Why CPGs Need Personalization: The Impact on Brand Portfolio Discovery and Growth

Learn how customer-facing content such as tips, recipes, and brand news can become powerful drivers of product discovery and sales by tailoring the content to each customer’s interests and needs with sophisticated personalization.

It’s easy to understand why a retailer like BevMo! or Sally Beauty would use personalization to display the best-fit products to each customer in their ecommerce stores, emails, and more. But what about the product brands themselves? Is there any benefit for a consumer packaged goods (CPG) brand to create a highly personalized experience across their various customer touchpoints?

The answer is yes! And in this post we’ll explain why, including the value that content personalization can have for product discovery and sales growth.

Consumer Direction

A primary benefit of personalization for CPG brands lies in consumer direction — telling consumers what to do with your product, in a way that resonates with their specific interests or needs. Of course, your packaging may contain usage instructions, but that likely represents only the core essence of how your product can be used.

For example, assume your brand makes a gluten-free flour product. Some types of content you may wish to share on your website and other customer-facing channels include:

• Recipes (e.g., chocolate chip cookies, Thanksgiving gravy)
• Tips or hacks (e.g., baking ratios, fun kids’ projects)
• Product pairings (e.g., using your gluten-free flour with your premium cornstarch)
• Brand content (e.g., news, product differentiators)

In each of these content categories, personalization plays an important role in generating customer engagement. For example, if a visitor to your site is an avid baker of cakes and sweets, but the majority of the recipes they’re seeing are for savory dishes, they’re probably not going to stick around very long. Similarly, if you’re showing someone fun weekend projects to do with kids, but the customer doesn’t have children, then you’re providing a sub-par brand experience and missing the mark.

Product Discovery

Your consumer direction activities directly feed into product discovery. By guiding the consumer on ways in which to use your products, you’re not only expanding the utility of products they’re already familiar with, you’re also introducing them to products they haven’t yet tried.

This product discovery can be hard to achieve in the retail environment. Even if the retailer is savvy enough to recommend adjacent products to shoppers — such as recommending cornstarch after they’ve added flour to their cart — that doesn’t mean it’ll be your brand that gets recommended. On a store shelf or third party ecommerce site, it’s tough to make consumers aware of the full breadth of products you offer.

This is why utilizing content personalization for product discovery on your owned properties is so important. It allows you to complement any marketing efforts the retailer may be performing on your behalf, and fill in the gaps by recommending additional products from your line of goods that you believe the customer will enjoy based on their learned interests and behaviors.

Product Sales

Effective product discovery, in turn, leads to increased revenue. If you sell direct-to-consumer (D2C) on your website, you can convert that consumer interest into direct sales. You can then upsell, cross-sell, and/or present relevant content and offers to these customers for the long-term, turning them into loyal brand fans and advocates.

If you don’t sell D2C, you can simply let customers know where they can buy that particular product that they’ve just discovered on your site, even linking to the product page on your preferred retailer’s ecommerce store. Working with your retail partners on sales analytics can help identify which specific content types are generating the best conversions, allowing you to continually optimize your content and personalization strategy.

Getting Started with Personalization

CPG brands such as Nestle and Mars rely on Breinify’s personalization technology to present the right content to each consumer in order to maximize engagement. With Breinify, you don’t have to undergo a massive data organization or clean-up exercise before being able to reap the value of personalization. Even if you have large amounts of existing content, getting started is easy and takes just a matter of days.