How To Stand Out & Impress

How To Stand Out & Impress The Hell Out of Hiring Managers With A Powerful & Compelling HR Resume!

By Alan Collins
If you’ve been sending out resumes and you’re getting no responses, chances are your resume is the problem.
As you know, most folks screening HR resumes are squeezed for time and typically only spend 15-20 seconds per applicant.
This means your resume must immediately grab them by the throat and sell you as a powerful and compelling candidate…and illustrate that you’re worth contacting for further interviews. Sadly, most HR resumes don’t.
Even if you aren’t currently in the job market, failing to know how to best highlight your achievements is a weakness that can absolutely destroy your HR career.
When it comes to performance appraisals, promotion consideration, even day-to-day work assignments, being a master at how to influence the perception of you as a performer is key to ensuring that your career in HR reaches the heights you desire.  And that’s what a powerful and compelling resume can do.
With that in mind, here are 12 suggestions that will make your resume stand out from the rest of the bunch.
1.  Forget the gimmicks.
Using quirky font sizes, strange layouts, or clever graphics are no-no’s. While a bizarre resume format may get you a few more seconds of eyeball time during the screening process, it may also prevent your resume from making it through electronic sorting and filtering tools used by the bigger corporations.
So focus on more of your “selling points” and less on “curb appeal.” Compelling “selling” points include your  results, your impact on the organization, your skills and your ability to manage and lead…at the very minimum.
2.  Juice up your accomplishments by quantifying or monetizing your results.
Hiring managers are NOT looking for job descriptions or activities on your resume.    Job descriptions are simply boring descriptions of the responsibilities of the HR positions you have held in the past. Today, that simply won’t cut it.
The language of business is dollars and numbers. Everyone wants HR folks who deliver impact and produce results. So you need to find a way to energize and pack your resume with quantifiable results and the dollars that you MADE, SAVED, and ACHIEVED in every position you’ve held in HR. Then, include those totals in your resume and put them up front, where they can’t be missed.
EXAMPLES:

• Saved company $50,000 in recruiting manufacturing supervisors by utilizing a “quick strike” Twitter and LinkedIn recruiting strategy.
  
• Reduced by 14% the number of complaints filed per employee which resulted in $30,000 savings.
  
• Did supervisory training utilizing in-house managers as trainers saving $125,000 in outside consulting fees.
  
• Collaborated on an action plan that reduced turnover rate by18% of the top performers.
  
• Won 2 union organizing campaigns saving the organization potentially $1.5MM in increased costs if the group had successfully unionized.

To differentiate yourself from 95% of your HR competitors, whenever possible include phrases like:  “cut costs by xx%,” “completed the project under time and under budget,” “used technology to improve HR service to business clients,” “did more with less,” “reduced management time spent on HR issues by xx%” and the like.
3.  Lead, follow or get the hell out of the way.
HR folks who can lead are always in demand. If you haven’t led and you’re seeking a role that calls for leadership skills ask yourself how many times you were a leader of a project, a subproject, a team, or even a meeting/event.
It doesn’t matter if you were never formally appointed a leader or given a leadership title. If you’ve successfully led others, you should reference leadership as one of your attributes.
Feature leadership terms throughout your resume, including sections covering your experience, education, and extracurricular activities.
EXAMPLE:

• Assembled and led a team responsible for developing a plan to expand scope of HR services provided by 25%, overcoming resource limitations, personality conflicts, and communication breakdowns and successfully presented the case to the Executive Committee.

4.  Brag about your awards and honors
Crafting your resume is not the time for modesty. Stick your chest out and mention all recognitions received for outstanding work. Don’t forget shared and team awards, or informal awards created by local managers. Include awards received both in school and on the job.
EXAMPLE:

• Received the Chairman’s Award for HR Excellence three times.

5.  Name drop.
HR pros who have the opportunity to work with key people and executives are assumed to be among the best. So name names. If you worked for or with a famous individual, highlight them. Also include enough information so that the reader will know their importance.
EXAMPLE:

• Was selected by PepsiCo’s CEO, Indra Nooyi (#2 on the Fortune’s List of the World’s Most Powerful Women) to serve on a committee that successfully streamlined our talent and succession planning process by two weeks.

In addition to mentioning the names of key individuals, you should also mention the names of well-known and innovative firms you have dealt with including notable customers, strategic partners, vendors, or consultants.
EXAMPLE:

• Worked with McKinsey & Co. on a strategy for employee redeployment during the 2008 recession working with Google, Kraft, and Pfizer which saved $1.2 million in severance costs.

6.  Show you can think like Steve Jobs.
In a volatile, changing global world, few things are more important than innovation and coming up with new ideas. List new ideas or innovations you developed, even if the innovation was not implemented. Show that you are an innovator, an outside-the-box thinker and often among the first to try new things.
EXAMPLE:

• Suggested adoption of three new innovative HR approaches to improve employee engagement, two of which were immediately adopted, yielding a 23% improvement in our organization-wide survey results.

7.  Drop in a few impressive buzzwords.
Business people love functional/general business buzzwords, and merely using them reveals that you are current and up-to-date.  Buzzwords should be included in descriptions of both your experience and education.  However, just don’t over-do this.
EXAMPLE:

• Participated in a Six-Sigma evaluation of our new employee onboarding & orientation process.

8.  Show you can be proactive.
If you can pinpoint problems before they become severe, you are quite valuable. List situations where you identified a problem that no one else saw and show them that you thrive in situations where there are lots of problems, issues or dilemmas.
EXAMPLE:

• Led the HR team which uncovered $300K in employee theft, previously unknown to the Company, which potentially could have led to a $6.2 million total loss if not for early detection and attention to detail.

9.   Manage money — not yours, theirs.
Demonstrating that you were given financial responsibility shows that management trusted you. List any time, even if it was brief, where you managed a budget, were responsible for cash or other major spending decisions
EXAMPLE:

• Charged with evaluation and selection of $3.2M worth of new enterprise software for the company-wide HRIS upgrade. .

10.   Sell. Sell. Sell.
No matter what your HR job, the ability to sell your ideas and influence others is extremely valuable. Demonstrate that you effectively sold executives, vendors, or owners on new ideas.
EXAMPLE:
Influenced our top HR vendor to alter their long-standing service level agreement and reduce costs of their annual employee benefit administration fees by 17% saving the company $2.6M.
11.  Showcase your global perspective.
You enhance your perception if you can demonstrate that you have a global perspective these days. Even if you don’t have formal international responsibilities, show that you have the capability of working with those from other countries…especially BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China).
EXAMPLES:

• Partnered with colleagues in China and India to standardize our performance evaluation and career development processes developed there and slated for global rollout.
• Used my knowledge of Spanish and Russian to assist our global HR executives in translating HR policies for implementation in Europe and Asia.

12.  Include impressive training courses, seminars and workshops.
In many companies, access to advanced training means that you are a top performer. Highlight training courses, seminars, workshops and any advanced training on emerging issues that you participated in. If you have taught training classes, even if they were informal, include that also.
EXAMPLE:

• As a Diversity & Inclusion trainer, trained 300+ managers, with course evaluations averaging 9.2 on a 10 scale. Built training capability at 3 others locations, certifying 52 people as trainers with 1300 people trained by these trainers saving $500K in costs.

Some final thoughts
Your resume is a comprehensive marketing document that sells your your capabilities, skills, and accomplishments. It should be kept current and used not only when you’re job hunting, but also as a memory jogger when applying for an internal transfer, promotion, or completing a performance self-assessment.
If you find, as most HR folks do, that over half of these suggestions are not present in your resume, you have my permission to kick yourself in the butt for underselling yourself for all these years!
Got comments or additional HR resume suggestions, post them HERE.
About the author: Alan Collins was Vice President – Human Resources at PepsiCo where he led HR initiatives for their Quaker Oats, Gatorade and Tropicana businesses. He is now President of Success in HR, Inc. and the author of the HR best seller, UNWRITTEN HR RULES . His new book, BEST KEPT HR SECRETSnow available on Amazon.
Feed your network: If you like this article, feel free to share it with your FACEBOOK friends by clicking the “share” and “like” buttons below…or share this with your TWITTER followers by clicking the “tweet” button below.

Supply chains need ‘reliability quotient’

As recent production disruptions in the Far East have illustrated, a supply chain is only as strong as its weakest link. John McPherson, Senior Advisor of Trade Advisory Services at Export Development Canada, spoke to the Financial Post’s Smart Shift Editor, Cody Gault, about how companies are rethinking the way they do business.

Q: From the earthquake and tsunami in Japan to the flooding in Thailand, this has been a bad year for supply chains, correct?
A: The natural disasters that have occurred in the past number of months are yet another straw on the camel’s back. For decades, the supply chain focus within corporations has been all about reducing and removing costs. It’s with that singular focus that we’ve seen companies who’ve moved to ‘just-in-time’ inventory, to reducing inventory, to sole-sourcing and outsourcing in some instances. And that all started to fall apart, going back to 2008 and 2009, when some of our key suppliers started just disappearing and being wiped from the face of our supply chain.
Q: Literally “disappearing”? As in: Disappearing in earthquakes and floods?
A: It dates even before the earthquake, back to the financial crisis of ’08. That’s where the singular focus on reducing costs lead to some weaknesses.
Q: In their single-minded pursuit of extraordinary profits, companies undermined their own long-term viability?
A: There’s no question that supply chain professionals within corporations, over the past decade, have been generally about reducing … input costs — simply removing as much cost as [they] could. And that has been done, generally speaking, without a real good view to what our resiliency is….
Essentially, [corporations stripped] away a lot of that safety net that existed for [them] by having that singular focus on squeezing costs.
Q: Do you see a parallel mindset here with Wall Street, where safety nets were similarly stripped away (through deregulation) for the purpose of turning a short-term profit (via sub-prime lending)?
A: Those are your words. I’ll add that we’ve seen the same thing in the expanded supply chain of most corporations — in that it was [the result of] a singular focus on reducing costs….
What’s happened — as a result of everything from the financial crisis to the tsunami and so on in Japan — has been a real re-think about that balance in our supply chain [to] where reliability once again is an important component of planning.
Q: So you predict a shift in supply-chain management back toward prudence and reliability?
A: At the end of the day, reliability at all cost is always too expensive. And so it becomes a balancing act. That’s the table setting that we have today; companies have realized that there are risks within their supply chain that affect their ability to do what it is that they do. And, recognizing those risks, the next step is: “What action should we take?”
Q: Do you think the economic losses associated with the Thai flood and Japanese earthquake increased awareness about supply-chain vulnerabilities, leading once-complacent companies to ask “What action should we take?”?
A: I think awareness occurs at different levels. I think the first level of awareness began five or six years ago when demand started dropping off, in some instances. And so the focus was then: “How do I begin making my supply chain more agile so that I can adjust to changes in my customer demand?” That was the first revelation as it pertains to supply-chain agility.
[That said,] certainly today we’re seeing companies now recognizing that there is another component to that “agility equation” which deals with [the] supply base and — in an integrated world where my ability to deliver is predicated on my health as well as the health of my suppliers and my value chain — [the] need to have a more holistic view of [a] supply chain.
So, regardless of what the event is — regardless of what socioeconomic situation it has caused — the reality is: Corporations today are looking more holistically at their supply chain and trying to develop that balance between agility — or reliability, whatever word you want to use — and bottom-line profit.
Q: You mentioned that demand started dropping off five or six years ago. Do you think that that drop in demand is connected to an erosion of the middle class caused by corporations moving manufacturing overseas?
A: “Erosion of the middle class” — Again, those are your words.
Q: Are there any companies that, in your mind, are taking the kind of “holistic” approach that you’re prescribing?
A: Without relaying anything that might be private to companies … companies tend to see these “best practices” as being what may very well set them apart from their competition. And so, although it’s often referred to, some of the leaders within the retail sector often refer to their supply-chain agility as being what they see as their strategic advantage.
Q: The price of oil, which is the lifeblood global supply chains, is projected to rise as “easy oil” runs dry. Perhaps unrelated — and perhaps not — is the fact that instances of “extreme weather” (like the flooding in Thailand) are projected to increase as our climate shifts. With these factors and others in play, do you think companies will consider a prodigal return to manufacturing in North America?
A: I think that what we see right now, what companies are taking into view as they are planning evolutions within their supply chain, is an uncertain future — as it pertains to many different things. And so, that means many things to many different companies — be it increasing reserve stock, or reserve inventory, through to rethinking sole-sourcing and outsourcing strategies.
So there’s a whole myriad of thought processes occurring relative to corporations’ supply chains as they begin to incorporate a “reliability quotient” in their design of those extended systems.

Posted in: Moves, Smart Shift  Tags: Japanese earthquake, Japanese tsunami, Moves, Smart Shift, Supply Chain, supply chain disruption, Supply Chain Management

Ruthlessness and lasers: Apple’s supply chain revealed

By Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows
About five years ago, Apple Inc. design guru Jony Ive decided he wanted a new feature for the next MacBook: a small dot of green light above the screen, shining through the computer’s aluminum casing to indicate when its camera was on. The problem? It’s physically impossible to shine light through metal.
Ive called in a team of manufacturing and materials experts to figure out how to make the impossible possible, according to a former employee familiar with the development who requested anonymity to avoid irking Apple. The team discovered it could use a customized laser to poke holes in the aluminum small enough to be almost invisible to the human eye but big enough to let light through.
Applying that solution at massive volume was a different matter, Bloomberg Businessweek reported in its Nov. 7 issue. Apple needed lasers, and lots of them. The team found a U.S. company that made laser equipment for microchip manufacturing which, after some tweaking, could do the job. Each machine typically goes for about $250,000. Apple convinced the seller to sign an exclusivity agreement and has since bought hundreds of them to make holes for the green lights that now shine on the company’s MacBook Airs, Trackpads and wireless keyboards.
Most of Apple’s customers have probably never given that green light a second thought, but its creation speaks to a massive competitive advantage for Apple: operations.
This is the world of manufacturing, procurement and logistics in which the new chief executive officer, Tim Cook, excelled, earning him the trust of Steve Jobs. According to more than a dozen interviews with former employees, executives at suppliers and management experts familiar with the company’s operations, Apple has built a closed ecosystem where it exerts control over almost every piece of the supply chain, from design to retail store. Because of its volume — and its occasional ruthlessness — Apple gets big discounts on parts, manufacturing capacity, and air freight.
“Operations expertise is as big an asset for Apple as product innovation or marketing,” says Mike Fawkes, a former supply-chain chief at Hewlett-Packard Co. and now a venture capitalist with VantagePoint Capital Partners. “They’ve taken operational excellence to a level never seen before.”
This operational edge is what enables Cupertino, California-based Apple to handle massive product launches without having to maintain large, profit-sapping inventories. It’s allowed a company often criticized for high prices to sell its iPad at a price that very few rivals can beat, while still earning a 25 percent margin on the device, according to the estimates of Gene Munster, an analyst at Piper Jaffray Cos.
Apple began innovating on the nitty-gritty details of supply-chain management almost immediately upon Jobs’s return in 1997. At the time, most computer manufacturers transported products by sea, a far cheaper option than air freight. To ensure that the company’s new, translucent blue iMacs would be widely available at Christmas the following year, Jobs paid $50 million to buy up all the available holiday air freight space, says John Martin, a logistics executive who worked with Jobs to arrange the flights.
The move handicapped rivals such as Compaq Computer Corp. that later wanted to book air transport. Similarly, when iPod sales took off in 2001, Apple realized it could pack so many of the diminutive music players on planes that it became economical to ship them directly from Chinese factories to consumers’ doors. When a Hewlett-Packard staffer bought one and received it a few days later, tracking its progress around the world through Apple’s website, “It was an ‘Oh shit’ moment,” recalls Fawkes.
That mentality — spend exorbitantly wherever necessary, and reap the benefits from greater volume in the long run — is institutionalized throughout Apple’s supply chain, and begins at the design stage. Ive and his engineers sometimes spend months living out of hotel rooms in order to be close to suppliers and manufacturers, helping to tweak the industrial processes that translate prototypes into mass-produced devices. For designs such as the MacBook’s unibody shell, cut from a single piece of aluminum, Apple’s designers work with suppliers to create new tooling equipment.
The decision to focus on a few product lines, and to do little in the way of customization, is a huge advantage.
“They have a very unified strategy, and every part of their business is aligned around that strategy,” says Matthew Davis, a supply-chain analyst with Gartner Inc. who has ranked Apple as the world’s best supply chain for the past four years.
When it’s time to go into production, Apple wields a big weapon: More than $80 billion in cash and investments. The company says it plans to almost double capital expenditures on its supply chain in the next year, to $7.1 billion, while committing another $2.4 billion in prepayments to key suppliers. The tactic ensures availability and low prices for Apple — and sometimes limits the options for everyone else.
Before the release of the iPhone 4 in June 2010, rivals such as HTC Corp. couldn’t buy as many screens as they needed because manufacturers were busy filling Apple orders, according to a former manager at HTC. To manufacture the iPad 2, Apple bought so many high-end drills to make the device’s internal casing that other companies’ wait time for the machines stretched from six weeks to six months, according to a manager at the drillmaker.
Life as an Apple supplier is lucrative because of the high volumes, though painful because of the strings attached. When Apple asks for a price quote for parts such as touch screens, it demands a detailed accounting of how the manufacturer arrived at the quote, including its estimates for material and labor costs, and its own projected profit.
Apple requires many key suppliers to keep two weeks of inventory within a mile of Apple’s assembly plants in Asia, and sometimes doesn’t pay until as long as 90 days after it uses a part, according to an executive who has consulted for Apple and wouldn’t speak on the record for fear of compromising the relationship.
Not every supplier gives in. An executive who works with a major parts manufacturer says that Apple’s bargaining tactics tend to exert downward pressure on prices, leading to lower profits and margins. After months of negotiations, the company declined a $1 billion payment from Apple that would have required the supplier to commit much of its manufacturing capacity to Apple’s products. The executive familiar with these talks, who asked not to be named because the discussions weren’t public, says that while deals featuring $1 billion in cash up front are basically unheard of, his company didn’t want to be too dependent on Apple — and didn’t want to help it deflate prices.
Apple’s control reaches its crescendo in the leadup to one of its famed product unveilings, a tightly orchestrated process that has been refined over years of Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad debuts. For weeks in advance of the announcement, factories work overtime to build hundreds of thousands of devices.
To track efficiency and ensure pre-release secrecy, Apple places electronic monitors in some boxes of parts that allow observers in Cupertino to track them through Chinese factories, an effort meant to discourage leaks. At least once, the company shipped products in tomato boxes to avoid detection, says the consultant who has worked with Apple. When the iPad 2 debuted, the finished devices were packed in plain boxes and Apple employees monitored every handoff point — loading dock, airport, truck depot, and distribution center — to make sure each unit was accounted for.
Apple’s retail stores give it a final operational advantage. Once a product goes on sale, the company can track demand by the store and by the hour, and adjust production forecasts daily. If it becomes clear a given part will run out, teams are deployed and given approval to spend millions of dollars on extra equipment to get around the bottleneck.
Apple’s enormous profits — its gross margins were 40 percent last quarter, compared with 10 percent to 20 percent for most other hardware companies — are in large part due to this focus on operations, which is sure to remain a priority under Cook. The new CEO is known to give colleagues copies of Competing Against Time, a book about using supply chains as a strategic weapon in business.
According to Martin, the logistics executive, Cook uses a catchphrase to hammer home the need for efficiency: “Nobody wants to buy sour milk.”

The Education Solution

WASHINGTON, DC – The world is assailed by problems that defy easy answers. Economic shocks are destabilizing countries and regions, and inflicting great social and financial hardships on families and their communities. Environmental damage threatens our food supplies, the air we breathe, and the rich biodiversity that sustains the balance of life. Wars and conflict produce millions of new refugees.
Moreover, new health risks are emerging, with diabetes, obesity, and other non-communicable diseases now stalking low- and middle-income countries – even as many of those countries are still locked in combat with tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other infectious diseases.  Hundreds of millions of young people around the world are searching for jobs in a very uncertain labor market. The infrastructure we use to produce our energy, transport our goods, and transact our business is under stress.
This list of worries is not meant to discourage, but to challenge. As the world’s physical resources grow scarcer, we must increasingly rely on the best and most proven renewable resource available – human ingenuity. Just as they confronted problems in the past, our scientists and entrepreneurs have brought us solutions by way of the Green Revolution, new vaccines, communications technology, and cleaner energy.
Scholars and leaders have given us the means to identify and resolve social and economic dilemmas. Rising levels of education have given people more control over their own health, household circumstances, governments, and culture.
The global challenges that we face today are proof that we need a world of problem solvers. We need a world of people who are productive, resilient, creative, and versatile enough with technology and culture to find solutions to the many challenges we face.
Education helps to build that world. Households with more education cope better with economic shocks and with extreme weather events. People with higher levels of education earn more, have more control over their fertility, and have healthier and better-educated children. Education gives people the skills to earn a living, to innovate, to invent, and to access culture – all of which allows them to live more fulfilling lives.
The good news is that the global community has united to help all people acquire these skills – and with real results. In 1990, a broad coalition of governments, the World Bank, United Nations agencies, and civil-society organizations committed to a strategy called “Education for All.” Twenty years later, there has been significant progress in enrolling children in school and expanding access to secondary school and universities. Globally, 88% of children now complete primary school, and 67% go on to enroll in secondary school.
But low-income countries are still far from meeting the goal of ensuring that all children complete primary school: only 63% of children in those countries achieve that milestone. Poor children, children with disabilities, girls, and ethnic minorities still face daunting barriers to education.
Many countries struggle simply to build schools quickly enough to keep up with population growth. Severely overcrowded classrooms, lacking in trained teachers and basic supplies, are not uncommon. In the rush to expand services, school systems have sometimes neglected teachers’ professional development, student assessment, and even basic building standards.
Over the years, we have learned that the real challenge is not just to enroll children in school, but to help them to acquire the skills necessary for employment, entrepreneurship, family life, and citizenship. The World Bank’s new education strategy, “Learning for All – Investing in People’s Knowledge and Skills to Promote Development,” highlights this imperative. It emphasizes the need to invest early, nurturing young children to ensure that they arrive at school healthy and ready to learn; to invest smartly, transforming schools with good teachers, good materials, and good management; and to invest for all, laying the foundation for just and equitable societies.
The strategy rightly recognizes the importance of building systems that support the development of education on a large scale. Sufficient numbers of teachers, school buildings, and textbooks are all essential, but accelerating learning requires much more. We need well-designed systems of finance, student assessment, professional development and management, quality assurance, and monitoring and evaluation. We need more robust and transparent relationships between central and local governments, state and private education providers, and households and communities. And we need stronger links between schools and employers to ensure that graduates acquire skills that are relevant to a changing job market.
We have much to learn from systems that have demonstrated continuous improvement, in contexts as varied as Singapore, Chile, Ghana, Slovenia, and England. While each of these countries had very different starting points, progress has been aided by the political will to measure outcomes and learn from results, define a sustainable path for change, and make smart, effective investments.
To foster learning about how systems improve, the World Bank is embarking on a major initiative to assess the quality of education policies around the world. Its new databases will catalogue which policies countries have adopted to promote learning in each part of the education system, in areas ranging from teacher policies to student assessment to school financing mechanisms. Our goal is to facilitate the spread of good policy and practice, allowing countries to learn from a variety of approaches and to understand which ones might work in their own context.
The case for improving education systems is urgent. Imagine our world, 20 years from now, if we could educate a new generation of young people so that they have the skills and creativity to take on the great economic and technological challenges of the day. Imagine, in particular, that all girls are educated, with all the profound benefits that this would yield in the areas of population growth, health and welfare, poverty alleviation, human rights, and politics.
Now imagine the alternative and ask yourself: Which world do I want to live in?

The fine art of shopping

It turns out consumers really do like to squeeze the Charmin, as the old advertising catch phrase says. In fact, they have sometimes resorted to poking holes in the toilet paper’s plastic-wrapper packaging to gauge its softness, according to shopper marketing guru Marcus Evans.
Getting into the nitty gritty of how consumers shop is a key focus of Mr. Evans as managing director of the new shopper marketing practice Integer Canada, part of the TBWA advertising network.
Shopper marketing is an area of fierce expansion and growing popularity at ad agencies. In August, DDB Canada launched Shopper DDB, an operation dedicated to the practice, and Toronto-based Philter recently announced a new joint venture, shopper marketing agency Mars|Philter.
“There is audience fragmentation in traditional media,” said Mr. Evans, noting the insights gleaned from shopper marketing help brands target consumers more effectively. “Consumers are getting really adept at filtering out brand messaging, and brands are investing in areas where they can have a quantifiable defined return on investment.”

A survey by management consulting firm Booz & Company found that 83% of senior consumer packaged goods [CPG] executives planned to increase their company’s investments in shopper marketing. Integer says 75% of CPG companies dedicate at least 5% of their sales and marketing budget to shopper marketing.
That brings us to Canadian Tire Corp., Shoppers Drug Mart Corp., and Loblaws Cos. Ltd., stores in which Mr. Evans spent a morning with the Financial Post offering shopper marketing insights.
At a Canadian Tire on the east side of Toronto, he analyzed a blowout sale of Charmin on a stand at the front of the store. His prior shopper marketing research outside of Canada for Procter & Gamble resulted in a significant sales increase after a small aisle display of two unwrapped Charmin toilet tissue rolls (Ultra Soft and Ultra Strong) let customers torip off a square or two and touch the product.
“If a brand claims “ultra soft,” how real is that? In extreme cases people were making a hole in the packaging to feel how soft the Charmin was,” he said.
Shopper marketing involves everything from giving out detailed questionnaires to consumers to discover how and why they shop to accompanying them on shopping trips and quizzing them about what they are doing. It includes analysis of websites and mobile communication, flyers and loyalty promotions, packaging, store displays and in-store layout and service.
“Why does a shopper come into a store with 20 items on her list and leave with 30 items? Or 15 items?” Mr. Evans said. “That’s what we want to find out.”
Integer divides consumer shopping into three parts: “pretail,” primarily communication that consumers access at home, such as websites or flyers; “retail,” every aspect of the in-store experience; and “post-tail,” follow-up communication and brand experiences after leaving the store.
Integer’s research has revealed customers are cautious and like to plan, making “pretail” particularly important for retailers and brands; 51% of Canadian shoppers always shop with a list, compared with 43% in the United States; and 80% said coupons have an influence, in varying degrees, on their brand selection.
“If you have got information to give to consumers when they are in the ‘What am I going to buy?’ phase, it’s a good time to talk to them because they are focused on it as opposed to in a store,” he said. “If I have got two young kids and a sausage dog shopping with me, I have a limited time. I am not looking around much.”
Mr. Evans noted Canadian Tire’s flyer and store layout were focused on deals, which may encourage people to buy extra things. “Most of the shoppers are here on a mission for one or two things, but the job of Canadian Tire is to remind them to leave with as many things as possible.”
At Canadian Tire, Charlotte Curgenven-Appt, shopping with her young son in tow, came in for sale-priced candy but ended up adding cleaning products to her cart.
“I really don’t need anything else, but I’ll probably end up buying more,” she said. “I am here because I was looking in the flyer. Canadian Tire always has good sales.”
Mr. Evans’ verdict of the retailer was largely positive, though he believed it could improve its signage. “They should hang [signs] from the ceiling so people can see them from different vantage points of the store rather than on the end of each aisle,” he said.
He was also generally positive about Shoppers Drug Mart, its wide aisles and clear signage, but found its flyer of standard sale offers said too little about the experience in the store. Inside, he lamented the incongruous placement of a bin of purses in the middle of a hair product aisle.
“Is that helping at all?” he said. “Interrupting shoppers when they are sleep shopping is a good thing, but this should be here for a reason.”
Sleep shopping, he explained, is what most people do when they make a routine retail trip to a grocery store. At Shoppers Drug, that could mean putting a promotion for chocolate beside a cleaning aisle, he said. “I haven’t any interesting secondary placements like that here.”
Mr. Evans was more effusive about Loblaws, extolling its store layout, endcap sale promotions, clear signage and range of private label products. “They could also do more with the flyer, which also says little about why people should come to the store other than some deals here. Give me a story as well as giving me the prices. People are looking for inspiration.”

More than half a million ‘baby pensioners’ in Italy: report

Christine Dobby  Nov 1, 2011 – 3:54 PM ET

As Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou called a surprise referendum Monday, hoping to curry political favour with an outraged citizenry, Italy faces its own howling protests over plans to raise the retirement age.
Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi submitted a “letter of intent” to the European Union summit last week promising, among other things, to balance the country’s budget by 2013 and increase the age of retirement to 67.
This will be no small task in Italy, which has more than 530,000 pensioners who retired under the age of 50 — sometimes with just 14 and a half years of service — according to a report from independent Italian business agency Confartigianato last week.
The large majority of these pensions (78.6%) are paid by INPDAP, the country’s public sector pension administrator, the report said.
The average so-called “baby pensioner” remains retired for 40.7 years, spending 48% of their life retired, Confartigianato said.
Social security spending on baby pensions totals €9.45-billion ($13.2-billion) a year, according to the report.
Cesare Fumagalli, the secretary general of Confartigianato, called the situation an “absurd iniquity” and suggested the need for a hike in the age of retirement.
Hundreds of Italians protested a €54-billion package of tax increases and spending cuts passed in September and physical violence even broke out in parliament last week.
Deputies from the Northern League, part of the ruling coalition, fought with members from the opposition FLI party of speaker Gianfranco Fini, grabbing each other by the throat as other party members rushed to break up the fight.
The clash last Wednesday came ahead of Mr. Berlusconi’s submission to the EU summit amid reports that the Prime Minister would agree to step down in exchange for the Northern League agreeing to increase the pension age to 67 by 2026.
Italy’s bond yields have recently increased to unsustainable levels, making borrowing prohibitive and requiring intervention from the European Central Bank to prevent further rises.
Reluctant investors have concerns about the country’s sluggish growth and €1.9-trillion ($2.6-trillion) debt, which is 120% of its gross domestic product and second only to Greece in the region.

Canada urged to end ‘pension apartheid’

very Canadian needs $2-million in RRSP contribution room to achieve parity with public-sector defined benefit pension plans, the C.D. Howe Institute says.
As things stand, the system punishes those with defined-contribution pensions in the private sector and those who rely on what little RRSP room is granted them, says James Pierlot, principal with Toronto-based Pierlot Pension Law.
The $2-million figure comes from the value of public-sector DB plans for top managers earning $150,000 late in their careers. Rather than limit RRSP contributions to 18% of a prior year’s earned income, Mr. Pierlot would give every Canadian the lifetime RRSP contribution room, adjusted to inflation.
The need to redress the gap between pension “haves and have nots” has become urgent, Mr. Pierlot says. Indeed, a new book published by Wiley Canada – Pension Ponzi – makes the same point: It depicts a system of “pension apartheid” that favours 20% of workers with union negotiated public-sector DB plans at the expense of the rest who guarantee those pensions through their future taxes.

Related

• Save billions on pension reform
• Canadians working longer as Pension Freedom Day approaches 67

Most penalized are new Canadians, the self-employed, the chronically unemployed and those who have suffered market losses in RRSPs or prematurely withdrawn funds from them.
In an interview, Mr. Pierlot said his paper (titled Legal for Life) still calls for upfront tax deductions for RRSP contributions but no annual contribution limit. The only constraint would be coming up with the money. Plans would still be taxable once funds are withdrawn in retirement.
Eventually, registered retirement income funds (RRIFs) would decline to zero but would not be subjected to minimum annual withdrawal rules that may force seniors to sell at market bottoms.
An early draft advocated a “declining limit system.” So while the limit might fall from $2-million to $1.9-million the first year of a RRIF, and fall another $100,000 each year thereafter, someone with only $500,000 wouldn’t be forced to withdraw anything in the early years of a RRIF.
The paper does not discuss taxfree savings accounts, but Mr. Pierlot advocates a lifetime TFSA limit of $250,000 to $500,000. “The retirement system is intended for middleclass workers earning $50,000 to $150,000 a year,” he said, “Anyone earning less should not be in RRSPs but in TFSAs.”
His proposals were included in private-member’s bill C574, which passed first and second readings until the federal election intervened. The Retirement Income Bill of Rights was presented by Liberal pension critic Judy Sgro and supported by all parties except the Conservatives, Mr. Pierlot said.
“It said every Canadian shall have equal opportunity to accumulate pension income no matter how they are employed or where they were born. If it had passed, it would have forced changes to the Income Tax Act.”
Mr. Pierlot said he didn’t “cost” his ideas because Ottawa misrepresents RRSP and pension tax deductions as tax expenditures.
“They’re not,” he says. “Money goes into plans and accumulates tax-free but down the road, the government gets its tax with interest. Yes, it affects government cash flow in the short term, but it isn’t a tax-avoidance mechanism. It’s a tax deferral.”
Fred Vettese, chief actuary with Toronto-based Morneau Shepell, says Canadians “essentially have a lifetime limit already since unused RRSP contribution room can be carried forward indefinitely.” But it’s true average private-sector workers with RRSPs can’t replicate public-sector levels of retirement income.
“If we truly felt public-sector plans provide an appropriate level of retirement income, the author is right in suggesting a $2-million lifetime limit to level the playing field.”
But there would still be inequity, Mr. Vettese said, because contribution rates needed to generate so much income would impoverish average RRSP savers over a working lifetime.
jchevreau@nationalpost.com