5 Marketing Terms All Retail RDs Should Know
By RDBA Contributing Editor Amanda Rubizhevsky, MPH, NC
Understanding your company’s retail business helps you be more effective in your retail RD role. Having a general understating of marketing terms, including those listed here, will boost your business acumen.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): the total sales and marketing cost for a given time period (month, quarter, year). CAC can be used to calculate ROI, as the expenses needed to execute a project, promotion, or even advertising and fulfilling your nutrition services all factor into the equation of measuring financial success.
CAC is calculated as follows:
- Add up advertising or program spend + salaries + commissions + bonuses + overhead.
- Divide by the number of new customers in your given time period.
Media: various ways to convey advertising messages to potential audiences or target markets for products, services, organizations, or ideas. Media can include newspapers, online ads, magazines, direct mail advertising, radio/podcast, television, outdoor advertising, transit advertising, etc.
- Paid Media: advertising; magazines, mailers, Facebook ads, etc.
- Earned Media: word-of-mouth; blogs, reviews, and general word of mouth
- Owned Media: public relations
Closed-Loop Marketing: the idea that you can execute, track and demonstrate how marketing efforts have impacted business growth. For example tracking a visitor to your store’s website as they become a lead, to the very last point when they close as a customer (i.e. sign up for one of your services or place an online order). Ideally with closed-loop marketing you will be able to see how much of the marketing investment yielded new business growth.
Total Product: refers to the bundle of services offered by a product or service. Total product concept is used by customers when evaluating products among different brands, distinguishing benefits and overall value. Companies use this concept to differentiate their products from competitors and create unique positioning for them in the market. Includes benefits from the actual product, to warranties, customer service, etc. Using a dietitian led gluten free store tour as an example, the total product could include: the tour, gluten free product samples, recipes, food lists, and ongoing support from the RD. Shoppers might compare this to another store with fewer offerings.
Diffusion of Innovation: explains how information and acceptance of new products spread through a market. Innovations are not adopted by all people at the same time. Instead, they tend to adopt in a time sequence, and can be classified into categories based on how long it takes for each group to begin using the new idea. It's very useful to be able to identify which category certain individuals belong to, since the short-term goal of most change agents (the retail RD) is to facilitate the adoption of an innovation. In the case of a retail RD the innovation could be a new healthy product, or a class you might offer. The popularity will grow after the initial acceptance, allowing more customers to digest and become more familiar with the concept.
