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ACQUISITION: STRONGER TOGETHER In May 2019, leading outsourced sales and merchandising, brand activation and shopper marketing solutions provider Strikeforce acquired Blueprint, a competitor and major player in the same sales and merchandising space. Retail World interviewed Strikeforce CEO Matt Lloyd to find out how things are working out 12 months later. What was the rationale behind your decision to acquire Blueprint Group last May? We were competitors in an industry that, in Australia, is quite fragmented in terms of field marketing providers. There are companies providing basic services into stores but there are also those doing specialised work including consumer and shopper insight, data management, space planning and more. We developed a strategic plan about three to four years ago, developing areas that would enable us to offer our clients an integrated marketing services proposition designed to help them get ahead of their competition. Those developments have been significantly accelerated by the acquisition because there were services Blueprint were very good at that we didn’t do as much, and services we did really well in which they weren’t strong. For example, we were developing a creative, data led shopper marketing and experiential service. We were offering this with some products, but with Blueprint we gained exactly that as well as Extravert which complements category planning and in-store merchandising activation services. You’re now a business with about 3,500 employees many of whom are instore. What difference has that increase in headcount meant? Scale in our game is really important because the more activities you’re executing on behalf of clients, the more people you need and the smaller territories you can plan. This enables us to mitigate the inefficient travel demands of Australian territories so, rather than paying for what we call ‘windscreen time’ between calls we can maximise actionable instore time for clients. When working with grocery chains such as Coles and Woolworths, scale equals efficiency, so acquiring a good-scale business that was in the top five or six by revenue in the grocery space meant we were able to make a step change in our efficiency. In addition to increasing effectiveness further for our clients at store level due to smaller and more territories meaning increased frequency and depth of store relationships, we have integrated two high-calibre FMCG field teams and effectively cut our travel costs by about half. You certainly have a very comprehensive offering now. Can you outline the range of services available? What we’ve tried to create is an integrated offer so that a client can choose to use us for in-store flawless execution, or they can use us across the various touchpoints of a brand, consumer and shopper journey, thereby amplifying their marketing investment for competitive advantage. We can start from say, understanding new product development, gathering consumer feedback and then recommending category, space planning and range management strategies. We can then create a consumer or shopper awareness campaign, digitally or event based, which is where the Extravert business we acquired TO PAGE 64 SALES & MARKETING “What we’ve tried to create is an integrated offer so that a client can choose to use us for in-store flawless execution, or they can use us across the various touchpoints of a brand, consumer and shopper journey.” MAY, 2020 RETAIL WORLD 63