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Turbana Taps Geoscape To Educate Store Partners On Multicultural Retail

bananasWhen retailers have multiple stores with different consumer demographics, it’s vital for them to understand which products will sell best depending on the demographic makeup of each store.

Turbana, a distributor of tropical produce in North America, has the challenge of marketing and supplying its Turbana Tropicals line of products to retailers serving multicultural communities. With the help of BI solutions provider Geoscape, Turbana is now gathering consumer demographic data on a consistent basis. With this information in hand, managers are able to stock individual stores more efficiently.

Geoscape also helped Turbana launch an educational campaign for partner retailers and create a mobile app so partners can easily access the shopper data.  The educational campaign helped Turbana grow its tropical produce business by more than 300% in 2014. Within six months of the launch, one of Turbana’s retail partners increased sales by more than 30%.

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Turbana Tropicals was initially designed to capitalize on the growing Hispanic and Asian communities throughout the U.S. By gearing the new product line to these communities, the distributor has sought to differentiate its product from competitors.

“We wanted to capture that opportunity, and we saw that a lot of retailers were not capturing that customer,” said Ricardo Echeverri, VP of Sales for Turbana Tropicals. “It was an opportunity to introduce these products to retailers and invite new customers into their stores.”

Initially, many Turbana retail partners were not completely familiar with the demographics of their individual store locations, nor did they know much about the Turbana Tropicals product line, according to Echeverri. Therefore, the products weren’t getting effective exposure to shoppers. “We felt our partner retailers weren’t very familiar with our items,” Echeverri said in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “It’s a very fragmented market, and logistics are very time consuming, so learning about products can be a hassle. These buyers either don’t have enough time for it, or they didn’t know which Tropicals products to carry according to the demographics.”

In turning to Geoscape, Turbana could demonstrate a specific ethnic breakdown for the surrounding areas of all of Turbana’s retail partner locations. With the demographic makeup in hand, the Turbana team built an educational campaign, which informed retailers of the revenue the Tropicals line could drive to each store.

To build the accompanying mobile app, Turbana collected a list of every retail partner’s store, along with each store’s corresponding address. The Turbana team then downloaded each address into the app, so that users can log into the app and access mapping and demographic data.

“With the mobile app, a retail manager can find what populations are around the store, what items each population consumes, what holidays and products they should promote,” Echeverri said. “It describes exactly what a product is and the temperature it should be stored at, and even gives out different recipes. It’s a very educational application.”

Given the difficulties retailers may have in when it comes to keeping track of produce from outside the U.S. — especially when products that appear to be the same have different names from different countries — the Turbana team looks to continue using the Geoscape technology to educate retail partners.

“The idea for us is not to sell the products, it’s to sell the program,” Echeverri stated. “We want to work with them side-by-side and deliver the program for them, and we want to offer them not only the tools of the app, but the expertise that we have.”

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