Cough-cold promos aligned with season
More and more cough-cold retailers are pulling their circular ad placements out of the back-to-school season and focusing their efforts on placement closer to an uptick in cough-cold demand, according to a recent ECRM webcast hosted by Drug Store News titled “Surviving the Cough-Cold Season: A Category Promotion Review.”
(Click here for charts and the full Category Review.)
“Year-over-year, we’re seeing more of the [circular] promotions for the cough-cold category happen in November,” Tanie Andraos, ECRM lead business intelligence analyst, told attendees. “Back in 2012, 11% of all cold promotions happened in November and that spiked all the way to 15% in 2014. This shift mostly came at the expense of promotions in September and October.”
That suggests that retailers are placing bets that the timing of their cough-cold promotional push should more closely align with what is expected to be the beginning of elevated incidents of cold and flu illness sometime in December. While some 70% of consumers will stock up on cough-cold items before the season, according to a Field Agent report commissioned by DSN, this new promotional alignment creates a better sense of immediacy. A person who gets sick and shares with all their friends on Facebook that they are suffering from a nasty cold may prompt others to pantry load cough-cold medicines. And if they just saw a cough-cold promotion for a particular retailer, what are the chances that they will make a dedicated visit to purchase cough-cold items, including symptom relievers, immunity boosters and hand sanitizers?
There also is an opportunity to cross-promote a product both in a retailer’s circular and an FSI placement. “Across the board, we definitely found that the drug channel was the strongest in this whole matter,” Andraos noted. Of all cough-cold promotions in 2014, 19.6% represented an overlap in brand promotion within a drug store circular and an FSI promotion of that same brand within the same week. And across 11.2% of all promotions, the retail circular ad referenced that FSI ad.
“Mass, dollar and supermarkets definitely missed the boat,” Andraos said. Only 0.7% of mass circulars referenced a corresponding FSI. In the dollar channel, 4.7% of circulars mentioned an FSI, and in the supermarket channel 2.3% of retail circulars copromoted a brand with an FSI drop that week.