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Tim
Callahan
President
ACNielsen North America
Some of the critical questions relating to coverage
that drive your business today include:
- How can I gain market share in growth?
- Where are my loyal customers shopping and what motivates
them?
- How can I better understand channel incrementality?
- In what categories are my competitors hurting my business?
The underlying
solution to your questions lies with the seamless alignment
of your business intelligence across all existing databases.
What’s happening in the marketplace today is the following:
consumers are increasingly moving targets; channels are growing
less conventional every day; retailers are becoming increasingly
innovative and quick to market.
It all boils down to achieving greater ROI on your channel
marketing dollars. It’s about driving more customer
loyalty. You want to lower your costs while increasing your
market share.
Here are two strategies that may help:
1) Manage customer relationships, not just products and stores.
Before category management, retailers managed their business
around vendors. When category management became a standard
practice, people started managing their business around categories.
Now what we’re saying is that you’ve got to start
managing your business around customers. The category management
folks for shampoo, for example, are not going to be judged
on whether they increased shampoo sales; but did they increase
shampoo sales with the customers that the client was going
after? Did they get more of their dollars? Are they retaining
them more? Did they get more cost selling opportunities? If
they are really going to start looking at these customer dimensions,
then they can start managing and monitoring how well they’re
doing.
2) Augment or enhance your loyalty card data with information
that gives you greater understanding of your customers’
demographics and lifestyles and purchase behavior outside
your stores. The issue that most retailers face today is that
their own data that they collect doesn’t have enough
information to allow them to segment their loyal customers.
At ACNielsen, we’ve been working with Spectra to match
loyalty card data with lifestyle and lifestage demographics
so retailers can see that their loyalty households: have “x”
number of children; participate in specific kinds of activities;
and have a certain level of income—all the things that
retailers are going to need later on, but they’re able
to profile in segments that they want to go after now.
Years ago, retailers just looked at their own scanning data.
Then we brought them market share measurement. Today, what
we’re providing are insights that not only tell the
retailer what it is that the card members are doing inside
their stores, but what share of consumer wallet they represent,
so they can turn them into buyers in more of their categories.
ACNielsen Homescan’s data and analytical content will
be enhancing Spectra’s current Loyalty Marketing capability
to create a new “share of wallet” that continues
to innovate in a new class of offerings that more directly
integrate Homescan consumer insights with our clients’
marketing execution. To illustrate, “share of wallet”
analyses enable clients to prioritize those specific households
and categories within households with the greatest potential
to increase sales. In addition, these same metrics are loaded
on retailers’ frequent shopper files, enabling them
to leverage this information for individualized promotional
offerings and communications that reflect the household’s
unique needs, preferences and family circumstances.
As retailers look for innovative approaches to the challenges
of a competitive retail landscape, developing a stronger bond
with their loyal shoppers and converting switchers into loyal
shoppers are enormous opportunities with direct financial
benefits. “Share of wallet” is an invaluable tool
for retailers because it can help them establish a direct
connection between their strategic objectives and the financial
results they require to drive their business.
At ACNielsen, we customize and integrate consumer views every
day to provide the best measure of your business. We are the
leaders in measuring consumer behavior because we consistently
provide gold-standard scanning and panel-read information.
We continually deliver the fastest data and insights in the
industry. Not only is our coverage deep, but we maintain robust
major markets in ALL channels. We offer the best available
solutions for addressing “low-scanning” channels
like convenience.
And finally, we pride ourselves on our superior category management
solutions such as CBP,™ Category Business Planner.
The next wave of integrated views will combine POS, panel,
shipment and internal data for the makings of even more accurate
decisions in the future. Stay tuned for more innovation.
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