It’s not just fashion brands that can stand to benefit from a pop-up shop, though. Despite challenging market conditions that have forced many a layoff and plummeting sales numbers, some companies in the CPG category have used their creativity to reap the rewards. How have they done it? They’ve kept in mind these three goals:

• Generating Excitement: If you want a pop-up shop to create buzz for your brand, you have to give consumers something to get excited about. If you’ve designed a welcoming space with fun giveaways and tasty treats, the people will follow
• Building Awareness: When you make the investment on a pop-up shop, you’re also hoping to reach people beyond the footprint. Whether that be through media hits or social media buzz, that amplification is what puts your ROI over the top. Everything should be designed through the lens of  “is this share-worthy?”
• Reaching New Customers: CPG brands have been losing their main consumer base. In order to survive, not only do they have to appeal to the loyalists, but they also have to make sure they’re getting in front of new faces. Make sure you’re selecting a location that is accessible to the masses, and, if not, think about how you can bring the experience to them

In the past year, few have put as unique of a spin on the pop-up as Kellogg’s and Frito-Lay:

Frito-Lay

One of the most buzzworthy pop-ups in recent memory came this past month, as the folks at Cheetos launched The Spotted Cheetah, a three-day restaurant with a menu crafted by celebrity chef Anne Burrell. The menu, complete with three courses full of items ranging from the savory Cheetos Meatballs to the Cheetos Sweetos Crusted Cheesecake, was a big hit amongst New Yorkers, with all reservations on OpenTable booked within the first six hours. Though the restaurant lasted only three days, the buzz around it was substantial, earning media hits in national newspapers, food blogs, and even the likes of CNN and Fox News.

Kellogg’s

Starting in July of 2016, Kellogg’s opened its first-ever restaurant, a gourmet cereal shop in the heart of Times Square. Once a breakfast staple throughout the United States, cereal has seen a sharp decline in recent years, due largely to the masses declaring “war” on sugar. On top of questionable health value, cereal has always been viewed as one-dimensional in its serving style: pour in bowl, add milk, and enjoy.

In reality, though, cereal can be much more versatile and exciting than that, which is exactly what they aimed to show when opening up Kellogg’s NYC. The Times Square flagship location offered the opportunity for tourists and residents alike to try out their own creations, whether it be fresh fruit to make a healthy breakfast bowl or marshmallows and chocolate morsels for DIY dessert. In fact, the restaurant has been so successful that it outgrew its flagship location and will be relocating to a bigger space downtown this upcoming winter.

Seeing the success of the Kellogg’s restaurant, the brand decided to leverage the space for another one of their entities: Pop Tarts. For a week during February, the red space was turned blue to showcase a menu full of special Pop Tarts treats, including the Birthday Fiesta Nachos, Chili Pop Tarts Fries, and Pop Tarts Burritos — each of which used deconstructed Pop Tarts as ingredients of something even more decadent. To make sure that busy college students got their fix and documented it all on social media, they partnered with Uber Eats to provide 600 NYC college students with a free burrito and a special prize.

Door-to-door marketing is a canvassing technique that is generally used for sales, marketing, advertising, or campaigning, in which the person or persons walk from the door of one house to the door of another, trying to sell or advertise a product or service to the general public or gather information. People who use this sales approach are often called traveling salesmen, or the archaic name drummer, to “drum up” business. This technique is also sometimes called direct sales. A variant of this involves cold calling first, when another sales representative attempts to gain agreement that a salesperson should visit.

With the realization of telephone “Do Not Call” lists it is becoming increasingly more difficult to connect with consumers and business people. An emerging trend is the deployment of very professional, highly skilled door-to-door canvassers to drive product sales and brand awareness.

Coordinating, training and motivating these teams to produce results are at the very core of Fulcrum’s proven capabilities. Fulcrum has the knowledge and experience required to implement these programs, such as best days and times to canvass, who will sell the most product; male, female, young or mature and what geographics and demographics respond best to door-to-door marketing. Put Fulcrum’s experience to work for you and avoid the costly mistakes of trying to manage these programs in-house.

Hire and Train Door-to-Door Marketing Team

If you’re in charge of hiring people, that typically means that you’ve found success in Door To Door Marketing yourself. You know what it takes to be great, but now you’re stuck with an entirely new problem. How do you find others who will be just as good (if not better) and will stick around and grow into important influencers invested in the long term growth of the company? A great D2D sales company is a great recruiting company. So what does that greatness look like?

First off, you need to realize that you’re not going to hire a superstar every time. If you think you have found one, be careful. It’s not hard for someone to seem golden during one interview and you don’t want to be fooled.

Even if you think the candidate does have a lot of great experience working in the field for other companies, you have to realize that success doesn’t always translate. What worked for them at previous companies probably won’t work as well for you. In fact, their success will probably make them stubborn; after all, what reason do they have to follow your approach when they’ve figured out their own?

It’s also possible that the rep’s previous company might have had much better-developed training and selling systems than you do, and that system was the key reason they killed it. If you’re not developing a competitive system, what does that communicate about your company? The more dialed-in you are about a rep’s success, the more likely you are to attract and keep strong performers.