It is notoriously difficult to measure the impact of a brand’s marketing efforts – particularly when it comes to offline advertising. Methods for assessing the ROI of packaging design, billboards, pamphlets, TV advertisements and other traditional offline marketing tactics extremely vague.

This can lend a hand in explaining why the pioneers of the online digital marketing industry, such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook, have seen such explosive growth. After all, the digital funnel analysis can easily provide you with important marketing metrics such as how much reach your advertising has, customer attribution, and cost of customer acquisition, while most brick and mortar marketing efforts cannot.

So the question is: how do you fight this seemingly uphill battle to measure the monetary value of building brand awareness? 

In-Store Demo Campaigns

Most people undervalue a long-term impact of In store Demo Campaign, because they do not have a methodology to measure the holistic impact of their event. In other words, ROI is measured only by the amount of product sales during the demo instead of the “big-picture” impact.

While demo sales are certainly an important metric, and are fairly easy to acquire using demo reports and/or POS data in stores, it does not tell a complete story.

The reality is, with proper analytics in place, in-store demo campaigns can provide you with complete visibility into the ROI for every dollar that is invested. 

Economic Valuation of Brand Building

When you ask CPG brand builders why they invest time and money into conducting demo campaigns, you will hear a combination of the following responses:

• We want to increase our brand awareness
• We want to show our support to retailers
• We want to accelerate velocity of our product inventory

All of the above are very worthy goals, so how would you know if you achieved them or not without assigning economic valuations to them? 

Economic valuation of the first two goals are reasonably well represented by sales receipts achieved during the demo event and additional sales uplift during 3-4 weeks immediately following the event. The only sources of such data can be the store POS or the distributor sales order records. But how does one measure the economic value of brand awareness?
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A brand is the way a company, organization, or individual is perceived by those who experience it, and growing brand awareness means getting as many people to experience your product or service as possible. 

The economic value of brand awareness can be calculated adopting the methods that are commonly used by digital marketers. One of the most effective promotional channels for building brand awareness is internet banner ads. Their effectiveness can be attributed to the powerful algorithms which serve ads using factors such as keywords, demographics, location, and remarketing in order to promote your brand and generate awareness in a very relevant way.

However, there are some big criticisms of online advertising especially around rising data privacy concerns. Ads can be “creepy” in the way they use demographic data and follow a person around the internet.

One may argue that an in-store demo is comparable to running “cold” online advertising (targeting an audience that has not interacted with your company). The goal of each is essentially the same: capture a moment of a potential customer’s attention in order to boost brand awareness. 

On the other hand though, the value of tasting a product, interacting with a product, and having direct communication with a brand ambassador, or is a more authentic and valuable interaction than clicking on an advertisement would be. In addition, a consumer may feel more open connecting with a brand in an offline environment, where they are not concerned about their online privacy.

In Conclusion

The point is not to argue whether in-store demos are better or worse than online advertising, as the success of different marketing channels can depend heavily on your specific product or service. 

Rather, the point is that ROI of in-store demos are often substantially undervalued when, in fact, they should be seen as a valuable offline method of brand awareness building, comparable to online advertising. Therefore, similar methods should be used analyzing the holistic, “big-picture” ROI of an in-store demo, versus simply focusing on the low hanging fruit metrics, such as day sales.

If you’re curious to learn more about getting better analytics from your in-store demos, you can find a free copy of Demo ROI Calculator template by clicking on this link.
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One of the recurring complaints you would likely hear from Field Marketing Managers and Demo Coordinators is how unreliable are the Brand Ambassadors they have to deal with. In fact, if you ever experienced scheduling a few demos, you have probably endured a Brand Ambassador's last moment cancellation or "now show".

I would like to posit that the Brand Ambassadors' perceived lack of reliability is not necessarily caused by their mercurial personalities, but by the nature of their business and unavailability of appropriate time management tools. Consider the fact that most Brand Ambassadors are independent contractors who try to earn their living selling their personal skills in small time increments. After all, most in store demos only last 3-4 hours. As such, the Brand Ambassadors need to market their services to Demo Coordinators, Brand Managers, etc. as well as delivering these services in stores and events.

It is impossible to estimate how many hours a Brand Ambassador has to market their services to get a single demo for which she can earn $60-$140. This reality forces them to continuously work with multiple Brands, conflicting times and constantly changing dates. 

Field Marketing is more effective than any other form of advertising because it can measurably impact sales in a very direct and accountable way. 

“Half of my advertising budget is wasted away. Unfortunately I don’t know which half” is the quote attributed to John Wanamaker, Philadelphia retailer and marketing pioneer. Even with the advent of digital advertising it is difficult to account how ads exposure and clicks translate into actual unit sales. ​