By Matt Lloyd, CEO & MD Strikeforce
As seen in Retail World Magazine (April 2025)
We assume that senior leaders in retailers or brand owners wish to increase their retail marketing capability, maximise their coverage of retail partners/shoppers and consumers, and then drive towards achieving their organisational objectives. The problem with outsourcing the activities that could further these objectives is that somewhere along the line, the decision makers can worry about losing control, brand passion, and worse, retaining the empire. These worries are often manifested in an emotive and ideological position, “we’re never going to outsource.”
Just as shoppers, consumers and retailers (in the main, arguably save for own label) are outsourcing their food and drink needs to brands and manufacturers (we don’t all have acres to farm and be self-sufficient!), why then be so emotive about outsourcing an important retail marketing activity? Clearly, the industry of outsourced service providers has more work to do to remove the emotion, help decisions to be fact based, deliver “better than” performance and demonstrate the ROI.
And once you’ve decided you will, what should you be expecting?
Sometimes even the most fact-based decisions are compromised by gut feel or emotion. But once the decision has been made, it is over to the agency to prove their worth, justify this decision and better still, operate as an integral ingredient in the path to purchase value chain. In order to optimise your partner choice and in turn drive for those commercial results, look out for key traits.
Scale: biggest isn’t always best, but coverage of stores and geography is going to be a key factor in how your provider supports your objectives.
Data Driven: scale is pointless unless it is pointed. Use of data to optimise not only the resources in the most efficient way, but also the what to do and when and where, is going to help you avoiding wasted investment. Further, use of AI to do this task helps speed.
Technology Led: AI is one thing, but just ensuring that the provider has reliable, quality tech in managing all its services and also in reporting back the way you want it is crucial. And in this area, it going to be more cost effective than having your own supply agreements / in house resource to supply technology.
People: Well-developed, capable and passionate advocates of your brand is what you’d expect internally so don’t compromise on this when outsourcing. Furthermore, be sure to be confident, with evidence, that the culture and people management/IR processes is progressed and legitimate.
Fast and Efficient: all of the above so far helps the agency be more efficient and quicker at furthering your objectives without compromising control, quality and risk.
Trusted Partner: easy to say but needs to be lived and demonstrated. Look for skin in the game risk and reward performance related fee scales, look for your partner to be able to deliver a talent pipeline from them to your business.
Quality Connected Services: most retail marketing / field sales outsourced providers are strong and worthy in in-store activation capability. However, you need more than that by connecting adjacent services in the full value chain, connect the dots to remove fragmentation and the left hand not knowing what the right is doing. If you have a line of sight straight through where to range, where to locate in store, demand planning, demand driving in store activation and POS placement, sampling and consumer experience, and reporting via BI from top to bottom, then you are in pole position to drive your results.