I was asked by the management the other day to check a peculiar movement in one of our brand. It is not a big skin care product hence no marketing support is put behind it. From the beginning we were expecting only a flat growth for it; the brand is managed for cash, so to speak. So we are quite astonished to see that it actually is growing.
Time to check Nielsen’s Retail Audit. Competitors – check, market – check, distribution – check. There’s nothing extraordinary about them, except a slight increase in total market. But then again nobody really increase media spending for the category, if not nothing at all. So what cause the growth in consumption?
Having no explanations at hand, and no budget to spend for consumer research, the only thing I can do is to do desk research. And after googling for a while I realized one thing: it’s Global Warming. The higher temperature across the earth has caused certain people to sweat more. This phenomenon in turn caused skin irritation. To eradicate this problem more people buy skin care product, hence: the increase in total consumption for skin care category. Voila, a fool-proof analysis…
But back home I found out that it’s not only me who’s affected by this global warming craze. It’s been raining for few days in Jakarta and one day I found ponds of water in front of my house. This is odd because there’s none in front of my neighbours’. Must be the drainage, I thought.
I called my gardener because it’s his responsibility to clean the drainage. Soon we were involved in discussion why he didn’t do his job keeping the drainage unclogged, especially since it’s rainy season already. At one point he evasively said, “it’s not the drainage pak, it’s just too much water. Maybe because of global warming pak”. I rolled my eyes.
Last case. Again in the office, I was discussing operational performance of the sales force with one Sales Area Manager over the phone. The sales force performance in one of his area out of Java is not so encouraging, particularly due to lower-than-average numbers of sales visit. He could not immediately find out why the numbers of sales visit are low, so he asked whether he can discuss this with his team and call me back in the afternoon.
When he rang back he said that it’s true his team could not meet the sales visit quota. I asked whether it’s due to operational, people or territorial problem. No he said, my sales force simply could not visit that many outlets. He continued, it’s simply too hot, they can’t stand the heat so they have to go back to the office earlier at 4. And guess what he said when I inquired why is it so. Right. Global warming.
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