A TOOL OF CHOICE FOR BRAND MARKETING

PAT NATSCHKE LENIUS

Among brand marketers, in-store demonstrations are gaining in popularity as the demo industry becomes larger and more sophisticated.

Manufacturers view sampling not only as a tool to stimulate trial and close the sale with the shopper, but also as a consumer education opportunity that can contribute to brand awareness.

Kellogg Co., Battle Creek, Mich., has been using in-store demos as an educational tool, according to Karen Macleod, director of communications. Recently, she said, Kellogg demos have informed consumers about alternative uses for existing products.

"Our Crispix cereal was introduced in 1983, but recently we have been scheduling demos of a snack mix made with Crispix. It is a popular snack. We have a lot of snack recipe ideas," she said.

"We introduced a low-fat granola cereal in 1992 but only recently have started promoting hot usage of the cereal with milk or apple juice. We wanted to demonstrate how the product is great hot as well as cold. It is kind of unique to serve a low-fat granola cereal as a hot cereal," Macleod said.

Kellogg provides training manuals to assist in training the in-store demonstrators, she said.

Lever Bros., New York, has chosen not to sample its soap and detergent products in supermarkets, but has used in-store demonstrators to distribute coupon booklets for its products, said Doug LaTrenta, promotion operations manager.

"A couple of years ago, Lever Bros. was a big player in putting together in-store coupon handout programs. We were handing out booklets of coupons. A lot of that was driven by the opportunity to get a large quantity of display pallets of our products into each store where we distributed the coupon booklets.

"For a two-day period, seven to eight hours a day, we had a demonstrator handing out high-value coupon booklets that served to pull the product out of the stores. We were doing national programs in excess of 15,000 store-days," he said.

Those programs were expensive, and while most retailers were very cooperative, about half would not get the pallet in the store, said LaTrenta. That meant a program would be half as successful as Lever thought it should be.

"Since then technology has improved. We tested instant coupon dispensing machines on the store shelf. Right now we are looking at doing some instant coupon machines but we have not lost sight of doing actual demonstrations in-store because that really catches the retailers' attention, which is the first step to any successful in-store program," he said.

Another trend in the demo industry, toward establishing preferred or exclusive relationships between demo companies and retailers, has required some adjustment on the part of manufacturers, he said. "A lot of times a big company would like to work with one agency and let it contact each of the retailers that our program is going into. Now working with so many different preferred suppliers, it complicates the program. We hope when retailers specify a preferred supplier they are choosing the best demo agency in that market rather than basing the relationship on favoritism," LaTrenta said.

Training of demo people has been especially important for the introduction of new products, LaTrenta said. For example, greater effort was spent on training in support of the introductions of Lever 2000 soap and the new double-power liquid detergents. For established brands, a manual is usually deemed sufficient as a training tool, he said.

"We always have one or two key lines that the demonstrator should always remember to say to consumers. They only have a few seconds to introduce the product and the coupon booklet to the consumer. The demonstrator is our representative for those days, so he or she should be as well informed as possible," LaTrenta said. Caryn Crump, director of grocery marketing at Coca-Cola Foods, Houston, is running a major demo program in support of Minute Maid Naturals, a jar juice line. She said she sees demo activity expanding and the industry growing for several reasons.

"Consumers don't have a lot of time. If we can get them to try a product at point-of-purchase, we can instill a change in their behavior and generate immediate trial," she said.

She added, "We have developed products that we feel are superior in taste. Demos let the customer taste the product at point-of-purchase. They fit well with the type and quality of the product we have." It's important to train the demonstrators so that they can talk about the product intelligently and explain the benefits.