Scaling printed store circular strategies to Facebook - Case: Walmart Brasil

Abstract

Question about how traditional consumer packaged goods (CPG) retailers can adopt to and succeed in the digital marketing has been under a lot of scrutiny lately. Even in 2018 while digital media has been growing in many other industries way past traditional print advertising, for many large-scale CPG brands has print ads and more specifically, weekly print circulars still been the main channel of product communications towards consumers. Although customer journeys are getting more complex due to additional marketing channels digital advertising is here to stay and especially among millennials retailers have to think of their digital strategies to remain competitive. During the past few years technologies such as advertising automation and dynamic targeting based on machine learning have gained ground to answer to the need of an easier and scalable digital advertising. Much of previous research has looked into the question of overall omnichannel strategies but relatively little research has been conducted around what the enabling technologies are. Through a case study with Walmart Brasil this thesis tries to find out, what components have made print circular strategies the number one strategy for CPG retailers and how emerging technologies could help retailers replicate their success in digital mediums such as Facebook.