Dollar General Selects Recess as Experiential Marketing Partner for DGMN

Our name may be “Recess” but when it comes to helping CPG brands execute memorable campaigns that are highly effective, we don’t play.

Recess CEO and Co-Founder Jack Shannon showed how serious we are about supporting shopper marketers with data-driven strategies by appearing on a recent episode of The CPG Guys and digging deep into how Recess is reinventing offline marketing as a performance channel.

Here are our top four takeaways from Jack’s conversation with The CPG Guys–full episode here.

Capturing the “right time, right place” moment

Marketing sometimes gets a bad rap because marketing can seem intrusive and spammy. But it doesn’t have to be. In fact, when CPG brands know the key moments in their target audiences’ lives where they would contribute best, they establish trust and ultimately drive sales.

Moments like going to college, checking out if the nearest fitness studio is right for you, or finding a fridge in your vacation rental stocked with tasty snacks. For example, Brownie Brittle worked with us through our back-to-college program and distributed 40,000 samples across 15 campuses nationwide to excited students.

Being in those spaces at the right time creates positive brand sentiment.

Communities and affinities help CPG brands go farther together

Most CPG brands know the power of social proof, and it’s true that reviews and influencer marketing hold weight. But getting to target consumers through offline marketing is the real power move, especially if your products make it into niche networks.

Consider it like two-factor authentication when product sampling takes place among a membership that the customer identifies with. It’s their gym where they’ve made friends. It’s their co-working space where they’ve networked. It’s their farmers market where they find healthful options for their family. Samples delight them while they’re doing what they already do where they’re already comfortable.

Top brands we work with, like La Croix and Beast Brands, really understand this, and we make it easy for them to tap into their target audiences within trusted communities.

• In a purposeful campaign with La Croix, we were able to help them reach their college demographic at scale by sampling more than 54,000 cans at 72 student housing complexes across the U.S.
• We helped Beast Brands meet their customers where they already were – at races and runs. More than 4,000 prospects were reached and the Beast Brands team reduced the time it took to execute a sampling campaign by 57% by working with us.

To know your customer thoroughly, you must have data and use it well

There’s a reason we believe that software is eating sampling - CPG brands can’t unlock the true power of offline marketing without technology and consumer data.

Recess’s platform gives experiential and sampling marketing a major upgrade: precise targeting, scalability, quantifiable measurement including key metrics like return on ad spend (ROAS), easy paths to omnichannel execution, and more.

The information we have on consumers (such as in our recent research report “2024 Shopper Marketing Guide to Offline Marketing”) allows clients to:

• Choose desired affinities
• Pinpoint target demographics
• Select ideal retail locations
• Identify which omnichannel extensions to activate
• Supplement sampling with consumer insights collection
• …and more

By knowing all of the factors above, we help brands reach hyper-local, relevant communities AND the precise shopper profiles they want. It’s the magic of data combined with a committed partner like Recess.

Offline marketing is entering the performance era

We’ll say it now: out-of-store experiential marketing will become the next inventory ad unit for Retail Media. The ability to target and provide closed loop measurement is something traditional ad agencies or big sponsorship players will not be able to do. There is an enormous opportunity for retailers to take advantage of Recess’ technology and retailer targeting capabilities.

We’ve seen it work already for both CPG and non-CPG brands.

• We know where loyal customers hang out in real life. This has supported QSR brands like Panera that are looking to highlight specific promotions.
• When coordinating a campaign with GoPuff and PepsiCo, we measured a 22% sales lift for Pepsi products on GoPuff.
• Knowing the full customer journey has allowed us to work with DoorDash to enable multiple CPG brands to drive traffic to other digital retailers.

The future is here. Do you have a plan in place for it yet?

Let us help. With more than 15,000 opportunities for sampling which you can filter by consumer demographic, customer behavior, location, proximity to retailer, Recess can support your unique brand activation and sampling event execution in turnkey, measurable, and scalable ways.