer is and that often is in conflict with what the brand thinks. But it definitely helps us talk to the right people in the right voice, if you will, which is massively important to what we do. And it's becoming more and more important. Again, it just comes down to how does this help our client set the challenger brand, set, compete? And that's what we do every day. We look at how to level the playing field for our, you know, smaller mid sized brands. And this seems like just another amazing tool to do that.

What other type of insights would someone pull from this?

Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, Rob, I wanted to kind of that you kind of got me thinking on what you were saying from marketing initiatives. Right. We got certain companies, especially emerging brands that are coming up in cbg and oftentimes you're trying to kind of figure out where your buyer is. You try a lot of different things, right? I mean, you might try, you might try a promotion somewhere that you put in a new display that you try to do something with pricing, let alone what happens with online advertisement, you put it out on Facebook, etc. And so what you can do is you can use this data to do what's called ab testing or natural experiments. So literally every time you launch something, you can pick the place where you launched it and another place where you didn't launch it. And look at the performance of them side by side. I mean if you did something in San Francisco, you didn't do it in la. You could just run them side by side and see if your buyers picked up. Doesn't matter. You can measure your Walgreens here, your CVS there, et cetera. You can look at an apple straps. So you're mentioning kind of other things that happen. There are a few different ways in which we start looking at it. So we talked about individual buyers, there's a lot more that we could talk about there, there's around reorg, there's around pushing the categories, there's around doing price control, et cetera. But maybe if we start talking then about having a high level overlook at your brand, right? The kind of executive level overview of how am I doing overall. One of the big advantages of being able to leverage data and you can do it pretty well in Alloy is having a high level overview of your business by comparing your performance at different retailers and comparing your performance for different products across metrics that don't lie. How fast is my product turning at Walgreens and how fast is my product turning at Target? Right. Can I compare it side by side and if this data is not matched, then it means that I've got an opportunity to do it. Now let me break it down, why is that? Is it because my top products aren't performing as well, my broad products are not performing as well, and so on and so forth. And you can also another strategy that we, that we find, I mean going back to the lost sales idea, I mean it's very powerful to be able to, you know, run like a well oiled machine is find where your lost sales are, right? That's your easiest revenue to capture, right? What, what products are losing, what details losing, etc. Etc.

I could also see this data being a very early indicator if I have an SKU that's starting to get in trouble.

Yeah, I was just thinking that.

So I've got six SKUs and I'm looking at my overall sales. But this would be that this dashboard would have the ability to kind of sound that early alarm that okay, this SKU over here could have some problems coming up, right.

Instead of getting the dreaded call, if you're watching it frequently, which is, you know, obviously the plan for something like this, it would be great information to have before anyone else has it. And I want to say, I don't think we've explicitly stated or asked the question. You can pull in information from all of the retailers and Put it in one consumable place for the user. Right? Yeah. I don't think we stated that explicitly. Right.

If I'm walking into a tough meeting with a buyer and let's say I've got three SKUs on that shelf and I know one or two of those SKUs are really sucking bad right now, I don't want to walk into the meeting and let the buyer tell me how horrible life is. I want to walk in there and tell the buyer, I already know how horrible life is and I already have a plan.

Yeah.

And my plan is I'm going to swap this SKU out. I'm going to put this SKU back. I'm going to take this SKU and you need to cut a thousand stores. Here's the thousand stores you need to cut. Here's the marketing campaign I'm bringing in to lift the entire brand. That's how you turn a bad meeting into a good meeting. But you don't turn that bad meeting into a good meeting if you don't have a pile of data when you walk in to do it. Because these guys are not going to come in because they want to hear what your feeling is about or what your opinion is. They want to see the data. So if a company wanted to look at your dashboard, wanted to see how this works, how do they do that?

Well, usually what happens, they just come to our website and, and they start talking to us. So it always really starts with. It always starts with a conversation.

So the website is a free demonstration for clients that want to see this.

Yeah, absolutely. We do. We provide demos, websites, Allah AI A L L O Y AI we do free demonstrations. I mean, the very first thing we want to do that we like to do is just understand problems, challenges, opportunities and provide best practices. I mean, some of the stories that we're talking about right here, when we're talking 101, we can give even more detail. We can talk about where we can help and where the priorities are. Right. We do live demonstrations and we do live demos on the software. And oftentimes we can just show once we know what the product is, what the category is and what are the challenges. We will typically also show how we work with the individual retailers that are of interest. Sometimes somebody will come in with an Amazon problem, sometimes there's going to be a Target problem, and so on and so forth. And so that's typically how we start. One thing is we are very proud technology companies. So just we tend to showcase our technology front and center. What people want to see it. And typically it clicks if it's something that they could use.

So with all the experience that you have now in this category, what would be the most important bullet points that you'd want to leave people with?

That's an interesting question. So I would say the theme that we really started looking at today is your Challenger brand going into a big retailer, right? The three things that I think came up today are one, you have to be able to speak their language, speak your retailer's language, and make sure that you do their job, that you help them do their job right. The second, which is actually not obvious, is do not assume that they're perfect. Don't assume that just because you're a small brand, you can't find out something that they could be doing better. Don't assume that because they have the data, they already have the answer. There are many, many ways in which you can help them. And the third one is if you want them to do something about it, you've got to make it easy for them. You've got to come up with the cake that's already been baked and you got to take it out of the oven. You can't give them the ingredients, a way for them to cook it. That's really it. I mean, one is leverage. What they give you. Two is know that you can help them do their job better. And three is already come with a solution, don't come up with a problem and make it easy for them to implement it.

Rob, any last comments on your part?

We've seen this presented to us a few times and it, it blew us away. As far as the amount of information that you guys pull into this one, I'll call it Little Dashboard. It's not little, it's one screen that is just packed with incredibly useful information. Stuff that we've talked about but never really knew could exist, I guess, in a platform like this. So it was just a. I encourage people if you're in this space to take a look at it. It's such a powerful tool. And I think as retailers get more sophisticated, they're going to have that demand of every manufacturer, regardless of how big or small you are.

And if you go to the Show Notes, if you go to cpginsiders.com, go to the Show Notes on this episode, we'll have links to your website and contact information where people can go and get the demonstration. Roberto from Alloy, thanks for being with us. I hope that you will come back. As you guys innovate and continue to bolt on more wonderful features onto the Alloy platform.

Oh, fantastic. Thank you so much for having me and sure. I look forward to coming here again as we keep moving.

Thank you. Appreciate it.

And that's it for this episode of CPG Insiders. If you like the show, leave us a five star review. Go to iHeart, iTunes, Stitcher, wherever else it is you happen to download your shows from. And if there's a topic, by the way, if there's a topic that you'd like to hear Rob and I cover, send us an email. You can do that at CPG Insiders and we'll try to cover the topic. Also, I want everyone to always feel welcome to contact any of the people here at our agency, Jekyll and Hyde advertising, which is jekyllheidagency.com and if you have questions about whatever you're hearing here, call us. We'll put you in touch with the right person here in the building who can answer that question for you. And don't worry, we're not going to send you a bill to have a phone call. We really, we just love entrepreneurs, we love the CPG business and we want to see people succeed.

That's it. Appreciate it, guys.

If you're looking to greatly increase sales on your CPG product, don't hesitate to contact us at Jekyll and Hyde Advertising and Marketing. By the way, the only advertising agency with a guaranteed result. Just go to jekyllheidagency.com or feel free to give us a call at 800-542 10.