Today’s savvy consumers expect brands to practise responsible production. At GroupM, Toni develops eCommerce solutions that help brands become more sustainable.
In a different era, Toni Ruotanen’s mother would never buy groceries online. But over the past decade, a cultural revolution led by digital natives – and fuelled by a global pandemic – have accelerated the growth of eCommerce. Toni is seizing this opportunity to help companies thrive sustainably by making the great leap online.
At GroupM Nexus, Toni’s team discovered that about 50% of customers begin their purchase journey online. Digital is a crucial part of every purchase. Even when they shop at physical stores, people will use their smartphones to locate the store or take advantage of offers.
In other words, customers are now living online every waking moment. But the physical world hasn’t disappeared, either.
“
“The most successful brands bravely step into unknown territories, investing, researching and doing experiments to find new ways to leverage the online and offline worlds.”
“Contrary to the dire predictions years ago, eCommerce never destroyed the brick-and-mortar stores. Instead, the two channels found a way to play well together and cooperate,” he says. “Effectively, the offline store has become a way for customers to test, feel or smell a product and potentially buy it later online.”
His primary role is to avoid brands falling behind by not leveraging the many opportunities presented by this merger of the online and offline worlds.
Because eCommerce offers unique marketing opportunities, Toni says it gives companies an excellent chance to improve their sustainability metrics. His team is drumming up fresh and innovative ways for GroupM to solve environmental problems at a tactical level.
For example, a cereal box is mostly filled with air with a large flat surface to advertise the product. That’s a great design if it ends up on a shelf in a supermarket. But such a large box is unnecessary if the sales channel is online instead. eCommerce offers brands an advantage of shrinking packaging size to both save money and help the environment, without losing any marketing punch.
“We are helping brands think about sustainability in practical ways. Companies of all sizes want to hear about opportunities like this. And that’s what we do best,” Toni says.
“What works today may not work tomorrow, so the answer is to get comfortable with always testing and learning. My advice is to not think so much about the past, but instead think about how to adapt to the future – because in many ways, it’s already here.”
Specialist,
|
Director,
|
Associate Director,
|