Tuesday, July 16, 2024, marked a milestone for Acosta Group and CEO Brian Wynne. On that day, the sales and marketing agency announced it had completed its strategic acquisition of CROSSMARK, including its headquarter sales agency and retail solutions businesses, and Product Connections, a specialized marketing services business, from WIS International.
The acquisitions of CROSSMARK and Product Connections were motivated by 3 key drivers:
1. To strengthen its existing business across retail channels (e.g., grocery, club, convenience, etc.) and geographic regions (e.g., Canada)
2. To add in new capabilities (e.g., product sampling and demonstrations)
3. To expand its business intelligence and data analytics platform
“We are, as of today, the only agency in America that can provide national coverage for foodservice, national coverage for digital, national coverage for demo, national coverage for marketing,” Wynne told The Food Institute in an exclusive interview. “We can provide everything for a brand owner.”
“So I’m excited.”
Wynne sat down with FI to discuss Acosta’s acquisitions – as well as the state of consumers and brands in 2024.
Food Institute: What do your recent acquisitions mean for your agency going forward?
Wynne: The acquisitions we’ve had the last three-and-a-half years are about filling in puzzle pieces in terms of services we want to be able to provide. As a longtime brand owner myself, I often think about “What are the brand owners going to need in five years from today?”
We’re growing organically and through acquisitions. We want both to happen. We’re not in the business of buying revenue at all. I tell our team all the time, “We want to become better, and if we become better, we’ll earn the right to become bigger.”
Food Institute: What do you expect in terms of consumer behavior as we move towards 2025?
Wynne: “Obviously, the consumer ebbs and flows with the state of the economy. The consumer’s stressed right now. So, discretionary spending is getting a little more clipped. As it relates to food and beverage, people have to eat.
But you start to see migration of consumer shopping patterns to try to find value. So, somebody might shop in this customer channel and then they find value in another channel and they pivot over. So, we have to make sure we’re strong where the consumer’s going.
Also, you have to re-architect the price package architecture of your brand, to make sure that you have offerings of value for those that are primarily focused on value. And then you have offers of trade-up. So, (utilize) things like revenue growth management, which is how you architect your price in a way to be able to touch the consumer in the state of mind that they’re in. That’s a really important thing for brand owners to be good at.
“The consumer’s stressed right now…you start to see migration of consumer shopping patterns to try to find value.”
Food Institute: What do brands need to focus on over the near future? What channels do you think are going to be more important in the next few years?
Wynne: “Brand owners need to make sure they’re understanding where shoppers are going. How brand owners build their first connections is changing; Historically, a lot of times brands were built through, say, brick and mortar and traditional media. That’s not how brands are built these days.
So, brand owners have to reallocate some of their brand building and their trial programs to different channels, and different vehicles, than they used to. That’s one reason why we built out our digital commerce group – because a lot of brands are built digital and then go brick and mortar now.
I think brand owners are trying to figure out “I have a certain amount of money, and I’ve got to figure out where to deploy it. And, if I’ve got to pull it from one place to invest in another, I might need to pull it from somewhere else.” Because the ability to just take a lot of price – that movie came, it was watched, and it’s over. There’s not a lot more price in the immediate horizon to be taken. So, brand owners are trying to figure out “Where can I save money?”
“Brand owners are trying to figure out “Where can I save money?””
Food Institute: As you envision the next twelve months, what excites you most as a leader?
Wynne: “I think we’re still in the early stages of fully becoming the best-in-class integrated model. But that’s what’s in front of us. Now we’ll spend the next 12 months really trying to bring that to life. When we do that, we become an indispensable partner for a brand owner, because we can help them wherever that shopper goes. And we do it in a seamless way – through our collective agency.
So, I’m excited. Because I think that’s the trend for the industry; Today, in any convenience store, for example, the space that they’re allocating is for foodservice operations within a retail footprint. And we’ll be the only agency that can bring that expertise of foodservice to a convenience retail operator, because we’ll have the largest coverage in convenience and the largest coverage in foodservice. And nobody else will be able to bridge those two.
I think we’re positioned to capture the consumer as they work through those blurring lines.
“We’re still in the early stages of fully becoming the best-in-class integrated model…When we do that, we become an indispensable partner for a brand owner, because we can help them whenever that shopper goes.”
Editor’s note: this interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
About the Author: Kelly Beaton is Chief Content Officer of The Food Institute, a leading food and beverage media company focused on insights-driven content.
