Three Ways Suzy Helps Colgate-Palmolive Make Even Better Business Decisions

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Global legacy brands are always working to retain sustainability, so they still need consumer insights — fast and of substance.

Across more than 30 years of working in the retail industry, as a cashier, store manager, buyer, and category manager, Tara Dunn, Senior Retail Category Development Team Leader at Colgate-Palmolive, has seen a lot of changes. The most prominent, important landscape alteration of late, as far as she’s concerned, is “the shopper has become king.”

“In my days in the store, the retailer really seemed to have more of the power,” Dunn said during a recent webinar, produced by Suzy in a partnership with CMA/SIMA. “If a shopper came in the store and they wanted to buy a gallon of milk, and they wanted the lowest price, they just had to have faith that, wherever they were, that was the lowest price.”

Today, on the other hand, she said, “folks can be in a store, they can pick up their cell phone and they can easily see” what the best price for an item may be and where they can get that price, as well as product reviews and tons more information.

Because of this shift, Dunn added, “We’re just having to adapt so much faster and so much quicker.”

But Dunn and the rest of the team at Colgate-Palmolive have Suzy’s customer insights on their side, and she explained how their partnership has been an advantageous one.

Fast Consumer Insights

Building on her earlier observation about the need for speed when it comes to pivoting in myriad ways, Dunn said “the pace at which we can gather trends and project-out the future” has quickened exponentially. Amidst the chaos of the past year, particularly the social distancing restrictions, which kept brands from conducting all-important in-person interviews with consumers, Dunn said Suzy was “a game-changer.”

“That virtual world allows us to gain insights for whoever our customer is really quickly,” she observed. “Five years ago, if one of my customers wanted insights on how to change a category, a flow, adjacencies, insights, anything, it could be upwards of three or four months before we could get the insights and the nuggets to present back to the retailer.”

These days, however, that just doesn’t cut it. She relies on the always-on insights from Suzy and a suite of other tools to keep up with the pace of contemporary business. 

“Time is of the essence,” Dunn said. “We don’t have six months to gather those insights anymore.”

Agile Decision-Making

This year, brands learned that, on a dime, shopper habits can change dramatically. Though the industry was already moving in this direction, Dunn is sure that the pandemic’s boost to eCommerce will have a lasting impact.

“We are seeing folks returning to the brick and mortar [locations], but still seeing substantial growth in eComm,” Dunn said. “EComm is here to stay; I think it’s just going to continue to be a bigger piece of the pie for everyone in the industry.”

For a brand like Colgate-Palmolive, which has items on shelves in big-box retailers and mom and pop corner stores alike, such a quick shift means business decision-makers have to be light on their feet. Always-on insights from Suzy can’t hurt their cause.

“It’s just about flexing and being able to be agile and helping your customer in any way you can,” Dunn says of researchers like herself, and other team members of any brand. “Where you have a Walmart and an Amazon, they’re very sophisticated; they’ve been embracing this digital, online, eComm platform [model], and then some of the smaller retailers have been behind.”

But to the smaller outlets’ credit, Dunn said, “they’re trying to catch up, and that’s where, as a manufacturer, we’re trying to leverage our insights, to help in that area, to be competitive in this marketplace.”

Future Forecasting

Given the speed of business today, forecasting the future has become even more difficult. But Dunn believes it’s still an important part of any brand’s business approach, and it’s an area where Suzy’s proven helpful.

“You just have to create your road map and you’ve got to stick to it,” Dunn said. “With eCommerce — just anything digital — it’s just changing so fast; I think sometimes we get impatient, and we don’t wait to see if things are going to stick, that it’s going to work.”

She then doubled down on this thought, advising brands to “define your path,” even though in this emerging age of eCommerce, progress is often so difficult to track. However, she added, in light of understandable hastiness, “Sometimes we pivot maybe before we need to.”

For more information on how your brand can respond to shifting behaviors in retail, watch the entire webinar. Visit Suzy.com to learn how to use Suzy to gather customer insights and understand your target market.