Transforming the Pet Care Category Through Shopper Based Design

ah welcome everybody to the 20/20 quarantined virtual insights conference my name is Bill McGowan I am the CEO of accelerator research okay see if that works yeah off to a roaring start here yeah so bill McDowell CEO of accelerant research we are gonna be hosting this conference that you all have graciously agreed to attend we have a fantastic lineup of speakers if you haven't seen that already I definitely encourage you to check out the list of those who are gonna be presenting it's great I think in the spirit of you know conferences we've got you know we're gonna try to keep this as as close to an in-person conference as possible under the circumstances of course knowing that you know here we all are dispersed and trying to navigate this thing as best we can I'm gonna kick us off for just a few minutes giving what we'll refer to as as our keynote as it were or kickoff for the conference sorry to disappoint I know T MRE gives you folks like Malcolm Gladwell I think Qualtrics does Oprah and Barack Obama you're stuck with me unfortunately so speaking of you get what you pay for obviously this is a free kind of conference so you're stuck you know I'm gonna go ahead and level set and mention you know that accelerant research were the ones hosting this we are an insights company we are not in event planning organization so you know what we've brought together some great speakers and great topics but you know it's gonna lack some of the polish that you might have from your typical research conference and honestly we're not gonna be really apologetic about that that's you know kind of the I don't know the coolness factor of what we've got going here you know I'm gonna refer to it to some votes that I have in front of me I'm not looking at a teleprompter and many of our speakers are gonna do the same this thing came together in you know just a handful of weeks kind of organically kind of just you know realization that you know we had internally here at accelerant that you know everyone is going remote all of the conference the conference's that we were hoping to implanted to attend were being canceled and you know we kind of came up with this idea we started reaching out to folks on our network and speaking with other insights folks and you know the idea started to take shape folks started to share with one another and all of a sudden what began as you know a couple of back-to-back webinars we had planned is all the way up to you know to chock full days of really good content I think we've got over 1,200 insights professionals that have have registered for this and they're planning on attending so you know it's something that we're really excited about I think we're just sort of taking advantage of you know the environment that we're up against again you know not an event planning company you know you you get what you pay for as it were you know I started off I told you about kind of where we how we got here I'm not going to spend much time we're gonna get right into the to the speakers but I did you know just want to go through our lineup just a little bit so we've got two days we've got several speakers lined up I'm just gonna scroll through a few of these there so we've got topics that are ranging right we're going from you know normal research under normal circumstances all the way up to you know some topics that are very relevant to what we're experiencing right now in the environment that we're all existing in right some are gonna get a little heavy in nature we've got a topic tomorrow on the subject of you know the job search in this current crazy environment and you know displacement that a lot of folks I'm imagining and attendants are dealing with but our intent is you know not to be too heavy what we want is something that and we're gonna be a bit light-hearted with with some of our content that's not to say that we're not all very aware of what's going on in the world today we're certainly not looking to downplay but what we do want to do is basically give a distraction for research professionals you know let's take advantage of the fact that we're you know kind of all in this together let's you know find a time that we can come together and and talk a little bit of shop you know because once we finish this you know once we get on on the other end of what's going on right now it's gonna be up to us as researchers we're gonna be tasked with you know after this you know dispersed environment you know while we're in this dispersed environment keeping our tools sharp from her from a research standpoint because the organization's are gonna lean on this and they're gonna trust us to be the ones to explain you know consumer mindset and you know in an environment where this guy came to a ridiculous popularity yeah we're gonna have to explain what's on people's minds and you know what the new norm looks like after after we emerge from all of this so I'm gonna hand off to to our first presenter in just a minute but first I wanted to take us through very quick ground rules for kind of how we're going to navigate this this entire conference you know and this is sort of to level set us right you know three rules that we're going to live by right one we're at the mercy of tech we're using zoom for this some of you are accessing the YouTube stream we've got a couple different options out there in hopes that you know we can string together a kind of as you know consistent as possible platform but everybody in their cousin right now is own a own remote meetings right we're all dispersed and I'm sure you guys have experienced it but the tech craps out on us sometimes and that is just the nature of what we're doing so you know we expect to have you know some glitches we've got presenters who are all you know working from home and trying to access and at the mercy of their own connectivity and grids that are being very strained so we're recording all sessions we will be reposting all sessions but you know if something goes out it is what it is will you know will catch you on the replay as it were you know we're not an in-person conference here right where you can you know if you say something if you make a comment during your presentation that's truly offensive you run the risk of actually bumping into this person you know during some of the meet and greets during the conference this is remote in nature so you know we have to try to avoid the trolling let's be respectful of one another our lineup of speakers I mean this has come together in a matter of three and a half four weeks so the folks that have lined up to do these presentations you know they're bending over backwards they're doing a great job here so you know give them the respect that they deserve if you must make fun of anything please feel free to grab the the glare off of my bald head or my southern twang you know those those are within bounds presenters as well as the accelerant staff who are going to be introducing them are going to be a bit more off limits rule number three is going to be again we're not an in-person conference what we are is remote and there is a tendency to sit and watch the show what we would really encourage em what's gonna make this conference special is going to be your interaction with the presenters with other attendees you know zoom if you're accessing the zoom there's a chat function there's you know Q&A where you can ask questions of the presenters but not everyone is accessing via zoom so you know to the extent possible we're encouraging you to go onto Twitter Ulta LinkedIn use the hashtag QV I see 20/20 and that's how we're gonna sort of you know simulate networking as best we can again we're not able to shake hands with one another but we can you know at least do so virtually to the extent possible and as any good moderator would do I'm going to give us kind of a first exercise as it were our first speaker is Karen Lee she is from Mars petcare and pet care pets we're all remote so our first goofy assignment is going to be during and after this presentation I'm gonna request that you guys get on the LinkedIn get on the Twitter share pictures of your furry co-workers you know let's have fun with this let's let's let's enjoy and with that I'm going to attempt to handoff again this might get a little clunky and apologies if it does but I'm going to hand off to Karen and let her get the show started okay hi everybody my name is Karen as you just heard I work for Mars petcare I find it very hard to follow Joe exotic but I will say that for this presentation is the first time I've worn sweatpants at a conference but I did put on my crazy cat lady shirt so I am definitely ready to give this presentation whether I'm at home or in front of you so let me share my screen with you hopefully everybody can see that I know if you have questions during the presentation as bill mentioned you can type them in and he'll be watching those and we'll get together after this so that we can answer any questions that you might have so what I'm here today to talk to you about as the crazy cat lady is transforming the pet carrot category so here at Mars petcare our shopper insights team works really hard to work on something called shopper based design which I'm going to talk about today and we're really currently trying to transition the pet care space at our major retailers through something that we define as proposition based shopping so I'm about to explain what that is for you but before I get started I would have to say that my job is super fun pet care is a really fun category to work in because people really want to talk about their pets right it's a topic that people will talk to you about all the time the second I tell someone at a social event that I am a cat researcher that they want to show me pictures of their cat they want to talk about their cat the same is true for the dog team so it's a really fun category to work on so let's level set with a couple of cat stats for those individuals that are not cat lovers or may not have a cat in their home so roughly 33 percent of American households own a cat that's a little bit less than dog which is around 44 percent of American households but the cat population in the u.s. is about 86 point seven million cats so that's a lot of domesticated cats that are out there in fact it's equal to the human population of California Texas and Florida combined so we are talking to a lot of cat parents and in those households you may have heard of crazy cat I won't use the word ladies but 24 percent of cat owners have three plus cats and the average amount of cats for a household is 2.1 so that's a little bit different than dogs the average number of dogs per household is 1.7 so if you own cats you're more likely to have two or more cats also crazy cat lady although said very often is not necessarily always true about 35% of our owners are also male so it's not just ladies out there that loving the cats it's also the guys as well we talk to a lot of guys our research and then finally at least in the u.s. 78% of cats are indoor only so it's really common these days that cats spend the majority of their time in inside of US households compared to dogs dogs 68% of them are indoor only so then you also have a percentage of cats that are indoor/outdoor and then of course that are outdoor only so that's just kind of do the level set about the population that we're talking about here in the US now as I mentioned before one of the things we're trying to do at Mars is we're trying to orchestrate new shopper behavior to deliver full price incremental revenue it's through a partnership with our retail partners so obviously all of our FDM partners and also our pet specialty partners as well um shopper base design is all about understanding how shoppers are thinking about the category and from that identifying opportunities to get shoppers to premium eyes which leads to incremental revenue with our retail partners right so I personally hit a catch wet and cat dry within our portfolio and one of the interesting things about cat population it's remained pretty steady over time so you have a set number of people that have cats in their household fluctuates a little year-over-year but a lot of people own cats and within that portfolio the majority of them feed dry right it's about a 90 plus penetration so really high within cat earning households so the opportunity to continue to grow that category lies within premium ization we're going to talk about premium ization a lot during this I'm sure in your own categories if you work in like a CPG function or if you're an insect person that's working with CPG partners you're going to be talking about premium ization as well for wet cats a little bit different you have roughly of 67% household penetration so you do have opportunities to grow by getting more people to buy wet but also the name of the game there is to get the people who currently buy wet to premium eyes so we do that through a process called shopper based design as I mentioned before it's really a consistent process that happens over time it's shown visually in a circle here because it never ends right if we start on at the beginning of the year we have what we call pencils down moment at the end of the year or really nice release shopper base design guidelines sort of feel teams which we'll talk about in just a second and then we ought to invalidate those and then we improve them for the next year so it's a never-ending process trying to drive category growth with CAD so one of the things that's really changed over time that we've seen in both cat and dog is the shoppers decision criteria for changing or deciding what pet food to buy has really changed over time so if you're familiar with the pet care category we see a lot of humanization if you own a pet you may already be humanizing the food that you buy and not even realizing it it's very common within our space with pet care so over time we've really transitioned from shopping around the basics like how much am I willing to spend what does this package look like those things are still really important in the terms of the shopping process but cat shoppers are also thinking a little bit more in depth about what they're purchasing in terms of the humanization factor we'll see in just a second what I mean by that a lot of shoppers when it comes to purchasing dog or cat food are thinking does this look like something that I would eat myself and if so then it's good enough to give to my pet or I'm on a keto diet so I'm thinking about high protein maybe my animals should be getting high protein different humans ations like that we see coming up really big within the cat and dog industry also we see trends like grain free meat first a lot of those claims that are on the front of the bag really popping and shoppers paying a lot more attention to them than they used to and they're really more interested in what's inside their pets food than they ever have been before and that comes to being more interested in what's there within their own food as well so it's a really interesting dynamic between feeding yourself or maybe your children and then feeding your furry friends as well we see a lot of connections there ok so let's talk a little bit about what proposition shopping actually means it's a fancy term that I'm using here but I'm going to illustrate it in some other categories outside of pet care so that you can kind of get an understanding of what I'm talking about so the first one is yogurt so as a non-dairy eater I was unfamiliar with the yogurt category and started investigating proposition shopping but it's a huge one when it comes to shelving and how things are organized on shelves so here's a quick picture from a top customer I won't be calling out retailers in this but if you're familiar with the industry you might be able to pick some out you can really see how it's segmented so it has Greek yogurt which I know has taken off and is huge now then it has organic yogurt then it has just yogurt and then at the end it's hard to see but it has kids yogurt so essentially instead of shelving just by brand or manufacturer or by package you're breaking the category out by what we would call propositions and this is an excellent example of that here's another one from a top retailer if you look at pasta sauce you can see across the middle kind of like at the almost hip level eye level range you have all of your white sauces right so you're categorizing by different propositions not only just by brand or by price point another example that we see in a number of different retailers would be deodorant right so your shelving by traditional formats then you might have all your sprays together and then you're going to also have all your clinical clinical-grade deodorant shelf together as well so another example of proposition shopping and then my last one is everyone's favor doing quarantine especially if you've seen alcohol sales recently or you've experienced it yourself in your hassle you know what I mean here's my personal favorite wine so wine and also beer usually as well if not always shelved specifically by like the winery that it comes from right it's shelf by the type of wine that it is so a little bit more of a proposition shelving versus a traditional shelving where we simply shelf my brand or bread price point so I'm showing you these other category examples first so that when I get to cat food if you're a little less familiar than myself with the category hopefully you'll understand what I'm talking about alright so what are the primary goals of shopper based design this entire area that our entire team is is working on and is doing projects on throughout the entire year and rolling out to the field teams right the first thing we're looking for is retail partnership so the whole goal of shopper base design is to grow the category not just to grow Mars product but to grow the category overall and that's true farthest viewing cats treats or you're doing dog food doesn't matter our entire goal with partnering retailers is really to see trust and collaboration from the fact that we are trying to grow the category as a total and not just for more specifically that's a very important part of shopper based design the second we're obviously trying to influence the Shelf so we really want to ensure that what the shelf and the planograms look like again drive overall category growth and we are constantly working on how we can refine that to help make sure again that we're driving premium ization that we're driving penetration in some categories and in some of our impulse categories like treats were also driving that there and then finally of course we're always seeking advisor ship which would result in category captains so if you're on the phone and you're familiar with CPG right this is a little harder for which we'll talk about in just a second but it's definitely something that we're always striving toward so developing proposition based shopper base design let's talk about how we got to what I'm about to show you right how did we start thinking about this how did this develop what does it look like within the cat food category so first we did foundational learning which always involves a lot of research right and then we do testing so that's we have a Center at we're really lucky at Mars petcare we have something called the Seabourn Lane insight Center the slick which is where we have our own shopper lab which I'll show a few pictures of in just a second and then we do control store testing with retailers and then at the end of the process or it's continuous but at the end of that process we put it into an audit analysis where we actually go out into real-life stores and see how these shopper based design principles are actually performing in market so I'm going to start with shopper insights of course so the foundation of shopper base design is all about how the shopper is thinking about the category and that's something I think that makes us really unique versus other manufacturing partners right we're really starting with how the shoppers are thinking about the category not just how Mars is thinking about the category and that's an important distinction to make okay so the first thing that I did when we were starting to investigate proposition shopping for cats specifically we had a vendor partner directions their awesome partner for the research that we did we did some foundational learning with them it involves a lot of focus groups and secondary research of course secondary research to figure out like what are the trends that are happening within the pet care industry it's really important that we know a lot of times it comes from pet specialties channels first so that would be retailers that only carry pet products right like your pet smarts or your local pet stores of the world you see a lot of emerging trends happen there and also comes from going to like the global pet expo and really just making sure that we're keeping up with global trends and what's happening there we get a number of focus groups with cat parents as we like to call it where we really do product sorting so product sorting weather info qualitatively in focus groups or online quant sorting really is the foundation of shopper base design because it gets into the mind of the shopper and how they're thinking about the different categories that you're asking them to sort so let's talk about how they sorted cat main meal as we like to call it all right so the first proposition that we discovered is ancestral so if you have seen if you watch TV in the last several years you've probably seen a blue wilderness commercial this has the crazy wild cats out in the wilderness eating meat right this has become a really high protein trend within the pet hair space so that's one of the first propositions that shoppers will sort out from each other also the packaging tends to be really similar as I mentioned before it has wild scenes with wild cats and lots of meat involved in that crave is our specific brand that we currently have out in the industry for ancestral the second is something we called ingredient transparency so ingredient transparency is all about wholesome nutrition so neutro is our brand that we carry here at Mars traditional blue would be another example beyond this one's funny to me because it tends to have like fruits and vegetables on the package which if you're familiar with cats they're actually obligate carnivores which means that they don't eat fruit and vegetables but it doesn't matter because remember this is a humanization trend so they're sorting all of these natural products together next we have customized care so this is more of a science play right this is really important and cat if your cat is throwing up hairballs all over the house this is the category for you if they have urinary tract infections you know specific health needs this plays a really big role specifically in dry cat because shoppers are really think of it as the foundation of the diet for us at times science diet Pro Plan Purina one those are all big brands that fall in this category next is culinary recipes so this comes up a lot more in wet than it doesn't dry specifically for cat culinary recipes is all about a fancy gourmet eating experience this is the foodie cat if you think about it that way right it has the the goblet with the fancy food in it it's really delivering that experience of taste and shoppers really see that that that is a huge role within the wet area and then finally we have like the foundation or core of the majority of FDM sales which we would refer to as basic and balanced so this is getting the cat everything that they need but it's going to be at a lower price point and it may not have some of the meat first claims or the grain free claims that you might see other places so whiskas is our weapon for that also very popular is at Friskies 9lives neonics again a lot of people currently feed their cat basic imbalance but the name of the game is to get them to premium eyes because that drives category growth so those are the propositions that we uncovered through all the sorting exercises that we did with cat shoppers next we did a couple of fun exercises so if we were in person I would have you guessed these but on personally we're not able to do that so I'm just gonna tell you so for the first one we have ancestral so we had them relate to like what kind of cat is is your pet if they're feeding an ancestral diet paleo comes up this was like two years ago my guest as keto would come up now right because it's the cool thing feral it's wild it's on Safari it's an Alaskan cat so the reason we ask these questions because it also helps create visuals for like our Pio Pio or are like in store shopper marketing materials that type of thing and net me a Shoppers if ancestral was like human food how would we relate it right so it's a steakhouse it's like a Brazilian steakhouse with the endless niche that they just saw for you it's all about the meat and we're thinking about ancestral I can also include fish obviously a very important protein within the cat portfolio but it's definitely all about the meat next is ingredient transparency so this is your kitty is Zen yoga kitty gluten-free crunchy your hipster kitty so the wholesome nutrition proposition this is the one I talked about earlier with like fruits and vegetables as part of the diet right so how does relate to human food be like found a table is what they said salads right grab a green one of my favorites going to Whole Foods Trader Joe's and that's kind of how they relate it to what they're eating versus what their Academy next one customized care so this is if my kitty has special needs as I mentioned earlier a huge one in cat as if your cat is having what we like to call either litter box issues or back end performance problems or if they're throwing up here moles all over the house another common complaint with with cat litter so my kind of special means maybe and my cat is sick maybe they're overweight we also know that a large number of pets are actually obese these days if you don't know Mars recently decrease their feeding guidelines because more pets are actually not getting the amount of exercise that they need and we're really specifically trying to address obesity within pets right so we want two premium eyes we don't just want to stop on posting how that would relate to people food they said it would be like cafeteria food it would be like vitamins right Jenny Craig Nutrisystem vitamin world that kind of thing next culinary recipes this is my favorite five of the cat this might be me the cat is princess Louie Vuitton bougie spoiled it's a diva kitty right it's foodie really enjoying the nutrition that they're getting and it's all about owner enjoyment - right you like to eat good foods you want to give your cat good food - we see variety coming to playing this right humanization a lot of times people will buy different brands or will buy different flavors cuz they'll say like I don't want my cat or my dog eating the same thing every day I wouldn't like that and so they introduced some of these culinary recipes into their diet so they would relate back to like a really fancy restaurant a lot of people said a French restaurant you know or like eating at the Ritz Carlton something that they would consider like special and then finally basic imbalance right so this is all about affordable enjoying that so this is a huge part of the category as I said before this would be like my kitty is there related it to broke basic budget college student couch potato but at the very bottom it's also really important happy the same set of high pal pal ability means that it tastes really good so a lot of cats like to eat it and how they would relate it I would call a quarantine food right now if you're anything like me that's kind of comfort food right so how Americans think about that is like it's the McDonald's of cat food um you know maybe it's not the best thing for you to eat mac and cheese or cheeseburgers but maybe your kids like it so you feed it to them anyway maybe you're stuck at home for months of it at a time and so you really just want some mac and cheese to make you feel better the same is true for cats right and so basic imbalance definitely plays a huge role within that cat this category also so now that we have the propositions they've come to life we know how shoppers are thinking about them we know how they relate to feeding yourself what comes next right so now that we understand what the propositions are we have two phases that we would go through with our retailer partners next first to be the shopper lab research and second would be control store testing with any of our retail partners so the picture on the left is our category vision lab that we have at slick which is our shopper lab testing facility as I mentioned before when I first started at Mars petcare I could not believe the facility that we actually have down in Nashville it's really awesome it does a great job giving us an opportunity to lay out different planograms and to test them with shoppers so essentially what I would do next is I would invite a quantitative so hundreds of cat parents to come shop different planograms um and sets as they're laid out in our facility right which is a really awesome opportunity then I would run several hundred shoppers through each of those planograms and I would calculate the basket results for how they performed and then coming out of that we'd be able to definitely get a better understanding of the expected difference in sales that we might be able to see in terms of recommending one planogram versus another so for example at the propositions I just showed how would we want those laid out on the shelf right if you look over on the picture on the right you can see an example so this is actually set up in our select facility but you can see here we're currently leading with ancestral to ingredient transparency to customize character culinary to basic and balanced within our dry cat portfolio so that would be one of the layouts that we would want to test right after it performs well in the shopper lab testing my next step would be to work with all of our field partners and our field teams do an awesome job on our category managers and our he account people really working hard with counterparts within top retailers to help selling control store tests because the next step is really to see after we take this out of a research environment how does it perform in real life right and so we utilize all the data we collected from the qual research and then from the Quan Chau lab testing to sell that in in partnership with retailers and then we do control store tests with them which is really exciting right because then we can learn and we can grow and you can continue to evolve shopper base design based off how it performs in real life in a FDM or SVT retailer right and so it's really exciting along with the control store test data of course which is very important we also tend to follow that up with qualitative so we'll do like qualitative shop belongs with cat shoppers to walk the owls with them figure out which elements they like the best what they notice that type of thing also we can investigate any shopper marketing materials that we might have tied to like propositions in general and we can kind of get an idea of what the shopper likes didn't like and then we can tie that back to the corresponding data of course that we get coming out of like point-of-sale right and so it's a really awesome process that allows us to gain both quantitative and qualitative feedback from those cat shoppers to give us an idea of how effective our shopper base design is everything that we test we grow and learn from right so we we are learning from every single test in every single category that we have going on out there with our retail partners and it's an awesome opportunity for us to gain the trust of retailers as well that we're really being diligent about growing that category so what does success look like right what what are these shopper based design results that we're looking for so obviously you can guess as sales improvement is number one thing that we're looking for but aside from that there could be other objectives as well right so highlighting assortment right allowing shoppers to see the breadth of everything that's available no matter what your category is you're probably familiar with the fact that a lot of shoppers are on autopilot right they go out there they maybe don't look around or they only see within six feet or whatever window what they're actually shopping for and so by setting up the aisle and the shelves a little bit differently than we might have before we're really looking for an opportunity for shoppers to see assortment that they've never seen before and we'll ask them questions like did you notice something new and it might have been something that's been on the Shelf for three years but it's new to that and so that's how we're trying to make sure that we're highlighting different assortment second improve shop ability we want shoppers to easily find what they need right if my cats puking hairballs then a lot of times I'm going to want to see all of my hairball or all of my customized care options together in a single place it makes it easier shop it makes it easier to compare right and so improving that shop ability is also really important and then I talked about this at the very beginning but I can't stress enough the name of the game and it's not just in our category sure it's in other categories as well it's driving premium ization right specifically as I mentioned and dry cat right everyone's buying dry cat it has a really high household penetration compared to other categories so in order for us and our retail partners to continue to grow that category we want to drive premium ization and by doing that you're facilitating trade up opportunities so that could be within the category or it could be between categories right so making bigger category baskets not only by DRI by getting them to drive the more premium ization within that category but maybe it's also to pickup wet and treats in that basket as well right my partner with me on the treat side always looking for ways for us to partner with wet right because you'll see a lot of planting gardens have wet and treat shelves together so we have actually found that our planning grants can impact each other and so it's important that we're staying connected because we're trying to drive premium ization and both of our categories and we're also trying to drive that plus one in the basket so it's important and then the last thing that we do within this process is what we call Bali datian right so all of these things are really important but and not a really cool thing that has been developed at Mars petcare is something that we call an audit and so really going out into the field and auditing top customers once they implement these shopper base design principles seeing how it impacts their overall performance right so as I mentioned at the end of every year we have what we call a pencils down moment where we create a document called a category gross solution which really allows our field teams to figure out how they should be recommending that each of their categories are shelved for the next several years and what that does is it gives them time to sell it in within their retailers and once they sell it in we track that performance or they don't so then we track that performance via this audit so tracks is a partner of ours where they go out into a number of top retailers so obviously I've blinded the data on here because we're not gonna show everything I'm sure you can guess who some of the top retailers are this is an example of scores for my dry cat audit for 2019 right and in association with the scores so the scores are based off whatever the shopper based design metrics are and so whatever they were tasked with doing for that year they're then scored off of and the fun part about the audit is then you can track that back to how those retailers are performing right so if you have a retailer that has a very high score and a specific metric I can then tie that back to sales data to say this grows your category by XYZ the velocities are so much higher when you do this shopper base design principle and so it's just an another method of validating that all of that work that we put in on the front end both in research and then in control store test is still really performing when it comes to a real life scenario right and so we score retailers and our retail teams three times a year so you'll have a base we'll have a mid year and then you'll have an end of your score and again for me my favorite part about the audit is that you can tie it back to actual sales data for these retailers and it really shows the investment that we're putting into developing shopper base design leads to something that's productive for the overall category right and that's that's a key part of shopper base design and ensuring that the things that we're actually recommending to the field are driving that category growth and so on the Left we see an example I will not call out the retailer specifically but this is a retailer that we've partnered with a lot they're really open to testing they're awesome to work with where we actually implemented a full pet section test a couple years ago two years ago now and we were able to get results performed extremely well sales were up in all of the categories for cat and dog and also they do a lot of fun things in this retailer when it comes to bringing things to life right so shopper marketing materials you can see some fun cat designs my favorite everybody noticed cat shoppers well not everybody knows but also you can't shovers love to see pictures of cats right they like fun cat stuff they like play on cat words you can see the meow there they really like yarn balls of what should they have on the walls so it's also kind of fun to make it come to life right and this retailer does a great job of that and so it was an excellent example even though it won't call out the retailer specifically of like what a control store test might look like and of course their audit scores are really high as well and all of that translates back to high category sales not only on the cat side but also in the dog side and so that's the type of partnership obviously that we're seeking out with our retail partners as I mentioned earlier the ultimate goal is category captainship so on the dog side we do definitely have category captainship we own pedigree on Cesar I like to say on the cat side sometimes we're if you think about it way I have roughly 8% share when it comes to dry cat and roughly seven and wet cat so I won't call out our competitors directly but we are not the largest manufacturer of cat products and so I would say one of the ways that we gain trust and partnership from our retailers is by some of this stuff that we're talking about here all of the stuff that we're doing as I mentioned before is not selfishly mars but is to grow the category and the shopper base design is a great way that I've found that we can prove on the cat side that we are being brand agnostic and that we're trying to to work together with them to grow the category and that's key importance not only in cat but also in dog so be Peter Drucker this code actually came from art director Neil likes to use it and it's really true he was a business consultant and if you can't measure it you can't improve it and that goes back to the CS T's and then also the audit as well it's really important that we're able to measure these these shopper based design principles because if we don't then we have no real way to tie them back to the fact that they were worth the ROI and number one and also that they're helping to drive category growth so it's a really important part of the process and then we have another part of our team so we have some really awesome people on our econ team as well actually I should call mommy now um but we also take shopper base design one step further or so I am leaning Cat Man meal for in-store but we also have a team that really works on what we call perfect page which would be like a digital version of shopper based design we also have someone on our team who has just developed an omni shopper base design as well so really exciting as retail continues to evolve shopping continues to evolve of course we want to maintain focus on in-store where there's a lot of pet food sales but our team is also really working on developing digital and Omni shopper base design as well because it's just as important for growth or the future of where we see pet care going especially right now in quarantine times where we've seen a real spike in a number of different categories for online shopping and also for a lot of the Omni shopping methods so like think in-store pickup that that type of thing and so that team is also working really hard to make sure that we can measure those shopper base design elements in the perfect page as well and then also in some of our areas so I will leave you with my personal favorite quote about cats because it's so true dogs have owners and cats have staff it's really true if you focus a lot on researching the difference between cats and dogs you will find that that is true every time dogs love you no matter what and people will do anything to get cats to actually love them so it's a little bit of a different dynamic but I love working on the cat side of the business where you have to you have to win their love a little bit more they're independent creatures but hopefully this was helpful as you think about the process for shopper insights either within your organization or within people that you are doing research for it's a unique process to Mars petcare and I think it's something that we're really proud of and that we've seen a lot of partnership and growth come out of so bill do you know if there's any questions for me hello yes there are actually some questions Oh DJ on the request line here okay mm-hmm Karen this is from anonymous how do you see Coppa 19 impacting sales of premium pet food now and six to twelve months out so obviously this is a hot topic that we're thinking about now we are doing some kovat research I will say within the organization to try and understand it I know that one of the shoes recently has been in stocks so obviously a number of our retailers have been struggling to keep pet in stock and so I think that has impacted sales somewhat with people switching to brands that they've not purchased before obviously in general we also see a higher percent of sales for premium products online so I'll be interested to see if that impacts it as well as far as where it's gonna go in the future I will let you know after we conduct our research I think it's going all over the place we're looking at it weekly now and so I think once we move out of the pantry loading phase and out of the quarantine phase then we'll be able to see how it really changes the overall category very good okay we have another question from Ann and this is are there any resources or classes you used to learn shopper based design there were no resources in our classes that we used it was developed I think by Neal who is our director within our area / process and over time so no I think it was internally developed as much as that more okay we got one from Susan and this is how would this translate to a virtual show oh so we have in the past also utilized some virtual research methodology to investigate shopper base design so the simple fact that we have a slick our shopper lab available to us I think we would much prefer to do the in-person shopper lab testing but we have definitely done virtual before also when you think about something like a large pet specialty Pet Smart or a Petco it's really hard to recreate that right and so there are different uses for virtual shelf when we do the research definitely for testing out different planograms and doing quantitative shopping exercises we have utilized that internally for sure it's cheaper okay another question is are there substantial differences in the way you have you have to communicate to pet owners internationally do those categories you mentioned earlier change yes so definitely there are differences between different markets also which propositions are like popular within different markets can really can vary immensely arching focuses specifically on America or in u.s. so I know that there are complete differences even within our own brand overseas so if you think about wet cat here Sheba's our biggest wet cat brand overseas its whiskers right so there can be differences number one within our portfolio but also in what shoppers are looking for globally okay looks like we've got time for maybe one more and as Mars pivoted on your advertisements to reflect a copa90 message similar to other brands marketing I haven't seen any changes in our marketing plan from a cat perspective I know that Mars petcare overall has been definitely promoting our involvement in efforts to help with kovat relief but I haven't seen any changes specifically at least within cat for my area - I would say capitalize on Co bid or anything like that I guess we got time for one more making the rules up as we go there's technology work to Bill we're doing good you know forget all my warnings and doomsday up front now the expectation bar is through the roof yeah so you're officially off the hook now Karen if you're this thing falls on its face Congrats oK we've got one more question as an insider's professional love your opinion on whether consumer / shopper research on category and merchandising should be on hold during these times yeah so we've had a lot of discussions internally I definitely think some things need to put on hold because it's not a normal time to investigate shopper behavior again the research that we're running right now is all code like we really want to see what's happening with people pantry loading from a CMI marketing insights perspective are people feeding more are they feeding less like what are their attitudes about what's happening so we're and definitely for shopping we have put on hold all of our shopper research unless it's covin related right so obviously that research is trying to figure out what's going on how's it going to change shopping for pet care in the future those types of things category wise etc but as far as our standard shopper based design research we are not doing any of that I was supposed to have some dry cat research first opera bass design that was going to happen and that's going to put on hold we're probably not doing it till fall even because we want to make sure that people go back to normal assuming that they do go back to normal but I don't think that it's a great time to specifically do any type of shopper research unless it's it's trying to investigate what's happening with Kovan gonna be didn't throw after your your sample and also the same with control store tests right we have a couple control store tests running we're gonna have to figure out what to do with the data that's happening right now because it's it's not going to be able to be compared to last year or control versus test and so I think it's something research professionals should definitely keep in mind yeah it's a question that we're getting from essentially all of our clients yeah what to do these days in the answer as with everything in research is it depends yeah there are certain categories where yeah full steam ahead especially with you know bigger ticket purchases are asking about experiences that you know individuals had in the past um something like retail or shopper yeesh and it's it's discouraging to a certain extent because you know participants are sitting at home and really engaged from a participant yeah obviously they're not coming into focus groups but if you can get them for a lot surveys for you know qualitative webcam I mean like we're doing right now right but again it's that it's that balancing act right yeah just be careful of your topic I would say right I don't want to dissuade you from doing some research with Bill because I would never do that but you talked about a make sure that it's a good time to do it like RC and my team was also supposed to be doing some like feeding Diaries right now and we can't do because behavior is not normal right I'm home all day with pickled and Sadie my two dogs and they're they're getting fat just like me because I'm feeding them all day right and so it would be representative of what's usually happening in the household so I think you just want to make sure that you're conscious of that indeed advice that we can all follow okay so 11:55 so in the spirit of you know parallel to in-person conference let's take five let's you know hit the restroom go go to the coffee line let's thank Karen for for an awesome presentation she and all of our president errs are have agreed to stick around as much as possible and you know engage with and and you know take part in some of the others so let's take them up on that lets lets you know network through them to the extent possible and and thanks to Karen I'm gonna do the round of applause on behalf of everyone else thank you so much way to kick us off thanks see you later