Insights
Parkar Digital for CPG & Retail-The Path to Digital Consumerism
Digital is obscuring the boundaries between consumers, brands, and stores. From New York to Nairobi, from Chicago to Singapore, and from Phoenix to Tokyo, every consumer has embraced the digital world. They rapidly adapt to shop groceries during the daily commute, download music or books, use social media, and share buying decisions and social networks experience. The ‘anytime anywhere’ idea has grown fast with the rise of cell phones, cloud computing, and social media.
The rising digital technology is empowering the consumers. It has shifted the power from the corporate to individual consumers. Today the consumers have full access to buy products and services. They check multiple websites or apps, compare prices and reviews, and share their opinion on the digital space.
It took just seven years to become the internet as a mass medium in the US since its launch date. Digital is ubiquitous today. It has already crossed all boundaries of age, geography, and phase of economic development.
With such exclusive digitization, the retail and CPG sectors are also transforming into digital. The digitally-influenced and mobile-influenced in-store sales are the two key factors playing a crucial role in this transformation.
This blog discusses how digital is disrupting and changing the CPG and retail industries by emphasizing how Parkar Digital can help you achieve digital transformation.
Digital Disruption
CPG and retail companies are quite skillful in adopting new trends. But the industries are yet to exploit all the changes drastically for scaling commercially. Most companies emphasize digital evolutions by adding more to the analog business by focusing on digital marketing and ROI. Although the line between consumer, manufacturer, distributor, and retailer is getting blurred, the CPG and retail companies can experiment with digital. For example, Tesco, the supermarket giant, built a virtual store in Korea where consumers can buy things by scanning QR code.
Digital Transformation (DX) in the CPG and Retail Industry
The CPG and retail industries stepped into the digital transformation journey when Coca Cola enabled the first cell phone vending machine in Helsinki, Finland, in 1990. Inspiring this footstep, many CPG giants, including P&G, Kelloggs, Nestle, Warby Parkar, Casper, Nike, etc. have started the DX journey with drastic technology adoption.
With such digital transformation in the CPG and retail industries, it saw a shift from traditional setup to the digital native. The US alone saw a significant shift in the market share of $18 billion from large to small CPG companies between 2011-2015.
- 2016: Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club ( digitally native CPG brand) for $1billion.
- 2017: L’Oréal begins Lancôme’s Le Teint Particulier to build foundation bases depending on skin tone.
- In the same year, P&G acquired Native Deodorant, having an online distribution model.
- 2018: L’Oréal bought Modi Face that builds custom augmented reality beauty apps.
Since digital transformation is shifting to a native and small segment, both industries have been witnessing an overwhelming journey. CPG and retail companies should include a digital-first business strategy as the next step.
What is a digital-first business strategy for CPG and Retail?
Integrating a digital-first approach in the core business practice enables businesses to create a digital transformation journey. However, this transformation is not easy without strategy and guidance. Digital transformation is critical when you don’t know how to plan proper change management without hampering the operation. Some of the common questions the CIOs face are:
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- Which technology or tool should I adopt?
- Will it affect my consumers?
- Will it enhance my customer experience?
- How should I plan digital transformation?
- Will I be able to give a more personalized experience?
Choosing the right technology
Everyone uses the cloud to scale their businesses. The CPG and retail industries can make the best of it by adopting a public or hybrid cloud. They can save customer information in the private cloud by offering online native products on the public cloud. Thus, they can protect consumer privacy with a seamless selling operation.
Customer Experience
With the right technology choice, you can enhance customer experience by empowering them with more personalized services. It helps to buy commodities from their preferred channels and mediums.
The roadmap of digital-first business strategy
- Integrate digital at the core of your business process.
- Plan a digital transformation journey.
- Integrate an intelligent cloud model to make the traditional setup agile.
- Adopt a contemporary multi-channel architecture to serve users on a one-to-one basis.
- Build a hyper-responsive engagement model to acquire and retain customers.
- Deploy API and microservices to adopt market conditions with faster speed.
- Embrace automation to deliver a consistent, repeatable, and scaled customer experience.
- Utilize high-tech digital technologies like AI, cloud, IoT, AR/VR, and mobile-first to embed data to offer a rich digital experience.
Parkar Digital for CPG and Retail
Interesting research reveals that consumers make 81% of purchasing decisions from home. Customer experience and brand accessibility play a significant role in this decision making.
We at Parkar Digital offer a platform for the CPG and retail industries to grow beyond boundaries. This NexGen platform lays the foundation for digital technology to improve your customer experience.
Parkar Digital helps you to innovate your supply chain. By re-engineering your ERPs and CRMs, we enable you to have a 360-degree view of inventories and all customer activities. Parkar NexGen platform is built on cloud technologies like OpenShift, Azure, and AWS to protect your backend data.
We analyze your consumer data with ML and AI to make intelligent decisions and predict analytics. With omnichannel marketing, we assist you in enabling your customers to shop from their preferred medium. We also leverage high-tech technologies to optimize prices for your products.
At Parkar Digital, we speedup digital adoption with our frameworks and pre-packaged solutions for retailers and wholesalers. Our customers benefit from the decrease in their time to market and with our core platforms:
- NexGen Cloud Platform; builds the Foundational layer for digital modernization for your apps and data.
- Intelligent Data Platform; builds the Unified data layer to support decision-making, operational analytics, and interoperability.
- Experience Platform; helps driving higher customer engagement and experience.
Fig: Parkar Digital convergence platform – Path to Digital Consumerism in CPG
We bridge the gap between buyers and sellers with digital consumerism and retail personalization with in-depth knowledge in retail, CPG, healthcare, and wholesale. With the power of an agile team, we make your digital transformation journey faster and smoother. We have been working with many CPG and retail companies to boost their customer experience.
What do we do in CPG and Retail?
By empowering modern consumers, we build a platform for digital consumerism from scratch. We empower you with the following services:
Product Recommendations
We use Parkar IDP (Intelligent Data Processing) to build a product recommendation engine. It helps in cross-selling and upselling consumables. Product recommendation studies customer buying and searching history to auto recommend them to buy products of their use.
Customer Experience
Parkar Digital aims to provide personalized customer service with AI-powered chatbot. It empowers the customers to buy products from their favorite mediums.
Pricing Optimization
We use the Parkar Intelligent Data Platform to build a price optimization engine helping in maximizing revenue. It uses mathematical analysis to find how customers will react to different prices of products on different mediums.
Smart Segmentation
We understand the micro-segments of customers. It helps to implement hyper-targeted market segmentation for customers. We use ML to predict your user buying behavior and divide them into groups. Also, we help to identify and monetize your app users who are not interested in doing so.
Supply Chain Optimization
We use data and digital solutions to find the best mix across your supply chain to meet increasing demands. Also, we build resilience in your supply chain against any risk and uncertainty.
Optimal Allocation
We help you to maintain optimized inventory levels for all stages with smart allocations of goods. This enables you to resolve supply constraints within any distribution of the supply chain.
THE AUTHOR
Amit Gandhi
As the Co-Founder and CTO for Parkar Digital, Amit leads the Technology and Engineering teams and is responsible for designing and implementing innovative technology solutions for clients across various industries.
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Parkar Digital is a digital transformation and software engineering company headquartered in Atlanta, USA, and has engineering teams across India, Singapore, Dubai, and Latin America.