Shedding Light on Retail Blind Spots
If you could see what your shoppers are seeing, would you approach your in-store promotions in a different light? What if you could quantify that in-store information in a way that allowed you to predict future performance? You’d be able to determine the percentage of stores that feature a display, or what the in-store promotional environment looked like. This is a blind spot for many brands, and it’s easily fixed — using data.
Data is often touted as a means by which brands can increase visibility to address their retail blind spots. The three in-store data sets listed below can drive decisions and actions that can increase ROI and promotion efficacy:
Digging into the Data
Though data is valuable, it is actually somewhat useless without an additional layer of sophisticated analysis, which provides the context that’s needed to empower actionable insights. When managed correctly, in-store data can be a brand’s secret weapon to winning at retail, by bringing insight into factors such as product pricing, whether the promotions actually being deployed, and its location in the store — as well as its proximity to the product in question. Other factors include details such as the number of facings, adjacencies, stock levels and actual components of the promotion itself, such as heater or price cards and the competitive environment within each store.
By understanding the nature of these elements, a brand can quantitatively measure the impact of these promotional components. Any mutation of these factors can impact sales data and negatively impact performance. They also bring to light interesting trends that impact traditional thinking on promotion activity. The following issues are pervasive across typical promotions:
Actions from In-Store Insights
Adding in-store data to existing sales, loyalty, ad and demographic data creates clues about the types of levers that brands can pull to increase the efficacy of their promotions. Common learnings include impacts of price, sharing displays with partners, the location of a promotion, the presence of an end cap TV or competitive activity within the store. These insights allow brands to easily identify and omit their weakest-performing promotions, which raises average execution and sales lift, and ultimately allows them to focus their energy on deploying a successful promotion.
Insights also inform channel-specific strategy. By looking at the average execution compliance and percentage of lift from all measured promotions, you can make decisions about channels you want to invest in more heavily. This data can also inform conversations along each channel, since it offers insight into channel-specific data such as data v. compliance.
Retail’s one-time blind spot can be obliterated with the help of a comprehensive analytical tool. Ideally, CPG brands should find a tool that gives them in-store visibility and actionable insights in order to achieve maximum compliance, more trade promotion control and positive ROI on spend.
Quri clients are steadily and rapidly increasing their promotional ROI. On average, they’ve seen more than 400 percent sales lift on individual promotions, 10 percent to 25 percent ROI improvement month to month and a 10 times’ increase in promotional ROI in just one year. Quri allows brands to look at what’s working and not working in promotions, to determine where compliance conversations are needed and to fine-tune their channel strategy. While these factors may seem insignificant, they compound and eventually drive huge increases in ROI.
Find out how in-store data can be your secret weapon to winning at retail in an exclusive on-demand webinar featuring Sahir Anand, VP of Research at EKN and Mark Cook, VP of Product at Quri.
Data is often touted as a means by which brands can increase visibility to address their retail blind spots. The three in-store data sets listed below can drive decisions and actions that can increase ROI and promotion efficacy:
- Awareness: advertising data collected from mobile/social/digital sources
- Consumer Insights: customers’ view of the world, including psychographics, heat mapping, demographics and shopping behaviors
- Transactional/Loyalty or Point of Purchase Data: portrays what customers do and what is influencing their decision-making process. This is the holy grail of in-store condition data, which describes the environment that the shopper is experiencing at critical point of activation/decision-making
Digging into the Data
Though data is valuable, it is actually somewhat useless without an additional layer of sophisticated analysis, which provides the context that’s needed to empower actionable insights. When managed correctly, in-store data can be a brand’s secret weapon to winning at retail, by bringing insight into factors such as product pricing, whether the promotions actually being deployed, and its location in the store — as well as its proximity to the product in question. Other factors include details such as the number of facings, adjacencies, stock levels and actual components of the promotion itself, such as heater or price cards and the competitive environment within each store.
By understanding the nature of these elements, a brand can quantitatively measure the impact of these promotional components. Any mutation of these factors can impact sales data and negatively impact performance. They also bring to light interesting trends that impact traditional thinking on promotion activity. The following issues are pervasive across typical promotions:
- 45% of secondary displays are non-compliant — displays are either not present or not constructed as intended
- 22% non-compliance on promotional pricing (price not marked down) — dynamics are not as intended
- 15% out-of-stock rate — lack of stock will impact sales data and negatively impact promotion performance
- 70% trade spend resulting in negative ROI — typically because the promotion’s execution was not where it was planned to be
Actions from In-Store Insights
Adding in-store data to existing sales, loyalty, ad and demographic data creates clues about the types of levers that brands can pull to increase the efficacy of their promotions. Common learnings include impacts of price, sharing displays with partners, the location of a promotion, the presence of an end cap TV or competitive activity within the store. These insights allow brands to easily identify and omit their weakest-performing promotions, which raises average execution and sales lift, and ultimately allows them to focus their energy on deploying a successful promotion.
Insights also inform channel-specific strategy. By looking at the average execution compliance and percentage of lift from all measured promotions, you can make decisions about channels you want to invest in more heavily. This data can also inform conversations along each channel, since it offers insight into channel-specific data such as data v. compliance.
Retail’s one-time blind spot can be obliterated with the help of a comprehensive analytical tool. Ideally, CPG brands should find a tool that gives them in-store visibility and actionable insights in order to achieve maximum compliance, more trade promotion control and positive ROI on spend.
Quri clients are steadily and rapidly increasing their promotional ROI. On average, they’ve seen more than 400 percent sales lift on individual promotions, 10 percent to 25 percent ROI improvement month to month and a 10 times’ increase in promotional ROI in just one year. Quri allows brands to look at what’s working and not working in promotions, to determine where compliance conversations are needed and to fine-tune their channel strategy. While these factors may seem insignificant, they compound and eventually drive huge increases in ROI.
Find out how in-store data can be your secret weapon to winning at retail in an exclusive on-demand webinar featuring Sahir Anand, VP of Research at EKN and Mark Cook, VP of Product at Quri.