Virtual simulations offer quick and actionable solutions to common challenges facing CPG and retail teams. The key to getting started is understanding how virtual software can help optimize your teams’ varied responsibilities. Let’s explore four different CPG and retail functions, and how you can expect to benefit from a virtual strategy for each going forward.
Research
Insights teams often need to run multiple test and learn studies throughout the year. So while a typical research project takes months to set up and see results, virtual research can be done in just a few weeks, meaning less time and dollars spent on each project.
If you’re part of a brand team in charge of shopper research, you can use ShopperMX to quickly answer business questions ranging from how a new assortment performs on shelf to what shoppers will purchase if your product is out of stock.
Roles most benefited:
- Category Management
- Shopper Insights
- Shopper Marketing
How to use:
- Set up your research study with drag-and-drop capabilities in a virtual store
- Run eye tracking analysis
- Create Environment Experience Movies to share your data and vision
- Analyze your data with an interactive dashboard
Bottom line: With these tactics in place, setting up and fielding a research study is faster, and more impactful.
Visualization & Presentations
When competition is at an all-time high, brand teams need their concepts to stand out. During presentations to retail partners, simply providing numbers—however convincing they may be—isn’t always enough to make a big impression when it comes to selling in new ideas.
The benefit of virtual software here is that you can help your partners visualize your strategies and recommendations, and provide an engaging way to clearly understand the impact of your concept. Virtual takes visualizing data to a whole new dimension, literally.
Roles most benefited:
- Sales
- Category Management
- Shopper Marketing
How to use:
- Showcase your planograms, displays and signage within the context of the store
- Highlight your shelf to show product and category performance
- Leverage multi-media integration
- Visualize your data in 3D
- Create impact with Before and After visuals
- Bring presentations to life with 360 videos
- Go a step further with full-immersive virtual reality headsets
Bottom line: Creating realistic, 3D images and videos of your proposed planogram or new signage or displays packs a punch with retail partners.
Retail & Field Enablement
Are you traveling less? Seeing more people on Zoom than you do in person? Us too. If you’re part of a sales or field sales team, collaborating with and enabling retailers to understand your winning ideas is a challenge right now–unless you are using the right tools.
The cool thing about virtual simulations is you don’t have to be in the same room to feel like you are. In real-time, sales teams can use our 3D collaboration platform to engage retailer partners, giving you both a socially-distanced—yet hyper-realistic—way to interact with new retail concepts. Visualize the store together as you plan and make decisions. For example, you can create a path-to-purchase video of a buyer walking to your new assortment in the store. Plus, virtual store testing can be done collaboratively as part of a joint planning strategy.
If you’re in a field sales role, you know that you have a short amount of time to make a big impact. ShopperMX arms field teams with the ability to create simple walk-through videos with pre-determined waypoints to show the shopper journey. Finally, reps can access merchandising materials anywhere, at any time, with mobile. A mobile app enables a full store-level view of the displays and planograms prior to execution. Augmented Reality (AR) features create greater detail and understanding by viewing 3D concepts in the context of the physical store, in real-time.
Roles most benefited:
- Category Management
- Sales
- Field Sales
How to use:
- Stream a live virtual walk-through of the store
- Collaborate simultaneously from afar, with multi-user capabilities
- Help your retail partners visualize your data-backed concepts in real-time
- Create efficiency in the field with mobile apps and videos
Bottom line: In our currently socially-distanced world (and into the future) virtual enables sales and category teams to develop their working relationships, build trust, and thrive with better ways to collaborate on new ideas.
New Hire Training
When new hires join the team, in-store education is a key factor in getting them up to speed on your planograms, shelf assortments, and the category. But that process can be time consuming, and costly. We help by jump starting the process with virtual content that immerses individuals into the store.
With our virtual platform, you can create, build, and implement your concepts online, and then review those concepts with your employees in a hyper-realistic 3D store environment. Virtual allows you to edit on the fly, so you can easily and efficiently train your employees on their new responsibilities.
Roles most benefited:
- Training & Professional Development
How to use:
- Create a virtual replica of your current planograms and shelf sets
- Allow new hires to experience a virtual shopping exercise
- Take new hires through your concepts to help them understand the go-to-market process and strategy.
Bottom line: Safely and conveniently bring all your new hires to train in one place with the help of online virtual stores, with hyper-realistic training capabilities that mimic traditional in-person processes.
Change can seem overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Hopefully you now have a better understanding of the various ways virtual technology can be implemented and applied to everyday roles and tasks within the CPG space. Contact us to learn more!
