The Branded Pantry

I read Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey Moore a number of years ago.  The book describes the successful introduction of disruptive or discontinuous innovations into a marketplace, and the challenges presented therein.  It also tries to outline the differences between discontinuous and continuous (which do not force significant customer behavioral changes) innovations and the methods and hurdles faced by each.  It is not always easy to determine whether the innovation introduced is discontinuous or not.  Perhaps the audience to which the innovation is introduced may determine the degree to which behavioral discomfort is experienced.

I remember, introducing ScanTrack, Nielsen’s replacement for it’s audit service in the U.S..  John Walling and I ran pretty much for a year from client/prospect to client/prospect meeting and found manufacturers were certainly willing if not eager to accept the innovation.    They did not always like the trade offs (losing inventory and out of stocks, but gaining granularity in both products and frequency), and they certainly hated dealing with the loss of market trends. However, by and large they broadly accepted the switch.    The Nielsen client service executives had a much harder time accepting the innovation as they had become masters at assembling disparate data in order to spin the mundane bi-monthly audit findings to life for their clients.  That set of capabilities and skills became less relevant overnight and so the behavior change required to add value to this new information was dramatic, in many cases very much resented and for some impossible to overcome.

Later at MyWebGrocer the consumers were easy!   Early adopters WANTED to try online grocery shopping and it has evolved becoming more acceptable for the rest of the population.  Most consumer limitations today are because of exposure (it is not offered very widely) and other constraints imposed by the retailers.  However, the bricks and mortar retailers through whom the online groceries are sold (for the most part) have been very cautious about signing up.   That caution may be due to reluctance to invest in labor “on the come” which is necessary to support picking orders.  Those that have taken the plunge have generally found it worthwhile, but it is a leap in a time when retailers are trying to squeeze as much as possible from labor costs.  The current pressure of Amazon and Walmart aimed at establishing a significant beachhead in this arena should ease some of that grocer reluctance to participate.

In our current efforts at ShelfSnap we have gained a pretty amazing amount of interest and trial, despite the absolute dearth of funds for innovating.   ShelfSnap of course uses digital pictures of in-store conditions as its input fodder.  Image recognition and spatial analytic tools turn pictures into products, positions, facings and conditions in the database for whatever analysis or comparisons vs. plan that need to be made.   All of those trials have ended up showing very, very significant ROI potential from in-store compliance opportunities, much higher than ever suspected.   Getting people over that next “chasm” which is to put the Shelfsnap service into everyday use, measuring and driving improved compliance is a much bigger leap.

In one case we heard about a manufacturer who is using a scan-the-barcode audit technique and has honed the process down to the point where the time it takes in-store to audit is comparable to the time it takes to capture pictures and the errors are “acceptable”.  In this case the old technology has been tuned to gain every last bit of efficiency, while the newer technology, ours, is still relatively at the beginning of the improvement curve.  There is nowhere to go in the old technology but perhaps by stretching it one or two more years they will at least not have to change.    At another manufacturer, after some work to align our processes we cut in-store time by 80% and data manipulation by by 70% by switching to ShelfSnap.

In another case we demonstrated for a retailer how our service could show them voids and stock outs in a high profit refrigerated category.  The merchandising executive lamented that he was sure that we were right but his store resources wouldn’t be able to fix the problem even with the near-real time exception reports.    Up the road at about the same time another retailer, an early adopter, was putting the 20% deviation from plan that had affected one of their categories back in pristine shape.

I will be musing quite a bit over the next weeks about how to ease the pain of crossing this chasm for our clients.I will report back from time to time as the thoughts develop.If you have any suggestions….I would welcome them.