A brand element is a logo, slogan, name, or design that’s used to give a brand an identity. Foster Farms uses the image of a rooster as their logo, the slogan “Always Natural. Always Fresh.”, and the word “Farms” in their name to indicate they’re not an industrial “chicken factory”.

If you’re creating a new brand (or trying to revitalize an old one), pick brand elements that consumers can instantly recognize and recall. It’s also a good idea to choose brand elements that are descriptive of the products under that brand. Ask yourself, “If the brand elements are all a consumer knows about my brand, how would they think or feel about the product?” Based solely on the name, a consumer might expect Avon’s Skin So Soft to soften their skin and Heineken’s Dos Equis to be a Mexican-style beer.

There are six core criteria you can use to evaluate potential brand elements:

1. Meaningful – Does the brand element suggest something about the type of person who might purchase the products? Is it suggestive of both the products and the category they belong to? Good examples are Nestle’s Lean Cuisine, FHP’s O’Cedar, and GSK’s Aquafresh. Read more…

A very interesting report was published about two weeks ago by NCH Marketing Services, a Valassis company. It was titled, “2010 Coupon Facts Report”, and the most important insight it offered was that CPG manufacturers offered $485 billion worth of coupons in 2010. That is a 13.9% increase over the previous year and a 47.4% increase over five years ago.

Clearly grocery and cosmetic shopping have become different ballgames ever since the latter part of 2008. Consumers are more strategic in their shopping due to worries about their pocketbooks. But to dig a little deeper past the obvious recession era trends, I thought it would be interesting to pull out a few of the more prominent points brought up in the report:

• Nearly two thirds of all coupons offered in 2010 were for grocery items – up 8% from the prior year.
• The remaining one third were for health and beauty care products.
• The average coupon face value distributed for HBC products was $1.94 – up 6.6 percent from the prior year.
• Consumers now have a week and a half less time to use coupons, compared to the prior year, due to an overall shortening of offer expiration dates in both the grocery and HBC segments. The average expiration is 10.1 weeks. Read more…

Over a year ago on this blog I posted information about the rate at which new data was being produced each year. It involved the plethoric number of iPods it would take to hold the year’s data – a number which would have filled a similarly excessive number of football stadiums with said iPods. The point is that this is the language we have begun to use when discussing the ever-increasing amount of data generated by humans and machines each year.

Well here’s a new one: according to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, quoted in a recent CGT Magazine article, the company now creates 5 exabytes of data every three days. To trump the iPod-football stadium illustrations of yesteryear, 5 exabytes is the amount of information created from the beginning of time through 1978. Read more…

Resulting from innovation and customer feedback, DataAlchemy is now a cleaner, more efficient solution with the release of DA 6.3.  This major release provides increased productivity through greater automated functionality and additional formatting, which allowfor quicker data translation. During our June 14th live webinar, alqemyiQ’s COO Glenn Geho will demonstrate time-saving features that are being introduced in this major release of alqemyiQ’s data analytics software solution.  Experience how DA users will benefit from the ease of use in: Read more…

Within the conversation surrounding the evolving effort of processing and analyzing the ever-expanding amount of retail data, there is an interesting new development. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has added a minor in Retail Technology to their offered curriculum. The first of its kind in the country, this program will offer students specialized computer-based courses resulting in greater exposure to the technology that has been transforming the industry over recent years. It will also, the university hopes, allow graduates to practically walk into jobs that utilize this technology – being better prepared than their peers.

The minor will be offered for the first time this coming fall. Assistant Professor of Retail and Consumer Science, Rod Runyan, says of the new minor, Read more…

Walmart is working to expand its market share in India, and it is doing so aggressively. Since Walmart entered the Indian market, the company partnered with Bharti Enterprises to open six wholesale stores to date, with four locations in the state of Punjab alone. As with any initial infiltration of a market, there are barriers to entry in India’s retail market. But then again, this is Walmart we are talking about.

One such barrier is the fact that India has not fully opened its retail market to foreign companies. Last year, after India’s Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) was non-committal on foreign investments in retail, the DIPP invited opinions from large retailers and small shop owners about foreign direct investment in multi-brand retail. And that discussion still continues. Read more…

Date/Time:  2/2/11, 2:00-3:00 PM EST

Registration: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/392270160

Overview: Whether you are familiar with the Data Import Wizard or new to the DataAlchemy solution, this 45 minute webinar is worth your time. The webinar will highlight the use of the Data Import Wizard that is available within the DataAlchemy tool, demonstrating how non-standard data sets can be quickly transformed into easily interpreted DataAlchemy reports. Read more…

The amount of necessary information that businesses must process in order to stay competitive grows with each year.  Because of this, the need for a unifying platform to manage that data will only become more evident as time goes by. If your company has not yet found a solution to make incoming data as valuable as possible, rest assured it will have to. In recent consumer goods news, we see another example of a company with global  presence climbing aboard the bandwagon of a unified data management solution. Read more…

 In the 2010 Reader’s Choice Survey in CGT magazine, the Consumer Products National Industry Practice Branch of the company Hitachi Consulting was ranked number four in the nation.  What is a nationally  ranked consumer goods consulting company researching in 2010? If you are in an organization that makes business decisions informed by specified industry data, the answer shouldn’t surprise you: Read more…