The Food Marketing Institute, like most associations, has had its buffets buffeted by micro and macro forces that, while they are bigger than just its events, also manifest themselves directly in those events. Back in its halcyon days in the late 1970s, the aisles of the FMI Show, held over Mother’s Day each year in Chicago’s McCormick Place, were filled with Elsie the Cow, the Pillsbury Dough Boy, the Jolly Green Giant—the icons of the large companies that then ruled the industry.
Fast forward to 2014 and the former FMI Show, now rebranded as FMI Connect and co-located with another organization and rotated to different cities, looked pretty good. Sort of. The branding was good, the event elements worked, the city and dates were fine—but it had a growing density problem. Buying teams were consolidating, and the show was no longer the “buying show” it once was. As Margaret Core, FMI vice president, marketing, and industry events, explained to the audience at ECEF 2018 in May, by 2016 it became clear that it was time to look at all the options to see how it could be improved.
So Core and her team put together a deck outlining various scenarios to present to the leadership. The option that got the unanimous vote? To retire the show, much to the surprise of Core’s team. “Everyone looked at me, and I said, ‘Let's go home and everyone have a stiff drink. Then let's come back tomorrow and make a plan.’”
Communicating the Message
The first item of that plan was to control how the news about the show’s retirement would come out. Core says that all agreed that the message had to explain how “We authentically believe in live events, but for our industry, football fields of exhibits was no longer the right format.” They focused their communication around that idea, and that “We're going to be bold and nimble in what we do next,” she said.
Before going public with the announcement, Core’s team did some preparatory work to prepare long-time partners and critical relationships, speaking with their general contractor, key partners, and major exhibitors. Staff also were prepared with call sheets outlining what to say and who to refer callers to for more information before the CEO announced the news in a press conference.
What they didn’t see coming was that, on the very same day they announced they were retiring the FMI show, the National Cable Television Association announced that it also was retiring its show. “So all of a sudden the headlines in the industry press were that two major trade shows had canceled long-time events on the same day, which is really not the news we wanted,” said Core. That made it even more important to double down on the message that FMI still believed in live events, just not in the format they had been using.
One lesson she learned from the experience is that you have to always be ready for what you can’t see coming, which is exactly as hard as it sounds.
Listening to the Market
So what would be the right format for the times? Mark Baum, FMI’s senior vice president and chief collaboration officer, said the organization looked at trends in the marketplace—and, literally the markets, the grocery stores—to figure out the next steps.
• Trend 1: The center of grocery stores is shrinking as more people shop the periphery where the meat, dairy, produce, seafood, and fresh-prepared foods are.
• Trend 2: The big brands, the Green Giants and Smucker’s, are no longer the single-product line purveyors they once were. Once upon a time, Smucker's only owned jelly, Wrigley was a gum company, and Unilever just sold soap, he pointed out. Innovation is hard to come by for these large companies, he said. In fact, the biggest product innovation in the space in the past 20 years is prepackaged salad greens, and the innovative part of that is packaging, not the product itself. So these big companies instead are growing through mergers and acquisitions—Smucker's now is one of the largest pet food companies, and Unilever owns everything from Ben & Jerrys to the Dollar Shave Club, he said. A similar consolidation is happening in the grocery chains piece of the market FMI serves.
• Trend 3: Even grocery shopping is starting to go digital. It’s a tougher online sell than something like a stapler because it’s a more tactile, experiential buy. Still, Baum predicted that by 2022, consumers will spend about $100 billion in online food purchasing and home delivery, which translates to 3,900 stores, he said. “This is not to say 3,900 stores are going to go away. It just means when the music stops, not everybody is going to have a chair,” he said. “And it does mean for the balance that are left, things are going to change.” Some stores may go to nothing but pick-up-and-deliver systems, some may take the center store out altogether and just sell the perimeter, “and whoever said a store had to have four walls, a floor, and a ceiling, anyway? That is the world that we live in today.”
Upgrading the Event Portfolio
When FMI re-engineered its strategic plan in 2016, it took the changing marketplace into consideration. One area that needed particular attention was its remaining events.
Core said they started with the low-hanging fruit among their existing portfolio of small events for specific niches within the profession. What were the easy fixes they could do to start to refresh their portfolio? How could the team, now that the big show was retired, apply their experience and creativity to the rest of FMI’s events?
One result was the FMI Midwinter Event, which last year added a fun campaign. Called “Stir It Up,” the contest had retailer and supplier executives vying to create the best family meal, as determined by audience votes.
They also formed strategic alliances, including one with the National Retail Federation that entailed rolling FMI’s asset protection and loss prevent event into NRF Protect, held in June. FMI also formed an alliance with the Fancy Food Show, an event held by the Specialty Food Association “so that we could bring our food safety expertise to that community and in return, we could help the grocers attend that event,” said Core.
Going Bold
But FMI didn’t stop with refreshing, rebranding, and forming new partnerships. The next step was to start an online community for small manufacturers who have challenges developing healthy trading relationships with grocery stores. Called FMI Emerge, it’s designed to help these small brands with manufacturing, financing, promotions, trade, supply chain, and distribution challenges.
“This is an online community with education, mentoring, networking, and investor connections,” said Core. “It's really different for us, but it was very important for us to make sure that this community had a healthy environment and that retailers could find them, and have them as healthy trading partners.”
FMI also worked with Shoptalk, which organizes events for retail and ecommerce innovation, to launch Grocerytalk, a new program for the grocery and consumer packaged goods industries that happened during Shoptalk in March this year. FMI helped develop and market Grocerytalk, which focused on the evolution of how consumers discover, shop, and buy groceries and consumer packaged goods in a digital age. “We are participating in a way in which we can help craft the conversation, bring the right players to the table, and add our expertise” without having to actually organize the event, she said.
Leading During Uncertainty
The post-show-retirement journey was one of uncertainty, said Core, a matter of “Leading while really not knowing where you're going. And I learned quickly that it is absolutely fine to plan not to know, to get yourself into a space in which you're observing, and you're connecting the dots.”
Baum added, “Raise your risk profile, but try to mitigate those risks as best you can. Don't be afraid to fail, but fail fast and move on.”
One thing that helped was shifting from a “should” to a “could” mentality, said Baum. “Don't tell me all the reasons why we couldn't [do something] historically or technologically or resource-wise or otherwise. Instead, figure out ways we could” make it happen.
It’s about thinking differently, said Baum. “I can assure you, if we can do it, given the size and history with our event, you can also.”
