For those who don’t know, SnippCheck is our mobile receipt processing solution. Its app-free, retailer-agnostic, works on 100% of all phones and just downright the coolest thing in shopper marketing since well, the term “shopper marketing”.
Thus far though, we have been focused on enabling brands to do purchase-related promotions – i.e. targeting consumers. In a series of interesting conversations at this year’s Shopper Marketing Expo we realized that its a really effective tool for trade promotions.
Most large brands tend to have a fairly diffused – and usually disintermediated – supply chain. Soft drinks manufacturers have bottlers. Alcohol companies have distributors. Construction material companies have contractors. Brands continuously face the problem of how to incentivize their distributed sales force to be evangelizing their products and getting it in front of customers. How do you get your sales force to be more proactive in trying to get better store placement? How do you get contractors to plug your product vs. the competition? How do you get distributors to persuade store managers to carry your brand? And most important of all – how do you validate that they have actually done so?
We have an answer (yes, its SnippCheck).
Brands looking to incentivize their sales forces can create contests and sweepstakes for the distributed sales force to incentivize them to sell their products. If you make the grand prize attractive enough (think: a Jeep or lotsa cash), your sales teams will want to participate. To enter, all they have to do is sell more of your product or get better placement for it or get distribution in a new store. Each time they do so, they get an additional entry into the sweeps. The hook? They have to take a picture of each “activity” (new store, better placement etc.) and send it in to prove they have actually done so. And we use SnippCheck to validate each of the incoming images and manage the sweepstakes – giving additional sweeps entries to new submissions, doing retargeting and messaging to participants etc.
With SnippCheck, for the first time, brands can easily create and manage their trade promotions in an effective manner. It is flexible enough to support any kind of promotion you wish to do and easy enough to use to validate and ensure the effectiveness of the program.