In-Store Demos & Experiential Marketing Agency in San Fransisco

Samples and demos offered in-store are a tried-and-true, entertaining way to interact with customers, promote your goods and services, attract new clients, and increase sales. The best way to make your products and brands stand out is to offer consumers the opportunity to experience, taste, or sample them. For the majority of CPG products, offering a free sample is a great way to attract new and devoted customers. 

 

Hundreds of food and beverage brands of all sizes have enlisted the help of Flavor Fanatics, a San Francisco experimental marketing agency, to increase their retail presence and sales and, as a result, strengthen their relationships with their retail customers. Flavor Fanatics organizes tasting events in grocery stores, where customers can sample various food and beverage products from partnering brands. These interactive experiences not only engage customers to try new products but also provide an opportunity for the brands to showcase their offerings and educate customers about their unique flavors and nutritional values. Flavor Fanatics is the only experiential marketing agency in San Francisco that provides advanced culinary skills to produce cooking demos in stores.

 

Talk to us about your needs today.

 

Why Do Brands Invest in In-Store Demos and Samplings?

 

Providing a solid sampling program to a retailer can increase the likelihood of your brand being included in a trial. Retailers place a high value on vendors' willingness to invest in the launch of a new brand. 

The post-demo reports, which contain insightful customer feedback, can ease a retail buyer's concerns about the potential success of your products. When the first retail partner is locked down and the products are on the shelves, a well-thought-out in-store sampling program can yield extremely useful data that can accurately predict the success or failure of the product at a cost that is much lower than a slotting fee. In-store sampling also enables brands to talk to new consumers and get instant feedback, both of which can be used to improve the product and boost its chances of success. This method not only reduces expenses, but also fosters a stronger bond between the brand and its intended audience through a more personal and intimate interaction.

A successful in-store sampling campaign can significantly improve the trial outcome and pave the way for your storefront to expand into additional locations, all while boosting initial sales performance and gaining the approval of retail buyers. 

Sales per square foot of retail space is a key metric for retailers, who use it to determine which products to stock and whether or not to bring them into new locations. Low initial and ongoing sales are usually the precursor to a product being removed from shelves in some or all retail outlets. However, if your sales are higher than anticipated, it will be much simpler to secure more display space and shelves.

In store sampling is still an important part of any CPG marketing mix. Thanks to this sensory, in-person customer engagement, field marketers find it simpler to persuade consumers to switch brands, try new products, and add a few unforeseen purchases to their shopping carts. In addition, in-store sampling provides an opportunity for consumers to ask questions and receive immediate feedback from knowledgeable staff, which can further enhance their overall shopping experience and build brand loyalty. Therefore, it is important for CPG companies to continue investing in in-store sampling as a valuable marketing strategy.

 

Flavor Fanatics: San Fransisco Experimental Marketing Agency

 

Flavor Fanatics can suggest, based on the nature of your products and extensive data of San Francisco market collected over the years:

1. The most successful retail locations,

2. Optimal number of samples on the demo samples

3. The most oppotune days of a week and time of a day,

And other specific parameters to produce and coordinate a flawless experience. We can also advice on a frequency of events going forward and coordinate inventory availability with the stores and their wholesale distributors to insure uninterrupted sales and high experience to purchase conversion ratio.

We use highly specialized experiential event management software to plan, coordinate, manage, report and analyze performance of each event, each brand ambassador, and the entire demo program all along providing to our Clients complete transparency into our process and analytics via the custom portal.

Most of our brand ambassadors have over three years of experience promoting specialty foods and services in San Francisco stores. During an in-store sampling event, a knowledgeable and well-trained brand ambassador will engage a lot more shoppers and persuade them to become customers than a staffing agency's minimum-wage temp. Compared to a temp, a brand ambassador with at least a year of experience in retail marketing can increase engagement and conversion rates by 83% at a 33% lower hourly rate.

 

After collecting and analyzing in-store demo reports for over a decade, we now have a sizable database of detailed information that allows us to reasonably predict the success of a proposed store sampling event. Our forecasting methodology centers on the customer acquisition cost (CAC), taking into account the following variables:

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Customer LTV (lifetime value) ‍

 

Most demo and sampling initiatives use in-store demo sales as their primary success metric, though some also try to predict how many units will be sold in the weeks following the demo. We propose a model that takes into consideration not only the frequency of promotion but also the category and price of the promoted product. ‍

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Store Traffic ‍

 

We use collected data, store staff knowledge and online research to estimate the store's demo event's expected foot traffic. However, foot traffic data alone cannot predict how well an in-store demo will perform. The degree of engagement shown by shoppers is one metric that is frequently disregarded. Marketing managers often adopt the "more is better" mentality, but our experience shows that s hoppers' attention wanes and they become less willing to interact when there are too many people in a store.

 

Brand Ambassador Performance

 

There is a direct relationship between the quality, attitude, experience, and product knowledge of each individual and the organization that provides them. The consistency of brand ambassadors' performance and the rate of their retention depend strongly on the quality of the management team, which schedules their time, coordinates the events, and provides support, training, and payroll management. Flavor Fanatics management team effectively recruited, train and retain our best performers since 2008.