Grapevine Marketing Solutions has launched its Demo Wizard online collaborative platform that matches retail stores, product vendors and brand ambassadors in a “fraction” of the time stores spend now, and suggests acceptable dates and times for product demos.
Demo Wizard is available for any independent grocery retailer, supermarket, co-op or community market across North America. Demo Wizard is cloud-based and does not require any investment in IT.
Gregory Yankelovich, Grapevine Marketing Solutions CEO, says: “Product vendors love our platform because it takes them less than a minute to request and schedule a demo event.
“More than 94 percent of the requests are approved within 48 hours and the requests that are declined are tagged with the reason and with suggested corrections.”
Additionally, Yankelovich says, by using the Demo Wizard, independent and community markets can give their employees an opportunity to earn a living wage and more hours.
These markets can use the platform to attract promotional funding from vendors and provide their employees with opportunities for brand ambassador gigs to gain higher earnings.
Yankelovich says: “Vendors welcome this approach because it helps resolves the shortage of qualified brand ambassadors in ‘remote’ areas and reliance on the third-party staffing agencies to reduce their staffing expenses.”
Yankelovich credited Matt Buley, a purchasing executive at Healthy Living, with suggesting that store employees could increase their income with an assist from the Demo Wizard and the stores that use them.
Buley says: “I recognized that the Demo Wizard could provide an additional benefit to stores and, importantly, their employees. In theses tough economic times, vendor promotional dollars can provide an additional income source and that is always welcome.”
The Demo Wizard software uses automated workflows to ensure that demo events in multiple stores; for multiple sponsors; and at multiple dates, times and locations within each store run efficiently without a glitch.
In addition, the automated platform coordinates all communications among involved parties responsible for the production of a flawless event, tracks and confirms progress, generate reports and facilitates inventory management and billing.
Product vendors and brand managers fund three times more demos in stores that use Demo Wizard software, Yankelovich says, and stores reap the benefit of delivering a superior customer experience that leads to higher sales, revenue and profitability.
Demo Wizard empowers store managers to deliver high-quality store sampling and demo events. Retail shoppers who experience the demos stay longer in the store, buy larger product quantities and generate word-of-mouth marketing impact.
As satisfied customers spread the word, more shoppers come to the store and products gain new customers. Additionally, Demo Wizard helps retailers get promotional funding from CPG brands.
Grapevine in-store sampling and the demo management platform for brick-and-mortar retailers, product vendors and marketing agencies improve the effectiveness of sampling and demo events. It enables retail businesses to gain a competitive advantage, Yankelovich says.
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