Are customer centricity and emotional branding relevant to the value channel and low income customers? At a time of high unemployment and persistent lack of consumer confidence, value is becoming more important across all shopper groups, especially those with limited budgets. As offering low price becomes more important, do customer centricity and emotional branding really matter? Mary will explore these topics and share insights for building retailer brands that matter in a value-driven world. This special opening keynote presentation will set the tone for the Innovation & Marketing Summit.

Immediacy is the key to packaging. Within typically as little as 2 to 3 seconds and rarely more than 10 seconds, the shopper will scan a certain category of packaged goods and make a purchase decision. Where the eye goes, taking in various packaging visuals and text, matters. But if the heart doesn’t engage – and positively – sale will result. In this session, you’ll learn insights about how to tip the scales in your favor when it comes to increasing visibility, foregrounding key features, establishing differentiation, and conveying a brand personality. As a general rule, less is more – except for when less is financially less because no emotional connection is created, depriving your offer of the motivational fuel required. And when it comes to quantifying emotional engagement and positive response, nobody is better qualified to provide insights than Dan Hill, whose company was the innovator in introducing facial coding to business practice. Cited by the Advertising Research Federation’s neuromarketing initiative as the best tool to learning valence (along with more expensive, invasive and unnatural fMRI brain scans), facial coding lets capture immediate, intuitive reactions because the face is, as Charles Darwin first realized, the only place in the body where the muscles attach right to the skin. Get ready for a lively, fast-paced, hands-on look at the do’s and don’ts of effective packaging.

The science and art of creating optimal store brands in different product categories for different consumer segments will be explored. The presentation will guide the store brands industry on Mind Genomics (the science of the everyday consumer) and ethnography (the science of culture) to understand experiences that consumers resonate with, identify which aspects of the experiences are important and why, and create products and experiences that resonate with the different mind-sets. The audience will:

• Understand the ethnographic and psychophysics underpinnings of how people experience and choose flavors and fragrances;
• Refine the knowledge with product ideas or prototypes;
• Observe and identify fundamental mind-sets of consumers for various flavors, fragrances, and products;
• Learn how to launch no-fail concepts and advertising for the products they develop for their target audiences.

According to Datamonitor’s Product Launch Analytics Database, store brands accounted for nearly 46% of all new food and beverage items introduced in 2011. This is a more than three-fold increase from 2009, when store brands accounted for around 14% of all new food and beverage items introduced, documenting the tremendous wave of store brand new product development taking place. Attendees to this session will gain insights on key trends in new product development for store brands as well as an understanding of where things are headed from session presenter Tom Vierhile, an internationally recognized expert on packaged goods trends and marketing.

Store brands have an exciting opportunity to win the store trip, increase their share of the basket and drive repeat purchase through shopper marketing. Building greater bang for your buck from shopper marketing will be enhanced through focused investments in shopper insights, display events around shopper solutions, and digital relationship marketing programs across their websites, email, mobile and social. Retailers are uniquely positioned to leverage shopper engagement before the store around deals and solutions oriented content, combined with owning the theater in store to capture these opportunities from shopper marketing. In this session Matt will discuss how retailers can:

• Approach funding store brands shopper marketing efforts
• Integrate store brands into their shopper marketing playbooks
• Build capabilities for shopper marketing and magnifying the opportunity for their store brands via selective collaboration with national brands.

This special keynote session will provide an overview of the journey Sam’s Club and Walmart have taken to make the packaging in their retail formats more sustainable. The presentation will include: a perspective on Walmart’s journey with sustainable packaging and key lessons learned; examples of sustainable packaging success stories that have delivered both environmental and economic benefit; and an overview of where Walmart is going with its sustainable packaging efforts. In addition, store brand manufacturers will hear perspectives about how they can use sustainable packaging as a powerful tool to drive growth in their businesses. In this session you’ll learn:

• How sustainable packaging has the potential to drive store brands innovation
• Lessons from Walmart’s experience working on sustainable packaging
• How manufacturer’s can benefit from embracing sustainable packaging

What is social marketing? In today’s digital world, almost anything. As the web evolves with people at its core, nearly every marketing effort online harnesses the power of the consumer. Digital marketing is undergoing its biggest evolution since its inception, and brands of all types are scrambling to figure out exactly how to drive their business with social marketing. In this presentation, Maz Sharafi examines the different ways in which retailers and brands are capturing value from their social marketing and describes how—with the right approach—store brands can achieve their unique marketing objectives. He will discuss:

• Tools for store brands to bring a holistic perspective to their social marketing strategy
• The increasingly complex dynamic of customer loyalty that has emerged in the social age
• How, with a focus on this social loyalty, store brands can drive higher in-store traffic and increase basket size
• Considerations for store brands as the social internet widens both their total opportunity and competitive set

How can retailers maximize store brands opportunities in non-foods? We’ve all heard how private brand teams innovate in specific categories, but can a retailer leverage its advantage and innovate across categories? And how can a retailer grow outside of its four walls and its own website? Mike Kitz will tell the story of private brand innovation across categories, and business model innovation into new retail outlets. He will highlight key advantages of retailer driven innovation and how consumer insights drive their innovation process. Mike will also tell the story of OfficeMax expanding their offering beyond their own stores, highlighting both benefits and challenges. Taken together, innovative products and new business models can greatly enhance the financial returns of a Private Brand business. Attendees will learn how non-food private brands can be more than cost savings.

2012 will be both a challenging as well as an opportunistic year at retail. Shoppers have “settled into a new norm” where “pause before purchase” drive almost every shopping decision. Private Brands have become part of 99% of American households and are there to stay. Merchandising platform innovation around health and wellness, home essentials, better for you, homegating, personal care, and meal ingredients and components are all techniques being used at retail to drive both traffic and unit growth. During our session, we plan to explore the capabilities needed to win at retail in 2012 with private brands as an anchor.

The term “First Moment of Truth” (FMOT) was coined by P&G in 2005 to define the first interaction between a shopper and a product on a store's shelf. This moment was considered one of the most important marketing opportunities for a brand as shoppers make up their mind about a product in the first few seconds after they encounter it on the shelf for the first time. While this “FMOT” is still important, rapidly increasing internet adoption, search engine use and social media’s growing influence lead to brand interactions between a consumer and a brand before that consumer even gets to the shelf. This phenomenon is what we are calling the “Zero Moment of Truth” or ZMOT. In this session, Google’s Retail Industry Director will discuss the most recent changes in consumer's media and shopping habits and the criticality for store brands to fully develop digital plans as part of their marketing strategy. The session will look at the influence of online research and social media on consumers' decision making and the implications for today's integrated marketing plans in addition to the exploding usage of smartphones and how this "super computer in her pocket" is changing her shopping journey from start to finish. In this session, Julie will discuss:

• Consumers' changing media and shopping habits
• Mobile trends and how these devices are changing her shopping journey
• Why these changes call for store brands to fully integrate digital into their marketing plans