Consumer Goods Analytics: It’s All About the Store!
When it comes to what’s most important for consumer goods companies, it’s all about whether product is on the shelves and selling. Since enormous marketing investments are made in product-specific promotional campaigns, the ability to accurately ascertain a campaign’s resulting up-lift is critical. The bottom line is – whether selling shampoo or potato chips – consumer goods companies need the real-time visibility into their shelf activity that can be provided by a solid analytics solution. The business benefits will ensure they’re meeting retail goals, driving returns on their promotional dollars, and gaining the predictive capabilities to define their next successful campaign.
Yet, as you might suspect, most consumer goods companies will say they already have a multitude of information systems that leverage point-of-sale (POS) data, track promotional spend and manage the supply chain. Savvy consumer goods companies also rely on a customer relationship management (CRM) system to support their field-level activities, such as merchandisers who are visiting stores to stock product in a manner consistent with the current marketing campaign. With all of these disparate systems, it’s become even more critical to have a robust single-source analytics solution that extracts what’s most meaningful to decision-makers from the volumes of data created by these applications.
What’s it Really All About?
With recent industry research revealing that CIOs consider enabling a demand-driven business model among their top three priorities and this being dependent on near real-time retail data, most organizations are squarely focused on pushing data capture capabilities out to their front-line field sales and service teams who are selling and servicing customers. After all, field execution is critical to position and move product into consumers’ shopping carts. With significant investments in the front-line store merchandisers, it’s even more important to be able to monitor, analyze and report on the retail situation. Consider analyzing these types of activities: Is your product on the shelf? What are the most visible products on the shelf for a given category? Is the new end display in place? Is the promotion clearly labeled?
Since the analytics solution is reinforcing current and driving future business decisions, selecting one with a “dashboard” user interface will help reduce training time for non-technical users and facilitate an “at a glance” approach to reviewing business-critical data. By investing in a solution that has a wizard-driven reporting feature, users will be able to create their own reports as needed instead of having to rely on the IT department.
The Power of Analytics
Let’s consider an example of what happens when a consumer goods company has uses analytics in conjunction with its workflow engine to gain visibility into its store presence. A consumer goods regional manager reviews her morning “zero-scan” business event monitoring report, which is delivered to her via e-mail. It hones in on a variance in one store. There have been zero sales of her company’s best-selling liquid soap in the past 24 hours, which is currently being heavily promoted in trade publications and through a dollar off coupon in local newspapers. Knowing this to be highly unusual, the analytics report enables her to drill down further into this situation. She discovers the product is out-of-stock in that particular high-traffic retail establishment. She is able to quickly redirect a shipment that same morning and by that afternoon, the product is back on the shelves and in the hands of consumers.
Would this problem have been identified without the proper analytics in place? Potentially. But, in today’s competitive business environment, where minutes equal dollars, can any company take the chance of having this type of situation go unchecked for a day, a week or a month? Absolutely not. Consumer goods companies need to have an analytics tool in place that examines transaction and historical data in order to avert out-of-stock situation, predict overall trends and support decisions. While information can unlock competitive advances, operational efficiencies and business opportunities, it’s the right analytics tool that holds the key to this success.
Jeremy deSilva is director of sales for StayinFront, Inc., a customer relationship management (CRM) applications, decision support tools, data services, sample inventory management solutions and eBusiness systems provider based in Fairfield, NJ.
