The Importance of Capturing Consumer Choices
Every moment a consumer decision is not influenced in your favor, it represents a vulnerability. Whether a consumer changes their mind, you’re selling for less than optimal prices, a competitor offers a better deal, or your brand begins to lose its appeal—each instance can significantly impact your bottom line. As these losses accumulate, the need to act quickly and strategically becomes paramount. To effectively sway consumer decisions, brands and retailers must achieve a “decision point advantage” by gaining continuous understanding and control over the factors that influence purchases across both online and offline channels. This report explores the five core pillars that are essential for capitalizing on every consumer moment and improving your outcomes.
Eyes on In-store and Online Channels
Achieving visibility into both in-store and online channels presents a significant challenge, primarily due to the compartmentalization of data and departmental focus. eCommerce teams might concentrate on online metrics while in-store groups focus on physical retail data. This division often leads to siloed information, making holistic analysis and strategic action difficult. For instance, if the e-commerce team notices a surge in online sales for a particular product but lacks visibility into in-store performance, they might not realize that in-store promotions or pricing adjustments could further enhance overall sales. Conversely, if in-store data shows that a product isn’t performing well, but the online team isn’t aware, they might miss opportunities to adjust digital marketing strategies to compensate or further investigate the discrepancies.
Siloed data can lead to several specific challenges; here’s some examples:
- Lack of Coordinated Promotions: If one channel runs a promotion without aligning with the other, it can lead to inconsistencies such as pricing conflicts or mixed marketing messages that confuse customers and dilute the effectiveness of sales campaigns.
- Inefficient Inventory Management: Without a unified view of inventory levels across online and physical stores, companies might struggle with stock imbalances—overstocking in some areas while running out in others. This misalignment can lead to lost sales, additional holding costs, or both.
- Delayed Response to Market Changes: When data is not shared across channels, the lag time in communication can slow down the response to market trends or consumer feedback. For example, if online customer reviews suggest a product defect or a drop in satisfaction, but this information does not reach the brick-and-mortar team promptly, in-store sales might suffer without timely corrective actions.
Additionally, while many organizations collect vast amounts of data, only a fraction is actively used for decision-making. According to research by Forrester, it is estimated that between 60% to 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics. This underutilization highlights a significant gap between data collection and its effective application in strategic business decisions.
The key to overcoming these challenges is maintaining continuous surveillance over all shopping channels—be it in-store, direct-to-consumer, e-commerce, or marketplaces—to strategically position products for sale. It’s crucial for data from various channels to be integrated and actionable across departments, preventing valuable insights from going unused.
Precise Data Coverage
Access to data that encompasses the necessary scope, depth, detail, and quality—all centralized in one accessible location—is vital for prioritizing actions and monitoring impacts effectively. For brands and retailers, the granularity and frequency of data updates are crucial and must be tailored to meet the dynamic needs of different product categories and operational strategies.
Online Price Intelligence: In the realm of online retail, the scope of data coverage can be vast, often involving visibility across hundreds of thousands of SKUs. However, the level of detail needed varies:
- Category-Level Monitoring: Retailers might require a comprehensive view across their entire product assortment on a weekly basis. This broader overview facilitates strategic category-level adjustments, enabling timely responses to market trends without the noise of daily price fluctuations.
- High-Priority SKUs: A subset of products, often the most profitable or competitive, may require more frequent monitoring—daily or even multiple times a day. For these key SKUs, staying abreast of price changes and competitive actions is essential for maintaining market positioning and profitability.
- Critical Promotional Periods: During high-stakes selling times, such as Black Friday or major sales events, some SKUs may need to be tracked on an hourly basis. This heightened level of scrutiny ensures that pricing strategies are optimized moment-to-moment, maximizing sales potential during these crucial periods.
- In-Store Intelligence: For brands with physical retail presence, the specificity of in-store data collection can vary based on the strategic goals and operational requirements:
- Quarterly Shelf Checks: For ongoing category management, such as within the premium waters category, brands might conduct quarterly audits to ensure that their products are correctly positioned and presented on the shelves.
- Promotional Compliance Tracking: During specific promotional campaigns, it may be necessary to monitor the setup and success of in-store displays more frequently, such as weekly or even daily, to evaluate the effectiveness of the promotion and make necessary adjustments.
- Ad Hoc Surveys: The ability to deploy ad hoc surveys provides brands with the flexibility to gather consumer insights and store performance data on-demand. This capability is particularly useful for testing new marketing concepts, assessing customer satisfaction, or troubleshooting specific issues as they arise.
By ensuring that data coverage is as specific and actionable as possible, brands and retailers can not only optimize their current strategies but also anticipate future challenges and opportunities. This level of detailed insight supports proactive decision-making, allowing businesses to adapt swiftly to changes in consumer behavior and market conditions, and maintain a competitive edge.
Category-Wide Intelligence
Having a comprehensive understanding of entire product categories can provide a substantial edge for brands and retailers alike. Many price and market intelligence vendors offer data solutions, but at Wiser, our success, especially with larger customers, is largely attributed to our extensive data collection across whole categories. Unlike some vendors who may restrict insights to specific brands or segments, Wiser embraces a broader approach.
Comprehensive Category Insights: We provide insights for entire categories on major platforms like Target.com, BestBuy.com, and Walmart Marketplace. For instance, if a customer is interested in the headphones category, we collect and report on critical factors such as price and availability for every product listed under that category. This exhaustive data collection methodology allows our clients to gain a holistic view of the market dynamics at play.
Strategic Advantages of Comprehensive Data (Examples):
- Identifying New Entrants: By monitoring an entire category, our clients can quickly spot new products or brands entering the market. This visibility is crucial for staying ahead of emerging trends and potential competition.
- Assortment Optimization: Understanding the full landscape of a category aids our clients in making informed decisions about how to adjust, expand, or modify their product assortment. This could involve strategies like introducing new products that fill gaps in the market, phasing out underperforming items, or differentiating offerings to capture additional market share.
This broad-spectrum intelligence is not just about reacting to the current market conditions but proactively shaping strategies that anticipate shifts and capitalize on opportunities before they become apparent to competitors. At Wiser, we believe that the key to successful category management lies not only in detailed insights but in comprehensive, actionable intelligence that empowers brands to lead rather than follow market trends.
Prescriptive Analytics & Insights
It’s also not enough for brands and retailers to simply gather and react to data; they must also proactively harness this information to drive strategic decisions. This is where prescriptive insights come into play, going beyond traditional descriptive analytics by not only explaining what has happened or what is happening but also prescribing specific actions that should be taken to achieve desired outcomes.
How Prescriptive Insights Work: Prescriptive analytics integrates advanced technologies like machine learning to analyze data and predict outcomes. By doing so, it can recommend the best course of action based on those predictions. For retailers and brands, this means receiving actionable guidance on how to optimize operations, marketing, and price management based on regular data flows.
Implementing Prescriptive Insights: Implementing prescriptive analytics involves integrating it into the decision-making process so that its recommendations can be acted upon quickly and efficiently. This might mean setting up automated systems that can execute certain actions like pricing adjustments directly, or it might involve enhancing decision workflows to ensure that insights are quickly delivered to and acted upon by the relevant teams.
Adaptable Configuration
In today’s retail environment, the capability for adaptable configuration stands as a cornerstone of effective data intelligence solutions. Wiser recognizes that each industry—from FMCG to consumer electronics—possesses unique data needs, influenced by specific market dynamics and consumer behaviors.
Industry-Specific Solutions Powered by Wiser:
- Home Improvement Brands: For customers like Tractor Supply, Zoro Tools, and Nebraska Furniture, Wiser customizes analytics to capture insights into seasonal trends, consumer behavior, and competitive benchmarks crucial for navigating the home improvement market.
- Consumer Electronics Brands: We work with giants like Best Buy, Costco, Sony, Meta, and Samsung to deliver dynamic insights into product launches, and pricing strategies, ensuring these brands stay ahead in a rapidly evolving sector.
- Appliances Brands: Companies such as Beko, Whirlpool, LG, and Curry’s rely on Wiser for detailed analyses of consumer trends, promotional effectiveness, and price optimization strategies across diverse appliance categories.
- Automotive Brands: For industry leaders like Yamaha, GM, and Tenneco, our platform offers targeted insights into dealership performance, aftermarket trends, and pricing strategies, empowering them to drive higher market penetration and customer loyalty.
- Food and Beverages Brands: Brands such as Mars, Talking Rain, Ferrero, and Barkman Honey benefit from our ability to monitor distribution channels, optimize shelf placement, and enhance promotional strategies effectively.
- CPG Brands: We provide Colgate, Church & Dwight, and Beiersdorf with advanced tools to analyze consumer engagement, assess competitive landscapes, and optimize marketing campaigns to secure and grow their market share.
The diversity of our customer base underscores Wiser’s ability to adapt and innovate across market segments, reflecting why leading brands trust us with their intelligence needs. Our adaptable solutions are designed not only to meet specific industry requirements but also to integrate seamlessly into each client’s business model, supporting strategic decision-making and operational efficiency.
Transition to a New Era of Retail Intelligence
The shift from the old world of fragmented vendor services and low visibility to a new paradigm—characterized by a single partner offering tailored implementations, high-quality data matching, clear risk visibility, reliable KPI reporting, and a unified market view—is essential. Demand a vendor that acts as your comprehensive observer, ensuring your products are optimally presented both in-store and online, identifying issues that deter buyers, planning and implementing strategic changes, and continuously monitoring and measuring results to refine approaches and achieve superior market performance.
