REL Field Marketing
A Superior Full-Service Field Marketing Agency

The COVID pandemic has disrupted an already shifting retail landscape. Online portals and aggregator apps for in-home delivery have become the revenue path for physical retail stores and restaurants. However, this has varied across different product categories and geographies, and so the return to “new normal” is also likely to vary. As the post-pandemic world continues to induce change into the ecosystem, predicting the shape of future demand by category and identifying the best marketing modality forbrands to affordably attract consumer attention is a huge challenge. That’s where REL Field Marketing can help. The company’s best in class tools allowits customers to receive rapid and accurate data insights, increased visibility into how their brands are operating in the field, helping them to deliver a plan for achieving greater efficiencies and increase sales.

Founded in 1995 as part of the Advantage Somllan Group,and as the world’s largest outsourced sales and marketing solutions provider, REL have unmatched digital resources, references and experiences within retail merchandising, technology and reporting solutions to draw on. REL combines data points to create the best multi-form solutions for its clients. Plus, with a highly engaged team, the agency offers great execution, acting as an agile, ‘easy to do business with’ partner. Nick McGrath, the Managing Director at REL, summarises, “We take the best analytical capability, combine it with great engaged people to deliver superb solutions that are cost efficient and effective.” The company also offers content improvement in addition to monitoring the point where consumers drop out in the online research and purchase cycle, whilst also offering instore resources for auditing, merchandising or sampling and promotions, in effect, covering everything from research to purchase.

The success story of one of their clients’ best exemplifies REL’s value proposition. A client was looking to make marketing investments over a comparatively short timescale to drive instore brand availability and visibility. However, the budget was insufficient to enable blanket coverage of the targeted retail channel.
Through the use of predictive modelling based on a machine learning platform and using limited EPOS data from a sample of stores, REL was able to model the entire universe of stores identifying which stores would sell most and be best to target based on their demographic, instore attributes, and proximity to certain landmarks and features. As a result, the strike-rate of the team was increased, and REL could provide effective channel-wide coverage through analytics.

Such has been the prowess that REL has garnered over the years by helping many such clients. The agency has also developed an availability tool that tracks inventory availability from factory gate to store-level-fixture. They can track the dropoff of availability at each stage of the value chain and identify root causes in the supply chain gaps. REL prides itself on its team and have been recognised by Great Place to Work™ as one the UK’s and Europe’s Best Workplaces, in addition to being recognised as a Best Workplace for Women. However, what really stands out is the incredibly high levels of engagement from its teams, who treat the business as though it was their own and show a fantastic "can-do" attitude.

Nick McGrath continues,"We have always been known for the quality of our people, and we have recently brought in seasoned experts in the field of digital and martech to further bolster the strengths of the team.” For the future, REL will continue to develop new analytical tools and has something in the hopper that they believe will give unprecedented visibility to category management and field marketing teams of customer and store level performance. This will be in addition to drivers of that performance, enabling precise interventions that will maximise revenue at minimum cost.