Challenge
Localize marketing messages of products, services, and promotions across markets with decentralized, marketing supply chain US Foods operates in over 65 distribution markets within the United States averaging 900,000 monthly deliveries across the U.S. with over 400,000 products and 300,000 customers. The client faced a challenge when it came to customizing these products and promoting them across markets through e-commerce and retail. In today’s dynamic market, personalizing customer experience via hyper-localization is increasingly important. Digital commerce has transformed the retail environment, adding a new layer of complexity to the path to purchase. With customer behavior changing more frequently, many retailers are adapting their merchandising strategies and processes to increase engagement with these always-on customers, including leveraging personalized point of sale and print advertising to garner attention in a digitally saturated environment.
As a practice, the territory managers of US Foods would offer their restaurant clients with table-tents that highlight one or two exclusive brand products, and in some cases, also allow them to customize and include their restaurant’s logo and specific sale price and product descriptions. With so many individual products, it becomes a challenge as well as expensive to print and distribute these table-tents across markets. There could not be any one standardized template that could be shared with customers, as the custom requirement would change often.
Additionally, every year over 3000 sales/event resources of US Foods were engaged in printing, delivering, storage and distribution of POS materials to events such as trade shows and conferences. This led to the US Foods resources from marketing operations, creative services and purchasing extending their support into these projects, leading to slow process time and other areas of the business without focus.
To undertake a major transformation in execution, the client was looking for a partner that specialized in procurement and execution to manage their programs efficiently and get to market faster. The materials and services included customized POS materials, menus, print marketing collateral and branded merchandise for all the products as well as distribution to their clients and to local in-market events. This would support two great initiatives important to US Foods – providing the greatest service and support to their customers and freeing their internal marketing and procurement resources to take on more initiatives.