In today’s environment, manufacturers need to have the right data in house to understand their performance nationally, regionally, and at specific retailers to drive growth and highlight opportunities. With so many data sources and options out there, it can be a bit overwhelming, and the risk of overspending on consumption data is a real concern for many companies. Prioritizing data needs and spend is imperative to helping your organization have access to the best information that is used and relied on across departments, both horizontally and vertically within your organization. Below, we outline considerations for organizations to harness the right mix of syndicated and retail portal data to drive growth. 

Importance of Synthesizing Data 

Investing in both syndicated and retail portal data provides businesses with the opportunity to better understand their current market position and their future opportunities. By using this data, businesses can find product innovation opportunities, improve customer relationships, and make more strategic decisions. Businesses can also use the data to better understand their competitors’ promotion and pricing activities, which allows for counter-adjustments and optimizations.  

Synthesizing the various sources and views speaks to the importance of working with your IT department to bring this information together in your data lake.  Translations need to be created to connect different definitions and hierarchies to streamline the ability to use data across platforms and teams. Once synthesized, this data shows trends that can be used to influence current and future business strategy. In response to strategic decisions, businesses can then use consumer behavior data to understand how customers perceive and respond to their brand’s activations. 

While leveraging this data can provide many insights, your business should establish a budget, resource(s), and process to ensure the data analysis is robust. There are many benefits to investing in syndicated and retailer data, but maximizing your return requires synthesis and analysis. Without enough investment, making decisions and developing future growth plans may be slower, incomplete, or inaccurate. But overinvesting or underutilizing information is also a risk – not utilizing data effectively can negatively impact your cost/benefit relationship and needs to be evaluated throughout the year. 

Areas to Keep in Mind 

Costs 

With limited budgets and more requests from retail partners for their retailer-specific data, manufacturers often must balance purchasing syndicated data (Nielsen IQ/Circana/Numerator) and additional customer-specific data. For customer-specific data, each request should go through a series of questions, resulting in a cost/benefit analysis that details volume gains and benefits of purchase.  

Some key questions to consider here are: 

• Where does the customer sit in your customer segmentation grid? 
• How engaged are they with your brand? 
• How rigorously do they use their portal data? 
• Does this data purchase fill an existing gap in the broader syndicated landscape? (Think Club and C Store as examples). 

Retailer-specific data typically offers very robust shopper card information, and if the relationship and resources are available to mine that information, it can provide critical information about the category, your brand, and the retailer’s most important consumers. Helping the retailer increase penetration and buy rate is a wonderful way to grow the category and strengthen the manufacturer/retailer trusted relationship. 

Resources 

Purchasing the correct data is an important step, but you must also identify the team and people who will be responsible for the data contract, data analysis and governance of the data. If the contract owner and data owner are different, there needs to be a clear line of communication between the two to minimize misunderstandings of what data is important and how it is used.  When selecting a data owner, you should take into consideration their knowledge and skill set so there is an understanding of shopper (i.e., buy rate, penetration, customer segments, etc.) and point of sale (POS) data (i.e., price, distribution & promotional type, and lifts). By identifying dedicated resources, analyzing, and contextualizing the data early on can allow for actionable and impactful insights. Your organization will also need a resource responsible for data maintenance to ensure complex data is understood and used appropriately across departments.  

Data Utilization 

Now the magic begins! Having the right data and the right team in place to mine the information is the first step. The next step is to develop a data plan: set up the infrastructure and cadence of your reports; outline the various teams using the reports and their unique needs; and investigate opportunities for automation to speed up repetitive activities.  Ad hoc deep dives are a separate but equally important task to evaluate things like competitive pressures within your category and/or in the aisle and store.  These are critical for understanding your business and finding opportunities and white space for growth.   

Consumption and shopper data knowledge sharing with Category Management, RGM/Trade, Brand, Innovation, Marketing, Sales, and Senior Leadership helps your organization to define common goals and objectives across departments with key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure against. By defining these annually and measuring them throughout the fiscal year, it allows organizations to track performance against objectives and pivot or enhance when needed.   

Next Steps: Syndicated and Retail Portal Data

Wherever you are in your data journey – from early stages where you are looking at what data you need to purchase to established companies that already invest heavily in data but might be looking to streamline or make sure you are making the right data choices, you must align internally on what data is critical for your brands and your retail partners. Data should be a fluid asset, adjusting as accounts get reprioritized and levels of purchase vary from year to year.  

Developing a Data Plan with yearly or bi-annual reviews of spend and utilization will be paramount for optimized spend and use. In the end, by investing upfront and selecting the proper data for your business, you can make strategic decisions for your brands and build more collaborative relationships with your retail partners.    

To learn more about our Consumer Products Sales and Marketing consulting services, contact us today. 

Contributions from Addie Schmidt