ppm factum has always been a pioneer in the field of retail, and it is still today. After a slowly receding crisis, which included a number of restrictions within the modern market, ppm factum is again active and is the first to carry out a face-to-face promo in Czech and Slovak hypermarkets.
For this summer, ppm teamed up with Jacob Douwe Egberts and prepared a promo for the premium coffee brand L´Or, to verify the responses of consumers directly in the stores.
One of the extra tasks was a thorough training of all the staff providing the activities with covid hygiene guidelines, which were then observed 100% during all the events.
Jirí Král from ppm adds: “Because the world is changing and so are the consumers with increasingly higher expectations from promotions, we selected the biggest coffee fans from our portfolio of promoters and hostesses to carry out the test.“
More and more it is no longer a classic hard selling, but consumers really prefer a stronger in store experiences and rather than a hostess who just recommends and brews coffee, they look for someone they can talk to more in depth about their passion for coffee.
That is why we needed to turn the already passionate coffee lovers into professional ambassadors of the L´Or brand. This was enhanced by a special experience workshop "We Love coffee", the content of which we prepared with a specialist in modern education."
Within the test, ppm carried out a total of 120 promotions. Partially in the form of educational sampling and partially the events took place with the possibility of tasting new variants of L´Or coffee.
During the events, several indicators were measured to find out how the customers´ behavior changed after the covid and whether a greater distance between people can be expected in face-to-face communication within stores.
The results yielded relatively surprising findings. At the sampling, we contacted a daily average of 280 customers, and on average 73% of them actively participated in an interview with the brand's ambassador. For tasting events, the ratio between the contacted and actively involved customers was 60%.
Compared to the participants before the covid, the number of respondents decreased by an average of 25% (lower traffic in stores), however, we recorded an average of 30% more customers actively involved.
From these figures and comments from individual ambassadors, we can conclude that with proper methodology in the events, when customers see a new approach by the ambassador, their motivation to listen to the presentation and to actively participate in conversation increases significantly.
At the same time, one can conclude that people in general simply miss people contact and face-to-face conversation.
Jirí Král from ppm concludes: “We are currently significantly innovating in ppm. We develop our own digital technologies for retail, at the same time we are moving on and creating a new category of online support for retail activations. However, the case study shows that we must not forget to invest in the education of the promoters themselves, from whom it is necessary to raise smaller but professional authentic ambassadors."