Opportunities in a changing CPG market
As the consumer landscape changes, it stands to reason that the promotions that resonate will change with it. Ongoing inflation concerns are causing consumers to reevaluate how they spend — and pushing Revenue Growth Management and Trade Spend teams to get creative. It’s common to lean on tried-and-true promotional strategies, but market conditions change, and last year’s consumer may not have the same priorities today.
Market challenges present new opportunities for promotion software teams. By leveraging innovations in AI, testing new promotion strategies, and staying adaptable to changing shopping patterns, you can deliver tailored promotions that can help drive consumer purchasing behaviors.
Emerging trends from 2023 suggest that a better promotion software can empower your business to reach consumers in innovative new ways — and in this article, we’ll discuss how. Let’s explore how you can leverage promotion software to best serve shoppers for the following four key trends for 2024 CPG consumer behavior:
• Consumers are adopting omnichannel shopping habits
• Inflation is still affecting consumer purchase behaviors
• Good timing can increase promotion effectiveness
• AI-powered promotion software is improving strategies
Trend #1: Consumers are adopting omnichannel shopping habits
Whether they shop at brick-and-mortar locations, browse online, or use services like Instacart, consumers are conducting cross-platform research to find promotions, discounts, and other shopping benefits.
Promotions should not only drive purchases in this interconnected landscape — they should also improve your organization’s perception with consumers. But traditional tools and historical data limit your organization to analyzing what has worked in the past, cannot give you new insights to apply to strategies, and don’t reflect the real-time preferences and current shopping behaviors of the omni-channel consumer over time. As a result, your team may spend more time analyzing obsolete or incomplete data, impacting your efficiency while guiding your strategy away from the direction consumers are heading.
Your promotion software should empower your team to analyze promotional execution at scale and improve promotion effectiveness across the board. AI-powered software can connect you to the most recent consumer data by way of real-time promotion experimentation directly with your real shoppers, freeing up time for your team to focus on your next strategy.
Trend #2: Inflation is still affecting consumer purchase behaviors
Consumers are actively adapting to inflation’s effect on food prices, which can lead to changes in basket size, shopping frequency, and brand choices to account for higher costs. Consumers are becoming more price sensitive, and thus more inclined to hunt for bargains, discounts, and promotions.
This creates a unique opportunity for your team to implement effective promotion strategies — and your promotion software will be a key ingredient to doing so successfully. There are challenges in this changing landscape that your team will need to account for, including promotion choice, performance monitoring, and obsolete consumer data, to deploy your promotion software and meet consumers where they are. Let’s break this down further.
Promotion choice
Knowing which promotion to amplify is key. But with a fluid market, it’s difficult to select a strategy that boosts promotion effectiveness if your promotion software can’t test new ideas.
Performance monitoring
Monitoring multiple promotions at once can quickly become time-consuming for your team.
Obsolete consumer data
Readily available consumer data is often historical or back-ward looking. As a result, you may be working with data that’s no longer applicable to today’s consumer.
To address these challenges, you can deploy AI and promotion software to optimize promotion decisioning, analyze patterns, and strategize with today’s data.
Trend #3: Powerful insights can increase promotion effectiveness
Discounts are important to the modern CPG consumer. For promotion teams, implementing well-timed discounts can encourage larger baskets and drive consumer satisfaction.
But how can your team decide which promotion is the right promotion to deploy? Your promotion software can provide detailed analytics on which promotions can drive successful results by giving consumers what’s important to them. With this information, your team can deploy informed promotions that drive results for your business.
Trend #4: AI-powered promotion software is improving strategies
AI can equip your team with insights that save time and boost productivity. Promotion software using AI has a demonstrated history of increasing revenue for organizations. For example, Eversight by Instacart’s Offer Innovation promotion software has influenced 10–25% sales growth for CPG companies.*
*Prior results do not guarantee future outcomes.
Eversight’s AI-powered promotion software goes beyond extracting historical data — it provides real-time consumer insights by testing promotions directly with real consumers. This innovative approach produces low-risk, high-value insights that can help your teams understand how to develop, deploy, and define successful promotions using today’s data. Eversight by Instacart’s Offer Innovation solution also empowers your team with the ability to create in-app Promotion Playbooks for your team to be able to activate in-market promotions with precise, holistic guidance, as well as Recommendations Reports that can be leveraged to prove the viability of new promotional strategies with retailers and partners, and streamline sell-in.
AI and promotions can empower your team with multi-dimensional analytics — and help you craft promotions that matter to consumers.
Upgrade your promotion software with Eversight by Instacart’s Offer Innovation
Tapping into today’s consumer trends — and creating a new strategy — begins with a powerful promotion software, and Eversight by Instacart’s Offer Innovation is purpose-built to meet your needs. Offer Innovation:
• Powers low-risk experimentation. Develop a promotion strategy that’s suited for today’s consumer.
• Equips you with analytics and insights. Drive real-world results with recommendations tailored to your business.
• Optimizes for an omnichannel world. Maximize promotion effectiveness across channels with Offer Innovation’s Promotion Playbooks.
• Enables continuous experimentation with pointed insights. Leverage consumer-centric insights and scalable capacity for insights that are always relevant.
For smaller teams, Eversight Access uses the same powerful AI of Offer Innovation, scaled to help CPG brands become acclimated to promotion performance management.
However you plan your promotion strategy, Eversight by Instacart’s Offer Innovation promotion software can help you differentiate yourself in a changing market — and deliver the right promotion to consumers. Learn how you can get started with Eversight today!