NielsenIQ Data and Reports - Ep. 47

Foreign.

Hi, everybody. Mark Young here. I'm so excited to tell you about my new book comes out December 7th and it'll be available every place. Obviously, the easy place is Amazon, but let me tell you about it really quick. It's called Hypnotizing. Now I want to expand on that. It's Hypno as an hypno and tizing as an advertising T I s I n g. And the book is@notnotizingbook.com you can also go to the Show Notes for Blunt Force Truth and we'll have a link there. But the book is so simply this. What if you could create advertising that is so compelling and so hypnotic that it motivates consumers to make an immediate change in their behavior to buy your product or service? That is what Hypnotizing the book is the Secrets and science of Ads that Sell more. Now, the thing here is it's for entrepreneurs, it's for marketing professionals. But I'm going to tell you right now, if you want to know how the human brain functions, if you want to know why people make decisions, if you want to know what makes, as an example, what makes conservatives do what they do and what makes liberals do what they do, the information is in this book. And I'm going to ask you as a great favor to me, and I'd love you for doing this, we want to make Hypnotizing an Amazon bestseller. So we need as many people as possible to go buy it this week. And because of that, we've made the digital copy of the book available for our listeners for 99 cents. It's available on Amazon. If you go to Amazon, it's going to have to be hypno-tizing. T I s I n g. Go to hypnotizingbook.com or go to the Show Notes and you'll find a link. And by the way, once you get it, please write a review. I'd love to hear what you think of the book. Thanks. Welcome, everybody, to this edition of CPG Insiders. I'm your co host, Mark Young with Justin Girard. We're coming to you from our new studios.

By the way, Fancy.

It is nice.

Yeah, it is nice.

No one can see it.

No.

Well, let's start putting these on YouTube.

We're gonna get so many. We're gonna get so many more listeners when they can see our mugs.

I know. My goodness, that really enhances. We were both told we were nines today.

Exactly.

Oh, actually, we weren't the nines.

We weren't the nines. Your wife was.

Yeah, my wife was.

Yes. So, yeah.

So. Well, at least somebody's a niner on here anyway, so I guess I have a face for radio today, we have a guest, folks, and our guest is none other than Andrew Croesus and he is head of product for Nielsen. Now, we're all familiar with Nielsen and Nielsen's incredibly helpful in this world because. Especially for us, because Nielsen pays double duty for us, because not only do they have all the sales data, they have all the TV data. So we're always interested not only in what Nielsen has for us on the retail side, but obviously what they have on the TV side for us. Now, Andrew, you deal with the CPG world at Nielsen, correct?

Yep. You got it.

All right, now I'm going to ask some questions. First question I want to ask you is, what's the difference between Nielsen Reports and Iri Reports?

Yeah, great question and a little bit of context, actually. We're now two companies, so you're going to have to jump between what we call Nielsen iq, which is the retail CPG side, and Nielsen, the media side. So actually, we had a split of the company to focus in on the two business units. Now, when you look at Nielsen IQ data and compared to competitive data, I think there's a couple lenses to it. One is coverage component, which is looking at different retail partners that Nielsen IQ works with, uniquely exclusives. There's kind of a little bit of that across the industry. So we have players like Whole Foods and other ones that are really significant, especially as you think about health and wellness in the CPG industry. Those are major components of the retail landscape. But then on the Nielsen IQ side, we're going a lot further than just brick and mortar. And I think that's one big focus that's differentiating us. And so we've got a big initiative around what we call Omni. So Omni Sales and Omnishopper, which is giving a holistic view across both online offline, and we're doing that through probably the best method possible in the industry, which is combining a lot of different sources, deduplicating the data so you don't have that crossover and confusion as you're trying to pull in. Give me a total view of my market on and offline. And so we're really the only player that can do that.

So you're picking up the online sales now?

Yeah, we've actually acquired a company called Rakuten, another one called Data Impact, just this past year. So really aggressive, I would say the last 12 months. And that's allowed us to get a broad read both online through a number of different technologies as well as utilizing our, you know, our existing retail measurement service to give a broad read across the industry. Oh, that's interesting.

Now, do you pick up, obviously you pick up the majors, pick up Amazon and Walmart and those. Do you also pick up smaller web properties or even the client's own website or what? How do you pick that stuff up?

Yeah, so we've got some cool technology. I won't be the expert on the data impact, but acquired a company we acquired does some pretty advanced scraping capabilities that goes across and crawls the Internet. So, you know, we're going to be pulling in Amazon other components here and there and then giving a full read and then harmonizing that across. We've got the right association representation of the universe. So that technology helps us. Right, because not every retail player or brand is going to share that information. Now. We're not going to have every single dtc.

Right.

As you can imagine, there's an incredible amount out there, but we are getting a significant percent of the read as we go forward.

Do you guys have a data relationship with companies like Shopify or anything where you're picking up data through them?

So definitely constantly trying to work on those partnerships. We want as much as we can get. We want to strike as many partnerships as possible. And where we don't have the engagement, that's where we're going to lean on things like data impact to scrape sites or scrape applications like that, you know, Shopify others to try to give us, you know, give our customers access to the data that they need.

Now, recently you did a piece of content where you were talking about, are your promotions catapulting your brand or cannibalizing it? Now, I say as an ad agency, any of our clients are used to hearing us talk about cannibalization, because we see that happen a lot. Tell us a little bit about that particular piece that you wrote.

Yeah, for sure. As you guys know. Right. It's a fast moving, fast changing environment the last 12, 24 months. And so part of this piece that we did was really looking at what are some of the trends, what are some of the insights we're finding around promotional activities. And what we're finding is there's definitely a range of elasticity is shifting around pricing. So people are definitely concerned around price thresholds. But from an elasticity standpoint, promotions are working. Meaning while though prices may be going up as we're going through an inflationary period, promotional activity is still strong and it's successful in its means. And so I think the takeaway is one, you need to be really targeted at how you think about your promotional activities and really get down to item levels or at least promote a product group, segments, to be specific on exactly how and what the benefit and what the impact is to the shelf on behalf of the retailer. And in order to do that you need some insights, you need some data to help guide you so that you can better go back to your retail partners to tell that story. So that's what we're finding is if you're smart about how you do it, it is definitely successful. We're seeing that in some of the numbers.

How big of an impact is the current inflation having on the CPG world? I mean, do you have any read on that?

So it's significant. I mean when you think about some of the math on just like what's happened the last 12 months, 24 months, right. We've got shipping costs, there's a number of different metrics here. The one that we have is around 300% I think like year over year costs and shipping. So you've got that anytime you're importing products or raw ingredients, commodity prices are therefore 30% higher. You've got energy costs 20% higher. So all of that is definitely fueling price increases. You are seeing across a number of different categories. It's not just one category anymore, it's across the board. And as a result I think combined with that is then shortages in supply chain. So all of that is definitely coming into the numbers. You're seeing prices go up or people as I talk to clients and small and medium sized businesses, which is where I spend the most time actually within Nielsen iq, having to basically weigh the pros and cons. Do they need to move up price given their raw ingredient costs have gone up or packaging, what's going to be the shopper feedback? Are they still going to stick with my brand? Do I have enough loyalty? So definitely seeing an increase. And then I think on the retail side, when you think about the supply issues with some of those promotions, longer term with the brands is you got to have the stock available, right? And are you out of stocking? And that's certainly a risk that we're seeing in store.

So there's two impacts that affect our listeners. One is the consumer's behavior if I raise the prices. The second one is we see a lot of small to mid size CPG companies that are struggling to get the retailers to take a price increase. Also because you can't just call Walmart up and say we're priced by 20%.

It'd be great if you could.

That'd be amazing. So how are you advising CPG companies now to, to manage that? How are you guising them to when is the best time to go for a price increase or how much of a price increase are we seeing that they can get through?

So a little bit context here. We actually launched a new platform in Nielsen IQ called Bizer. Kind of a cool name out there. Basically means if you're a tech leader or a leader of a company who uses technology, that's what we call Bizer. Long story short, it is geared towards small medium sized companies that don't have access to all of the incredible modeling and data science people. You got a small team to your point, how do you make those decisions? So the strategy here is we've created some very intuitive, simple and also very low cost means to get access to some of those models that can give you profitability. What's the right thresholds? If you're to price a specific item in this retailer relative your competitors, where what's on shelf, what's the optimal price point, what's the optimal promotional threshold? So my, my advice to companies is hey, you may not have realized it, but you do now have access to something that is extremely affordable. But you've got to come to the Walmarts, you got to come to your retail partners with some data to back it up. You know what's going to be the impact to you? What's it going to do for your volume, what's it going to do for the retail store? In order to do that you have to do quite a bit of modeling. But again in the past wasn't achievable. Small, medium sized companies could not tell that story. And we're at a disadvantage in store and really what we're trying to do is level the playing field for these small companies. And I think the positive story is you can do that. Now you got to come with the data and the insights. And we've got awesome feedback from some of these small startups that came in with the whole pitch around. How are they going to change their promotional strategy? And the feedback from the retailer was like, wow, how the heck did you guys do this? Some of the medium and large companies aren't this sophisticated. So I think if you impress those buyers and have the right conversations with the right data, you know you're giving yourself the best chance of getting what you need to be successful and survive in this environment.

Yeah. Andrew, I'm curious with this tool because we have a couple of our clients that use it and we've been very happy with the data. But when we've got brands that are trying to understand from the consumer side what the impact would be on any price increase, how could your tool help them with that? Do you have any examples?

Yeah, no, it's a great point. There's a company I've been working with a fair amount called Serenity Kids, which is kind of a baby food company. So they've been doing fantastic. It's a company that's been growing double triple digits the last three years. As they're looking across the landscape, they're using Beiser to assess what's the category doing across baby food. This is packages. I've got a baby, so it's relevant. Top of mind for me. But what are competitors doing? What's the category doing? That's one. And then they're also going into our brand score solution that has all the analytics really powerful behind the scenes, very simple up front to your face on what to do. So they're getting a recommendation that says your optimal price threshold or your optimal promotional activity and promotional timing is this time of year. From that, they're also able to get access to our panel. So our household information. Now, not every brand is going to have enough coverage to be able to statistically say you've got enough representation of your brand. But in this case, this company did. And again, they're smaller brands doing a couple million in sales and they were able to look into their loyalty information to see am I getting a shift in loyalty? What's happening to other shoppers out there? Get some demographic information on my shopper. So again, we try to give it a whole solution that if you were the big CPG firms of the world, you had that at your fingertips. You're a small guy, you don't have that insight into shopper behavior. But now you do. That plus your retail measurement gives you something to be confident about, to tell your story, and then also to measure it. Right. Am I seeing a shift in buying behavior based on that household data? And then obviously in store, what are my actual volume and unit sales?

What shifts have you seen in the consumer's behavior this year? Are they trading down? Are they moving to store brand? What kind of things are you seeing?

Yeah, so I think I'll kind of just segment broadly into two kind of buyer bases. Very broad stroke here. One, I would say is the more premium buyers, which is they are moving to a space of much less price concern. They're willing to pay a premium price to get something. We talk about the Omniworld delivered right to them. I don't want to go into store for this. Give me an I will pay a premium price for it. Then we've got the shopper base who I think over the last 12 months, maybe 18 months has started to return in store. But also online is very promotion oriented, going for the lowest price. And that's a significant percent of the population. I think we've got some stats that's like 40% are completely driven by promotional activity. So I think what we're seeing is a split. Those who are very price conscious, potentially going more into store, more focused on what activity you have, whether it's coming out for the holidays this year. And then we've got also a more premiumization than we had before. Because of the environment that we're in, people are willing to spend much, much more. Even if they had a premium brand, they can now achieve actually much higher price than they could in the past and customers are still going to pay it. So my point there is it really depends on your brand. It depends on your positioning and where you want to be in this new landscape. And depending on that, you're going to set your strategy on the high side, low side, again depending on retailer as well.

So would you agree then that that during a time like this of some rapid inflation, that the best thing. Would you agree that the best thing that a brand can do is to continue to differentiate themselves and make sure that their consumer understands why they're different?

I mean, so definitely I think it's differentiating yourself both on the shelf with a few things. One, there's a price element to it, which is are you going to use this as an opportunity to differentiate yourself if others are taking price up, are you going to take price in line? That's a decision just following the bandwagon doesn't necessarily do much for you. Do you want to be premium or are you going to try to stay lower cost? So there's an opportunity there in that pricing element. Second to that is just your brand equity, which is what can you double down on? Because I think something that's interesting is as the world's been forced to more online engagements, it does open up, especially in the S and P space, more exposure to brands that didn't have a ton of shelf space might have been at the bottom or at the very top, right. You Couldn't pay. From a slotting piece standpoint, you were limited. But now in an online space, someone opens up an app and just wants to have something delivered or a pickup. You're kind of getting exposed to a lot more brands as you're doing your online searching. So I think that does definitely bring up some opportunities and kind of building your brand recognition, whether that's more promotions, whatever it might be in an online space that can get your brand more recognized and again, you can reshape your price levels and what that threshold should be for your brand.

So that's fantastic. We work with a lot of, we have a lot of premium brands that we work with specifically. And so I'm wondering, based on what you described as far as your buyers, I'm kind of curious. We've got inflation happening and it's going to continue to happen. And you've mentioned a little bit this new online shopping experience that has really taken off in the last year and a half, two years here. So how does that affect a brand? Are we seeing any trends of either one of these buyers, whether it's premium or lower shopper spending more time online versus in store for their shopping?

Yeah, I think we're definitely seeing, you're seeing a lot more engagement online, a lot more research. So we, I feel like I'm rattling off companies we've acquired, but we've done some really cool space and cool stuff in this space. Another company acquired called Label Insights. So I don't know if you're familiar with Label Insights. Credible company that does some great characteristic. Insights, does a huge amount of analysis of products and packaging and gives us a lot of derived attributes. But one of the things they also provide for the industry is insights into what people are searching online. And I think what we've found and what we're seeing in some of those trends is that people are not necessarily going in anymore and searching your premium brand. They're not necessarily doing that. You're going to your iPhone, you're saying I need paper towels or I want, you know, organic something mix, you know, cereal mix. But you're not necessarily pushing in Kashi. Right. As an example, typing that in always. And so what we're finding out, huge opportunity to make sure that the metadata around your premium brand, as an example, what you're referencing is properly tagged. And what we found in the data is that brands are not doing a good job of this, that a huge percentage of searches are missing, actually a large amount of products that meet those criteria or those brands are taking Advantage of certain claims. So a premium brand may have the ingredients that actually makes them ketogenic, but they're not listing that in the information. And so when I go into my app to search keto friendly waffles, is the right thing going to come up. And oftentimes it doesn't. So I think there's a huge opportunity for premium brands to be smarter about that online strategy. Likewise for less premium brands. Right. It's thinking about how to get your face and your promotional activity out there.

Now, it used to be that the brick and mortar buyers didn't care what you were doing on Amazon. It seems to me that that's kind of changed now the brick and mortar people are paying attention to Amazon. Would you agree with that?

Yeah, yeah. I think the whole world is watching Amazon to agree now because it used.

To be they didn't care. You could go in and say, hey, we're doing $5 million on Amazon. And that didn't impress a retailer to decide to.

Yeah, yeah.

But that seems to be changing.

Yeah. I think especially what we're seeing with some of the smaller brands, you know, some of the companies that I've been talking to just this past week, right. Starting these companies, a lot of these startups, oftentimes starting in a DTC space. Right. The historical was you created a product, you tried to get entry into, I would say retail store. Now it's oftentimes you're building your brand first in a DTC format, lower cost, lower entry fee, et cetera. You're getting some sort of momentum in dtc. Then you're probably going on to some partner platforms, going on to Amazon. You know, it's not as profitable for you, but you need to start getting that volume. And that's giving you enough of a brand equity to then go into retail and say, hey, I've got all this momentum. Check out how I'm unique. Or example again with some of our health and wellness data with label insights. Check out how I'm uniquely organic and ketogenic compared to these other flavors you have on your shelf. You should bring me within your shelf space. I think that's the momentum of where some of these smaller companies are introducing themselves versus the historical trajectory.

You literally just gave the pitch that we give new clients when we want them to start. D2C.

All right, there we go.

We do this all the time, very often now we're telling people, look, we're going to start you direct to consumer. We're going to do walmart.com, amazon.com, we're going to set your site up to be E commerce friendly. We're going to go build your brand. We're going to sell 50 to 100,000 pieces of this product. We're going to build up a pent up demand. Then we're going to go to retail with our pent up demand.

That's perfect. Hey, data doesn't lie.

There you go. Yeah. Your data backs up what literally what.

We do every single day. That's, that's amazing.

And we built a lot of brands doing that. And, and the reality is, as you know, I can't always get a yes from a brick and mortar buyer. I do get a yes. It might be 12 to 18 months before they even reset their plan.

Right, Right.

But I can start my direct to consumer business any moment that I decide to pull the trigger on. So I can do it when I want to. Now we've talked about price increases. What about supply chain? We've had a lot of our clients this year. We've had two problems that have hit some of our clients, Andrew. One of them is labor shortages in their own plants where they can't hire enough people to make the sausage. And the second one is material shortages where they can't get ingredients. We've had can't get plastic caps for their bottles.

Sure.

It goes all over the place. What I think the clients do there.

Yeah. So I think that the labor shortage, it's a tough spot. Right. I don't think there's a silver bullet. I think is what we're all finding out. And if you had a silver bullet, it might work one month and it's going to be different two months from now. I think two points of advice. One is what a lot of companies are realizing is they need to have multiple avenues in their supply chain.

Right.

Just a single critical path within your supply chain is not successful. You've got to have multiple vendors at different points in your supply chain that are not 100% of a supply for just one item. Right. You kind of split 50, 50 and so you've got a broader base. You don't have all your eggs in one basket essentially. So that's point one. Two is there is a flip side to this. When you talk about the ingredients, you've got limitations or you don't have bottle caps and you're going to have a shortage for X amount of months. Is it an opportunity to go after a different packaging strategy? Right. You had bottle caps. Now let's go to paper format. Right. Can you come up with a different innovation. Now you're kind of being forced down an innovation path. So it's not maybe ideal, but it's at least presenting something in a different way and gives you an opportunity to come to the market with a varied product, different package, maybe it's a different flavor set. So I think some companies are starting to think like that out of just simply necessity.

Right.

Like you can't, the answer can't just be, I'm just going to sit here and do nothing. Like you've got to do something. And so it's, how do you take advantage of this situation to say, can I package? Can I come up with a different ingredient mix? It's not going to taste the same, but maybe it's a new offering and I'm going to do that. And if I've got good relations with my retail partners, they know the situation I'm in, I'm going to try to continue with another product or continuation until I can bring that one fully back online. So that would be my advice there.

This really exposed the weaknesses in what has been for years the just in time model manufacturing. Because we were all building around just in time and now all of a sudden just in time is. It's not there now. And we really see that in the car companies right now, where there are no new cars on the floor, there are dealerships right here in our neighborhood who have zero new cars in inventory, which is amazing.

Yeah, spot on. We're trying to get a family car. So I'm looking for a bigger car. Right. And there's nothing out there. But I think it's, I think it's a fair point.

Right.

The just in time aspect of whether it's CPG supply chain or car supply chain. And then I think it's a lot of those, by becoming hyper efficient with minimal inventory, also got very reliant on single suppliers.

Right.

And I think that's, that's a risk.

Right.

Where geographically your suppliers are and do you have a single source? You're really setting yourself up for any global disruption. And I think what you, what we're moving towards is you need to have multiple geographic inputs that are semi redundant. So it's maybe not a flaw of just having just in time, but you need a couple different just in time paths as well as obviously some inventory buffers along the way.

So right now it's December 1st as we record this show today, I believe. So we're coming up on 2022. Time is going by extremely fast.

Yeah, terrifying. Unbelievable.

Yes. And I'm probably older than both of you, which means time accelerates faster for me.

You're welcome.

Well, that's a whole other topic. But yes, we faster as we get older, what do you see as the biggest problems, roadblocks or opportunities for 2022 for our CPG clients?

Unfortunately, it's like a continuation of what we've been facing and I think just in the news in the last couple of weeks with endless variants. You just never know when this kind of environment omurage. Yeah.

With.

Oh for exactly when this is really going to be over at the reality is it's not right. It's almost going to become a part of the daily life. I think the supply chain that's number one, that's going to be the biggest challenge. It's not something you can wait for that to be over. To my point earlier, you have to solve for it and you're going to have to get creative on your ingredients or packaging suppliers, localization, et cetera. I think another challenge that that's going to drive though is retailers are starting to think about this of I've got to have product on the shelf. And so what we are seeing is a reduction in SKUs in retail format. So we've seen about a 5% reduction year over year, which is significant when you actually look at it on a. On a total US level.

Are we talking SKU rationalization or are we talking.

Yes. Yep. Skew.

Skew inventory issues.

Yeah, skew rationalization. So fewer SKUs on shelf, which is. When you look at that macro across the US that is. That's major. So I think what it's telling us is that these retailers are going to look at you on can they rely on what you're able to provide from an inventory standpoint. If not, they might start leaning more on their own private label capabilities if they have inventory. So that might be a reduction in store of the number of SKUs or FACINGS. The second though, flip side of that, and I think some retailers are doing this is a localization aspect. Less focus on a broad supply chain that's outside. But if there's local abilities or local emerging brands, those actually have an opportunity here to get more space than they maybe could have had in the past because of the issues with some of the national brand supply chains that are much deeper and much more internationally more.

Prevalent in the food arena. Sure.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think again, risk or something.

Yeah, A lot in grocery.

So risk, but also potential.

Right.

I think it's the flip side Right. There's pros and cons to what's happening for sure.

So we were looking at, we talked about this and I'll share this with you. So Harvard has studied the CPG space and they claim that there's roughly 30,000 new SKUs introduced into the country every year and only 5% of that 30,000 succeed. So when you think about that, only 1500, on average only 1,500 new products a year make it. And out of that 1500, 80 to 90% of those are presented by either a big brand or an established brand. So when you think of the startup world, when you think of people rolling out their new product, mathematically there's probably only 150 to 200 new first time SKUs that make it onto the shelf and stick and make it. So you really have to have all eight cylinders firing to make it today.

Yeah, I think part of it, it's also having the rights. So I think it's two things. One, knowing the risks in front of you. So I'll give an example. Within our Pfizer platform, we actually have a whole measure as part of a performance scoring system that looks at your risk of delistment. And so we actually have it listed so you can look across your entire portfolio, you can look at competitors and see their risk of delistment. So use it both ways. Right. What's my risk? What's the competitive risk? And then I think it's also using that information to help guide you. So we have automated alerts that will guide you on your risk of delistment. And the second component is how do you tell your story to help prevent that? You need to be able to tell that story. If you're having a supply chain out issue, if you're having something that's effective, you but you're able to tell your brand story, your momentum, or maybe it's velocity and another, you know, other banners, you can't say exactly who, but you know more broadly that you've got the right base that's going to make you, that's going to help you be stickier in those retail banners. If you're just flying blind and you're just hoping that, you know they're going to notice that your sales are magically going up, that's not necessarily going to happen. I think that's part of the challenge. The 30,000 is actually interesting because we have a Nielsen number that I believe is around 30,000. I saw one around 40,000 new SKUs that get added in the US every year. So one, we've also seen an increase in SKUs in the last two years. So the increase in startups, if you look at it from a, you know, actually from a US Bureau of like number of business applications, this is broader than CPG. Massive spike in 2020 and 2021. People starting up companies. Because you're sitting at home now, that flowed into cpg, right? You're thinking of a new food, you're crafting something, you want to start a brand. So I think if anything, there's more innovation happening right now than ever. At the same time, it's that much harder to be successful because supply chain inflation, et cetera. But you need to be able to tell that story if you're going to stick into retail.

Absolutely. Well, yeah, and you said retail too, because that's the thing. We have these conversations with brands all the time and it all starts with what are you trying to accomplish? What's the level that you define as success? Because in most CPG categories, brick and mortar is where you can really break through. But it's so much harder today to do it.

Especially they've cut another 5% of the SKUs.

Right. And because then you think about it, how many? Again, Amazon's taking as many points or more than some brick and mortar retailers do now. So it's very hard to be profitable if you're going to be there. So then you're going to rely on just your E commerce direct sales alone to try to run your company. But when 40% of everything bought online is bought on Amazon, that's not really going to get you to where you want to go.

It's pretty impossible to launch digitally and not be Amazon, not on Amazon. If you're Apple, you can do that. Well, sure, but how many Apples are there?

Right. And this kind of brings us back to what we've been talking about here. We got 2022 coming up and I just want to list off what we talked about so far. We've got more brands that are being.

Launched with fewer slots.

With fewer slots. Costs are going up across the board, right? Materials, shipping, you name it, costs are all going up.

So we're sounding very negative.

Let's spin the positive, guys.

We're going to spin it.

No kidding.

This is how we're going to spin it. So that's why we're going to lean on you here. So what can CPG brands do with all of these challenges and for to be successful?

So I think the silver lining here, what's driving a lot of this is demand is really high. Yes, we've got supply chain issues, all that, but that's because you're seeing across a number of categories, demand is significantly higher than in the past. You've seen the trends. Obviously there were in 2020, in the beginning, you had spikes with the unique products, center store products that people were buying and filling their whole garage. But in general, we have seen increases across a number of categories. So demand, people are consuming more. People are consuming more at home. So if you're in the CPG world, that's a good thing. That's causing or a potential impact of a lot of what's happening. So there's a silver lining there that there is more demand out there and that is growing. The second component is, I think while people have had more time to be at home, people are more connected to the Internet. They're having more time to get connected to lifestyle themes and lifestyle choices. So my advice to companies in 2022 is really go deep on your lifestyle and brand. What are you representing in the marketplace with your food? For us, we work a lot with wellness companies and that's across anything from diets to how your ingredients are farmed to how your packaging. Is it sustainable? People care about that now. You've had more time to reflect on what you're consuming and your health. And so I think whether that's consumption of food or it's products you're using in your home, cleaning products, et cetera, all of that matters a lot more than it used to. And if you're able to break through with your brand and your lifestyle and connect with us again, a subset of the population that's going to help you in this era of demand has gone up. It's Omni online and in store and everything in between, and you can still definitely be successful. We're not in an environment where all this is happening and demand has gone down 10% and we're struggling. It's actually the pie is growing, but it's harder for you to actually achieve, you know, the broader growth and volume that you really want to have in that pie.

So, Andrew, if you would tell our listeners how they can learn more about Nielsen iq, because there's some great tools here.

Yeah.

So how can they learn more about it? How can they get involved with it?

Yeah, for sure. So first off, we've got a number of different products and solutions with Nielsen iq. So whether you're looking at pricing optimization, promotion, help with assortment, you're doing innovation work. Definitely. Check out nielseniq.com if you're in the SMB space. So meaning you're a small startup, medium sized company newer to data. We've got an incredible solution called Byzer. You can go to byzer.com b y z z e r.com we've actually got a free, a free subscription. So for anyone who signs up you can get access to three free reports. It's on us, right. For a single category you can get a weekly alert. So you can pretty quickly get some data to understand, you know, what are some higher level trends. And then from there you can go further with various subscriptions that are a month to month basis. So really flexible. Again we're all about kind of this data revolution here and empowering small and medium sized businesses.

And to me this is the best of both worlds because when I look at CPG marketing, as you know Justin, we have a long successful history here and a lot of that history is based on our experience. But when you can combine that experience with the data now, you get yet better insights and better potential outcomes.

Well, I think Andrew talked about earlier, I think the demand for data is much higher than it's ever been and.

The buyers want you to show.

That's what I'm saying. I think, and we've seen this in the past where sometimes prestige of your network could help push you down the field. But I think right now the demand for show me the numbers and backing up what you're saying, it might make sense what you're saying, but I got to see some data behind. I think it's higher than it's ever been.

Well, one of the things I like about Andrew's tools is like one of his tools will tell you your risk of delisting, but it'll tell you the risk of your competitors delisting. If you're trying to find some shelf space in a category, knowing who's the most vulnerable is a huge benefit.

Right. You walk into that meeting and you say, I know these guys aren't doing so hot. Here's why we'd be better.

Absolutely. Here's the people you can afford to get rid of to give me a shot.

Yeah, that's huge.

Do you see it? Do you see your information used like that, Andrew?

Oh yeah. No, I mean absolutely. We try to bring transparency right to the marketplace and you shouldn't have things that are, that are hidden in that manner. And so, you know, you can look at competitors, you can look at what's working and then likewise look at, hey, this is not working very well. This isn't a you know, there are a lot of things at risk here. You're not performing to the way that this product should be. Therefore, hey, my product can do X, Y and Z. I can definitely back up your story in retail. We've seen it happen.

I've always found that the best route in to a buyer is to do as much of the buyer's work and legwork for you and then to give them a story that any reasonable person would say yes to. Because it's easier to say no than it is to say yes.

Yeah, 100%. I love it. It's spot on.

So paint a picture so that if they say yes and it fails, their own boss would look at this package and say, yeah, I would have said yes to that too.

Exactly.

It was reasonable that you said yes to this. And that's really, to me, that is about walking here with great hard data and show me an advertising and marketing campaign that I can argue I don't want to not be a part of. Andrew's been great, folks. If you go to the show notes@cpginsiders.com look for the show notes with Andrew as the guest and you go there and we'll have links to these, the separate websites that he has here. And Andrew, we'll get your information too. So people that want to subscribe, great contact you.

Love it.

Wonderful connecting with you guys here.

It's great having you on, folks. That's it for this week on CPG Insiders. As always, if you like the show, leave us five star review wherever you get your podcast. And again, remember that Justin, myself, any of the people here at Jekyll and Hyde are happy to take your calls, take your emails. You do not have to spend money or sign contracts to be able to call us and ask for help. We love entrepreneurship. We live and breathe the CPG world and we're here to see people succeed. And we want you to succeed. We'll see you on the next show, everybody. One more reminder, shall I say one more shameless reminder that my new book Hypnotizing comes out 12-7-99. If you download it this week on Amazon. The link to get it is right in the Show Notes. Please go download it. It really is a great book and I really appreciate it. Thanks. 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 800542.