Case Study

As a member of the generation who grew up with the rise of technology, I can tell you that the concept of social media in the workplace is discarded or embraced on many different levels in our industry. On one end of the spectrum, there is the camp that believes that it is a waste of time to view things as ridiculous as the type of drink you got at the gas station across social media platforms. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there is a camp that believes that there is value in knowing what type of drink people are buying, and in our industry, what type of packaging that drink is associated with.

It is important to remember that social media goes beyond Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Vanguard Packaging was founded in 1975 by my grandparents, Jack and Bobbie Mathes. These were the glory days of the brown box salesman—out on the road, armed with a paper map, a roll of quarters for the pay phone, and the idea that a handshake and the word of the salesman was good enough to get the deal done. My father and now owner of Vanguard Packaging, Mark Mathes, has taken our company beyond the production of brown boxes to more of a creative agency that offers full-service design, manufacturing, assembly, co-packing, and distribution in the retail environment. Jack was one of the most intelligent salespeople I have ever known, but as in all companies of that era, he was limited on the growth of Vanguard due to the technology of his time. My two-year-old daughter already understands how to work an iPad and find her favorite learning apps. It is more common to send a text or an email to someone than to pick up the phone or meet in person. Creativity and customer service are often pushed aside in favor of the lowest/quickest price. This is the new business world we live in, and embracing social media and technology is how you show value add to your customers.

Defining Social Media

So what is social media? I’m sure there are many ways to answer that question. To me, social media is how we share or promote information on an online platform. Smartphones, tablets, computers—all are used to connect individuals to an idea. What most people first think of when they hear “so-cial media” is Facebook. It is important to remember that social media goes beyond Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. I actively participate in blogs, podcasts, and online magazines. These are all ways for me to receive information or get ideas to the masses.

But, does the introduction to an idea or concept in social media always come from a smartphone, tablet, or computer? The answer is no, and this is where a company such as Vanguard Packaging comes into the picture. Our customers are creating campaigns for their customers or the end users of their products. As our customers use their brands to build campaigns around their products in a retail environment, we facilitate the concept on point-of-purchase packaging. We work with our customer base to increase their reach and growth by suggesting how our products can align with their campaigns. As a brand gets more exposure to the end user and more products are sold, Vanguard has the opportunity to capitalize on the increased sales through a larger manufacturing of our products.

If I were asked, “What are your most innovative approaches to marketing and social media? Who develops and runs your campaigns?” my answer would be, “I don’t know if we have been innovative in our approach.” I believe that we have accurately identified the business realm that we live in and have attacked it accordingly. We let our customers present an idea, and we run with it. We take a concept and grow it to something that will maximize exposure. Everyone develops and runs our campaigns at Vanguard. It is our job to understand what has worked and what could be promising for our customer base. This knowledge is built into our sales team and design team to create a marketing department. So, like all successful companies, our definition of social media is molded to fit our needs.

Gauging Success

The most important aspect of this for us has been how to use smartphone technology to gauge the success of our product on the retail floor. Displays have inherently suffered two major disadvantages over other forms of advertising and marketing. The first is proof of placement. In almost every multi-store environment, the store manager is the ultimate decision-maker as to whether or not a display will be placed on the floor. Another way to look at this is, “How do we prove that the investment in the display was a wise investment in the first place?” The second is, “How do we prove that the display performs as it was designed when it gets onto the store floor?”

Our answer to this was the major tool of social media—the smartphone. We began to develop a suite of apps on a common platform that we call the Retail Assessment Tool, or RAT App. This app allows anybody with a smartphone to prove the placement of the display on the floor and then grade its effectiveness based upon whatever criteria the customer selects. This information, along with a photo of the display, is immediately sent

to the cloud, where we have predetermined options for data collection and data analytics. All of this is available in real time if required. The beauty of this app is that anybody with a smartphone can act in the capacity of a data collector, thus gathering vast amounts of information in very short periods of time. So, in the case of Wal-Mart, their 2 million employees could all act as retail assessment auditors. This app provides lots of opportunities for compliance data collection as well.

So at Vanguard, social media and the tools of social media spread well beyond LinkedIn, Facebook, Snapchat, and all of the other platforms we traditionally assign to this category. We believe that social media in its purest form is about communication, and when you think that way, there are no boundaries as to where this can go. As for us, we went with a RAT.

Jared Mathes is marketing and brand development director at Vanguard Label Inc. He may be reached at 816-455-4000 or jamathes@vanguardpkg.com.