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JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The next chapter in Acosta Group’s ongoing evolution has arrived with the completion of the company’s acquisition of Crossmark and Product Connections.
The deal, which was announced in May and finalized earlier this week, brings, among other assets, Crossmark’s headquarters sales agency and retail solutions businesses, as well as Product Connections’ specialized marketing services capabilities, into the fold.
“We’ve been on a three and a half year transformational journey, assembling the premier brand building engine for the world’s CPG companies,” says Brian Wynne, Acosta Group’s president and chief executive officer. “We’ve been adding assets over the last several years to complete a suite of capabilities that brand owners can use today and tomorrow.
“The addition of Crossmark and Product Connections is a game-changing step on that journey. We believe that we will be the only agency collective in North America that will be able to provide fully end-to-end services for our brand owner partners and support for our retail partners. With this transaction now closed, we’ll be able to provide every service that a brand owner could need.”
Acosta Group’s reach extends across the CPG and retail spectrum, with agencies devoted to brand building, retail execution, marketing and food service. The Crossmark and Product Connections acquisition significantly augments those capabilities.
“We’ll be able to help our partners build their brands at whatever stage in life a particular brand is at — whether it’s an iconic billion-dollar brand, an idea that an entrepreneur in their garage is trying to launch, and everything in between,” Wynne notes.
The deal bolsters Acosta Group’s existing strengths in a variety of trade classes, including grocery, club, value and convenience retailing. It also makes the company the leader in the drug channel, according to Wynne.
“The acquisition materially increases our presence in drug,” he explains. “It’s a channel that we are fully committed to working in and developing, helping our brand owner partners fulfill their ambitions. With our last couple of acquisitions, you’ve seen us lean into companies that had a strong presence in the drug channel. It’s part of our overarching strategy. We think that’s an important class of trade for consumers to be able to fulfill their lifestyle needs and for brands to be able to fulfill their business objectives.”
Retailers in all channels will benefit from the newest iteration of Acosta Group.
“We’ll be able to bring a lot of benefits to our retail partners, starting with best-in-class technology and best practices,” notes Wynne. “Our unmatched scale in terms of providing in-store services, with all of our associates on a common platform, will allow us to do the work more effectively and more efficiently than anybody’s been able to do it in the past.
“Retailers can be confident that by working with Acosta Group their brand partners will get done what they’re trying to get done at store level. We’ll be able to translate what brand owners and retailers are trying to achieve and have it executed out in the marketplace by the largest field-based workforce in the industry.”
As Acosta Group expands to become a one-stop shop for commerce-related solutions, the challenge of running the business becomes much more complex. The top priority for Wynne and his team is knitting the company’s diverse assets together.
“The word group in our name is very meaningful,” Wynne says. “What we’re trying to achieve is to position that suite of services for the benefit of brand owners and retailers in a coordinated way, so that each agency that we have is best in class at what it does and can at the same time work together with our other agencies to provide an additive effect — a one plus one equals three kind of dynamic.
“If you think about Acosta the brand and Crossmark the brand, they represent two doors through which companies can come into our system. From there, they can leverage some of the other agencies that we have, be it Mosaic marketing, Core Foodservice or our digital commerce business unit. We want to make sure that our brand partners have access to the full suite of agencies that they can leverage to help them grow their business across multiple channels of trade.”
