By Kim Bruce, Chief Customer Officer, Premise
Inflation. It makes consumers more price conscious and prone to bargain shopping, seeking promotions or switching to cheaper brands.
Meanwhile, during times of inflation, cost of goods sold (COGS) also increases. Oil prices make transportation more costly. With such a tight squeeze on the supply end, and consumers also tightening their belts, it’s more important than ever to have eyes (and data) on every aspect of the supply chain. Battling inflation requires a holistic approach.
One place where we are seeing Premise customers make substantive changes is at the in-store level. Let’s take a look at how retailers are leveraging brick-and-mortar merchandizing as a key way to combat inflation.
Up-to-Date Price Tracking
As the adage goes, “Mind your pennies and nickels, and the dollars will follow.” During a time of inflation, it’s vital to track how your products are being priced in store.
But this is easier said than done. This data can be slow. By the time it reaches the computers at corporate, trends may have moved on. Some areas have also traditionally been data “black boxes,” especially in rural areas or developing countries. Data can also be difficult to parse. It often arrives in aggregate rather than at the city or store level. This is unhelpful when it comes to precision tuning your in-store merchandising.
That’s where the Premise’s Price Tracker comes in. Premise shows, down to the store level, where your pricing guidelines are being followed – or not. A common finding is that rather than just discounting a certain brand, shopkeepers discount the entire category, rendering a brand’s competitive pricing useless. With store-level data, brands can hold retailers, down to the individual store, accountable.
Premise provides CPG brands with regular price tracking for SKUs sold within mom and pop stores across global markets, including pantry staples, competitor products and key company’s portfolio items.
Offering In-Store Insights on Asset Compliance
Is your merchandising strategy actually working? You need to know, not just guess.
On a sweltering hot day, a cool drink hits the spot. This is especially true in rural areas in countries such as Pakistan, where refrigeration isn’t always available. A major soft drink brand, upon learning that 64% of sales come from powered coolers, banked on this by installing its branded coolers in traditional trade stores. However, because these stores are independent, it couldn’t simply ask HQ for a report on how these assets were being utilized.
With Premise, the soft drink brand was able to determine that storekeepers were not always using the company-branded coolers for the soft drink brand’s products. Further, sometimes the coolers weren’t even turned on, negating the effort.
Due to Premise’s insights, they were able to reinvent their strategy at the store level, take back their assets and increase sales.
Closely Monitoring In-Store Activations
During times of inflation, buyers seek out discounts and promotions, such as those found on end caps. But as of now, brands that spend billions of dollars a year on promotions often don’t receive the results of these promotions until the promotion has ended. In fact, more than 50% of promotions fail to have any impact on sales, leaving two-thirds of brands in the red after their promotional campaigns end.
One pantry item brand, new to its category, made the huge investment to display their product on end caps in mid-range retailers across the U.S. With so much upfront capital on the line, it was vital that they could show a return on investment.
With Premise, they found that only 14% of the stores were living up to the service-level agreement. And 73% of the stores were not even carrying the product! Armed with this intelligence, the brand was able to ensure compliance when the promotion was still on.
How Does Rapid, Store-Level Execution Intelligence Combat Inflation?
In the fast-moving CPG pricing and promotion space, legacy data is stale before it even reaches your inbox. Premise, on the other hand, provides invaluable execution intelligence for CPG brands seeking a competitive edge in local stores.
As opposed to legacy solutions, Premise’s uniquely smartphone-enabled technology delivers real-time visibility into how products are priced, promoted and merchandised across retailers.
Dynamic decisions require up-to-date insights. That’s where Premise excels – tapping into a global community of contributors, they rapidly gather on-the-ground intelligence into in-store pricing, assessment management, promotion tracking and more. This unprecedented speed and scale helps CPGs identify gaps versus category norms, inform trade spend, monitor key competitors, optimize price elasticities and react promptly when needed.
Premise turns timeliness into a competitive advantage.
As inflation’s grip tightens, CPG brands need more and more granular analytics. For CPG brands, rapid retail intelligence at scale is now a reality through Premise’s store-level solutions.
About Premise
Premise is a revolutionary insights company that provides the world’s largest consumer brands with rapid and actionable in-store execution intelligence. Our innovative platform, combined with a network of 6 million Contributors in over 140 countries, enables our customers to obtain same-day insights.
Discover why Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Mondelez and AB InBev are using our Execution Intelligence to prevent out-of-stocks, ensure promotional compliance, stay ahead of competitor pricing and more.
About the Author
Kim Bruce is the chief customer officer at Premise, with Commercial Sales and Customer Success under her leadership. Kim brings to Premise over 25 years of experience in sales, customer and executive management, leading growth, scalable sales and support teams. Prior to Premise, Kim ran a Global Enterprise Account Executive team managing and selling social media technology to Fortune 500 organizations to help eliminate brand, security and compliance risks.