Hillshire Brands Scores with Geo-Targeting Promotions 

In Grocery Stores 

By Dale Buss

Like most CPG companies, Hillshire Brands is rapidly ramping up its digital strategy for engaging shoppers and consumers more thoroughly, no matter where they deploy their bits and bytes. One of the company’s first successes has been the use of so-called “beacon” technology and mobile-phone apps to promote its new American Craft Link Sausage line

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The Chicago-based owner of leading CPG meat brands including Hillshire Farm, Sara Lee, Jimmy Dean and Ballpark partnered with marketing company inMarket and media-buying agency BPN during the second quarter for an in-supermarket program that pinged the cell phones of grocery-app users when they walked in and lured them to the case where American Craft Link loomed.

The project was deemed a huge success in terms of app-user engagement and prompted an overall lift in sales over its two-month duration. Hillshire proceeded to sign on another brand, Jimmy Dean, for a beacon-based campaign for this fall, when Hillshire is releasing new lunch and dinner products for the brand.

“We started experimenting with location-based technologies and increased focus on mobile a year ago, recognizing that location is key to engaging with our consumers,” David Ervin, director of integrated marketing for Hillshire Brands, told CPGmatters. “We are excited to pave the way in the beacon space and change the conversation CPG brands are having by challenging the market.”

Added Dave Heinzinger, senior director of communications for inMarket: “With Hillshire, this is the first time that we’re able to say with certainty that, yes, beacons and the mobile ecosystem are helping influence purchases in store, and here are the numbers to back it up. We can expect more announcements about beacon success from forward-thinking CPGs like Hillshire moving forward.”

And indeed, while beacon technology has been around for a while, it’s not yet a part of the U.S. grocery-retailing mainstream. In fact, Hillshire’s campaign is one of the first evidences to back up the idea that shoppers can be significantly influenced by the use of the technology.

“Reaching the consumer at the right time and in the right place is ideal to drive sales of a product and overall brand awareness,” 

Chris Hiland, chief growth officer of BPN, told CPGmatters. “Consumers are more receptive to receiving a Hillshire Brands message when closest to the product and in-store.”

Jamie Tenser, Principal, VSN Strategies, compared beacon technology “in a narrow respect to the instant-coupon dispensers used widely in the 1990s and early 2000s. Those had similar advantages of proximity and disruption – but they were not at all targeted.”

Hillshire was hoping the beacon program would help it launch the new American Craft line in an already-crowded segment on a limited budget. Hillshire’s initiative included stores in the top 10 U.S. grocery markets.

Specifically, the company and its partners targeted consumers who already had downloaded one of the shopping apps in inMarket’s network, which includes Conde Nest’s Epicurious and Gannett-owned Key Ring. Consumers who used these apps in-store were sent a branded “push” notification from Hillshire. The campaign also included banner ads within the app that linked to a big ad with coupon and content.

The “geo-targeting” effort “made the product stand out among competitors” in what Hiland called an “over-saturated” category, “which is typically difficult once individuals are already in the store, because they tend to gravitate to what they know.”

In fact, inMarket claimed to have lifted purchase intent by 20% and brand awareness by 36 % percent after the campaign ran, according to surveys of groups of app users who didn’t see the Hillshire ad compared to those who did. The parties measured some 6,000 engagements during the first two days of the campaign, which is a measure of the number of times someone received, opened and viewed a push-notification ad while in store.

By comparison, inMarket’s internal data finds that the average CPG brand sees about 3,000 views with content in one week. The marketing partners calculated that was an increase of 500%  in user engagement compared with the CPG average.

Heinzinger stressed that beacons don’t do anything without apps and active users to listen for the pings. But they certainly improve upon using smartphones in the CPG path-to-purchase, an effort that advertisers and their partners have been ramping up since the advent of smartphones in 2007. Millennials – who live by their mobile devices – are especially open to beacon programs.

Tenser said that Hillshire’s choice of using in-store beacons to promote a new-product introduction is “an interesting one on several levels.” It’s an economical way to notify likely shoppers – those who’ve bothered to install the mobile app -- about the item’s availability, he said, for one thing.

“And brands are in the continual hunt for mechanisms to target shoppers in store with less or even no dependence upon retailer cooperation than is currently required,” Tenser said. “In-store promotional networks like ICM, floor media, cart signs and even digital screens are unguided missiles. Communications via mobile devices are like rifle shots.”

That analogy makes beacon programs more like a laser-guided missile that helps brands hit their best targets perhaps better than anything that has come before.

“Millions of people already use shopping apps in-store, including list-makers and recipe fans and coupon-cutter and loyalty-point collectors,” Heinzinger noted. “The beacon experience is just layered on consumer behavior that has existed for years.”