Klug Touts Unified’s Marketing Efforts That Move Product For CPGs, Retailers

Driving sales and moving product off the shelves is what Sue Klug helps retailers do. This, the Unified Grocers SVP and CMO reveals, allows retailers to win in the competitive marketplace. And, when Unified’s retailers win, so does the co-op, she says.

Klug spoke with The Shelby Report’s Bob Reeves during Unified’s Expo 2013 this week and said her department—the Retail Marketing Services team—are “fully deployed to help retailers drive their volume.”

“We very much will assist them, and we have a variety of off-the-shelf services that we can partner with them on. We have a variety of projects…helping them figure out how to compete against a dollar store, how to compete against Walmart. We’ll help them with those strategies.”

Creating consumer demand and ultimately getting product into shoppers’ baskets is done through a number of ways.

“Social marketing, digital, websites,” Klug noted. “Many of our retailers don’t have the infrastructure to really dive into that world and that new technology so Unified gets very involved through my team and helping retailers speak to their customers in different ways to either drive traffic into the store or put more into their basket.”

Scan data is another tool Unified is making available to its retailers.

“Many of the small retailers that we serve don’t utilize scan data in the same ways that the chains do,” Klug said. “The chains, in the last 20 years, have become increasingly sophisticated in the area of using scan data to drive top-line sales.

“Our retailers, most of them can’t afford the infrastructure to figure out how to create those databases and deal with that big data in meaningful ways so Unified has invested in an approach that allows us to take scan data on behalf of our retailers and help them understand how they can move their own sales, drive their own sales, by virtue of better understanding of what is selling, what’s not selling, what could be selling, where they have void issues, where they have out of stocks.

“The thing that I love about that is it’s not like we’re on the cutting edge of anything,” she added. “We’re taking chain strategies—tried, proven, they work, no worries—and we can provide this infrastructure.”

Klug explains that independent retailers are innovative. She says marrying that innovation with Unified’s available services—like scan data and infrastructure—creates a sort of magic.

Connecting CGPs and the Hispanic marketplace

Unified serves hundreds of Hispanic markets—meaning the role it plays as the connection between CPG companies and those retailers is important.

“CPG companies want access to that Hispanic shopper base,” Klug said. “No one and no where in the country can provide the Hispanic access that Unified can provide to that broad base of Hispanic customers and that broad base of Hispanic stores. So, if a CPG company is saying ‘how do I really get more involved in the Hispanic market,’ Unified is the perfect solution.”

Unified works with CPGs to figure out how to create what Klug calls “smart advertising and smart promotions.”

“There’s so many emerging categories and emerging brands and they know that the Hispanic consumer is a part of their strategy. They just don’t often know how to get to them effectively,” she said.

Unified serves as what could be referred to as the “go-between.”

“A CPG company is never going to get to the retailer, but a CPG is going to get to Unified and Unified’s going to say ‘I have 400-plus Hispanic stores that reach X number of Hispanic shoppers every week.’ And if you’re trying to get your product onto those shelves and begin to connect with that consumer, Unified can offer that opportunity, Klug said.

The soy milk category is a segment Klug examples. She says Unified has been working with a company that is “big in the soy milk category.”

“They know the Hispanic shopper would be a real target for their product, but they don’t know how to begin to approach the market,” she said. “Do they sample? Do they coupon? Do they Facebook? What do they do? We really help large CPGs connect. And we’re going to put increased focus on that because nobody gives them the access to the Hispanic shoppers and these Hispanic stores like we do.”

Unified’s Neal Details Co-Op’s Loan Services For Members

Christine Neal has an important job at Unified Grocers. As SVP of finance and treasurer for the company, part of her job is managing loans for the co-op’s members so as to allow them to grow and remodel stores.

“We’re trying to broaden how we look at that and actually help them find financial solutions,” she told The Shelby Report during Unified’s Expo 2013 this week. “Sometimes if a retailer wants to sell, they’ve never done that before. They’ve owned their business, they’ve run their business for 30 or 40 years and now there’s no succession plans in place, so what do they do? We try to help facilitate that. One, find a buyer, and also help them go through the process—how they might consider valuing the business, how the buyer might find financing. If we can play a role in that we will…”

Grocers Capital Co., a Unified subsidiary, handles this side of the business. Neal said that, while she knows of some other wholesalers who offer this type of service, she’d be hard pressed to find one that does so to the extent Unified does.

“Our subsidiary Grocers Capital Co. has a loan portfolio of over $25 million, and that’s low (for us),” she says. “It’s actually been higher than that in the past.”

The financial and loan services offered by Unified facilitates a great partnership between the wholesaler and its members, according to Neal.

“I was talking to one of the retailers here at the show that we had helped with a buy/sell arrangement, and he said to me, let me know if you guys have any stores that I might be interested in, and I said, ‘You’re always on our radar.’ And he said, ‘That’s the partnership. We can run the stores, you can help us find them and help us finance them…’”

Neal understands the importance of such partnerships. She’s considered a food industry veteran.

She worked for Gelson’s as a controller for seven years and spent several years as the CFO for the California Restaurant Association. She later began working with Certified Grocers and she stayed on board when it merged with United in 1999; the merged company later became Unified Grocers. Neal has a passion for the independent grocer, and so does Unified.

“This is a big global economy and to the extent that we can help keep these local and family-owned businesses alive in America and help them compete, that’s what we do,” she said. “And we need to keep doing that and not let this ‘localness’ die out.”

Enthusiasm, Upgrades Seen At Unified Grocers Expo 2013

Excitement and confidence were the feelings that dominated the Unified Grocers Expo 2013 in Long Beach, Calif., this week.

Bob Ling, president and CEO of the Commerce-based wholesaler, said those sentiments were shared by both Unified employees and vendors.

“Nobody is going to declare victory over the recession just yet,” Ling told The Shelby Report on Thursday, “but there are certainly some pockets of success and some people are experiencing some growth, and maybe everybody is just tired of all the bad news that has occurred over the years. But there is an uptick in enthusiasm amongst the members.”

The show itself saw some big improvements from the year prior.

“We have a technology upgrade this year, both in terms of the way we approach the show, but internally we are tracking in real time the sales by customer, by region, by commodity, and comparing it to last year,” Ling said. “It’s allowed us to track the activity on the floor, to direct some people to vendors who are perhaps a little more aggressive than others and create a little further competition amongst the members…”

Ling said Thursday that activity appeared to be up vs. the 2012 show and noted that the information currently is only being shared internally. He revealed his company will soon share customer-specific information by customer.

Additionally, Ling—who took over as president and CEO role at Unified in May—discussed what changes the industry can expect to see from the co-op.

“I think there is a sense of both urgency and a sense of enthusiasm and a sense of mission by all of our employees to become more creative, more demanding when necessary, to be more entrepreneurial and to work closely not only with the vendors but our members to drive sales through the channel,” he said. “The pace has been quickened; that’s certainly one of our initiatives.

“We’ve done a lot of reorganization amongst our team members in all aspects and tasked them to be more flexible and creative in terms of the way they go to market,” Ling added. “One major initiative that is in its early stages but is going to be very useful going forward is an issue we call our Scan Data Initiative, where we are investing in both technology and getting great early response. There’s member participation, where they’re giving us their scan data in real time and we’re feeding back to them already some analytics in terms of are they selling the right products, are they missing products that they should have on the shelf. And that information is flowing now where we’ll be able to communicate that to the trade to make sure our forecasting is better and that we can deliver in terms of promotional activities.”

Under Ling’s leadership, Unified also is empowering its regional divisions to act more locally.

“With respect to the Pacific Northwest, we have melded together a lot of the activities between Seattle and Portland to make that more of a regional presence and much more efficient and I think we’re more effective communicating with the vendor community in the Pacific Northwest,” he said. “We have consolidated up there.”

He pointed out, too, that Unified is “aggressively” looking for business both in its current market as well as outside it.