Q&A: Lorna Davidson, redwigwam’s growth in demand
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Field Marketing heard that demand levels for redwigwam’s field marketing and mystery shopper/ product tester jobs had gone up and thought it indicative of interesting trend. Here we put the questions to redwigwam’s founder and CEO, Lorna Davidson.
1. What Field marketing (FM) and mystery shopper and product tester (MSPT) jobs are growth areas for redwigwam at the moment?
We have got numerous jobs across these sectors throughout the country. Our growth is helping challenger brands using our Red Alerts data driven service in grocery to help ensure they have maximum availability and distribution. This is vital to new brands coming into the grocery marketplace. We have also seen growth in brands using our Red Review service to drive brand awareness online.
Red Alerts gives brands a solution to identify and fix in-store their biggest distribution, availability, or promotional issues, on their most valuable SKUs at that point in time faster than anyone, therefore returning the biggest return on their investment.
We have designed a platform and written algorithms that can take any retailers EPoS sales data and turn that data into individual SKU alerts where we have identified an issue in its rate of sale. We make those alerts available to our field workers and they visit the store to fix the issue sane day. We then provide live reporting back to the client on the success of the fix. We can then put an ROI on that fix depending on the value or profit our client makes on that specific SKU, minus the cost to visit the store.
New brands often suffer from zero sales in store because retailers systems get listing and distribution data wrong which can often result in a product not being in distribution where it should be. Red Alerts is instrumental in identifying immediately where there is an issue and fixing it.
25% of us now shop online for groceries once a week, with online sales accounting for 97% in grocery sales in August 2020 when online sales reached a 13.5% market share. Shopping habits have changed for good, so we are helping brands drive their online presence, create consumer trust and confidence and drive trial purchase by leaving genuine consumer reviews on retailers websites. We ask our panels of shoppers to be open and honest in their feedback to encourage trial, especially where a brand is new and will rely more on word of mouth to drive sales.
2. FM specifically – what sorts of businesses are recruiting via redwigwam?
We are uniquely placed to be able to support both brands and agencies. Our database of over 160,000 staff, all employed by redwigwam, with the right skills and experience are ready at very short notice to execute FM campaigns across any channel and with a number of leading FMCG brands.
3. (FM) Has the pandemic affected this jobs market? How?
Yes, and it has been really positive in bringing more people into FM from the wider GIG economy who want to work in flexible roles.
4. (FM) What skills are required?
FM roles can cover a wide range of tasks, but primarily we look for people with skills in merchandising, sales, communicating and presenting information and the ability to understand data. Most of all we want people with a great personality and a positive attitude!
5. (FM) are there any strong or weak geographical areas nationally?
Not for us because we have the scale and reach to cover every part of the UK with our 160,000 workers. This means we can support agencies who struggle with remote locations.
6. (MSPT) Why is this area growing?
The growth in online shopping has been accelerated massively through the pandemic so brands need to grab the attention of shoppers so they have confidence to try new products.
7. (MSPT) What skills are required?
The skill in being a good MSPT is to be yourself and behave as an everyday customer buying and using that brand. We look for people who are prepared to try new things and be able to give articulate, measured and insightful feedback.
8. What sorts of businesses are recruiting?
There are lots of great, new, small challenger brands breaking into grocery to take on the big multi-nationals and we have created a niche working with them because we fit well with their values.
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