In the ever-evolving consumer landscape, brands need direct access to shoppers to keep up with their shifting purchase behaviors and sentiments in real-time. While market share can help brands identify where to focus their efforts, the ability to develop effective shopper activation strategies to achieve your brands’ objectives is derived from a deep understanding of behavioral data over time. In this article, we highlight the top use cases that demonstrate how panel data can help brands identify key growth drivers to strengthen their marketing and retailer strategies.
Marketing Strategies: Target Key Buyer Groups and Refine Brand Positioning
Tailoring marketing strategies to the shoppers driving category expansion
Brands are often challenged with keeping up with how categories are evolving, especially as they launch new products in a parallel category since they don’t know who is buying their brand or if they’re contributing to overall category growth. A brand can suspect that a market is growing, but may not know to what extent or who is adopting their new products.
For example, a leading home improvement company suspected that a subcategory based on new technology was growing rapidly, but didn’t know to what extent or who was adopting this new system. Using panel data, the brand quantified the growth and scale of the technology with over 10M HHs and 4% growth, demonstrating the overall movement toward this growing market. Panel data helped them to refine their marketing strategy by having a clear profile of these new market buyers and how to reach them.
Diagnosing the features shoppers care about most
Developing pricing and positioning strategies based on assumptions that aren’t backed by consumer data can lead to inaccurate plans. A leader in the smart home industry was losing share to private label while being confident that their position offered premium features that consumers were searching for.
In leveraging instant surveys, the brand asked consumers directly which features they valued the most and considered to be premium. The survey results proved that consumers were satisfied with their lower-cost purchases, and didn’t think the brand’s premium value proposition exceeded the features that were already included in lower-cost brands. In surveying consumers proactively, this brand was able to test the market and confidently alter its positioning and pricing strategy to increase its market share.
Retail Strategies: Support Preferred Retailers and Craft Data-Driven Sell-In Stories
Developing strategies to increase closure rates at key retailers
When a retailer is aiming to increase shopper purchases in their key categories vs. losing them to the competition (closure rates), typically they look to their brand partners to suggest strategies to help boost performance. A leading lighting company was approached by its retail partner to help determine the most accessible opportunities for performance improvement when they noticed the category was losing buyers to the competition.
Using panel data, the brand identified the top cross-purchased electronics categories amongst the retailer across all retailers. Video games had the strongest synergy and highest frequency at their retailer, making it an ideal category to consider closer positioning. A planogram strategy was formed with this category to position lighting products near video games for greater access to new category buyers and to better their performance. Overall, this strengthened the partnership between both the lighting brand and the retailer.
Sell-in stories: Regaining distribution with a lost retail partner
Brands are often challenged to prove their value and why they’re deserving of shelf space when retailers assume they’re not helping to close within the category. A leading kitchenware brand was removed from the shelf at a club retailer and needed to craft a compelling story for the brand to regain a spot on the shelf.
In partnering with Numerator, the brand demonstrated that once they were removed, the club retailer’s replacement brand caused shoppers to trade down to lower-cost items. This resulted in the decline of the category’s buy rate by over 30%. Using panel data, the brand was able to quantify that $30M of leaked spend among the retailer’s shoppers was going to the kitchenware brand at their competitors. The brand proved that by regaining distribution within the retailer, they could win back $5.3M of lost revenue.
Conclusion
In the dynamic general merchandise landscape, leveraging consumer data to develop marketing and retailer strategies is indispensable. Modern, robust consumer data equips brands with insights to refine their brand positioning, innovate toward the consumer, increase shelf space, and strengthen partnerships with key retailer partners.
If you are interested in learning more about how you can incorporate consumer data and insights into your marketing and retailer strategies, reach out to your Numerator account partner or contact us.
