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Enhancing consumer products decision making

Generate new insights from the full array of available data with IBM Sales and Promotion Analytics for Consumer Products

 

Table of Contents

Highlights

Improve trade planning and accurately forecast top-performing promotions Get timely, more complete promotion performance insight across customers, events and stores Identify poor performers sooner and drill down to discover root-cause issues Increase revenues and boost profits through smarter trade spend allocation
 
 
 

Address key consumer products challenges

Consumer products (CP) companies are continuously looking for ways to increase market share, spur growth and boost profitability with sales plans and promotions strategies that benefit all players: the supplier, trade customer and consumer. For many companies, achieving those goals is increasingly difficult. Too often it’s business as usual with no measurable progress in improving return on trade spend or achieving growth objectives.

In today’s business world, you must leverage all available data and advanced analytics to form more complete and more granular views of customers and products than ever before. Organizations now have the ability to collect large amounts of detailed data about consumers, their shopping behaviors, preferences and consumption rates. By combining this information with traditional demand data and new data sources such as social, news, events and weather (SNEW), CP companies can get the rich market and consumer insights they need to enhance sales and trade planning processes for better outcomes. Advanced analytics provide insight and decision support, driving not only sales volume but improved profitability as well.

To plan for and measure more effective promotions, you must first answer three challenging questions:

How can you better evaluate and predict the performance of trade promotions?

Advanced analytics can help you assess how well promotions are performing at the store, category and SKU level so you can maximize the effectiveness of current and future efforts. The right analytics solutions can help you examine the impact that a wide range of external factors—from weather to local events—could have on your success.


Which products and stores are the most profitable?

Optimizing your return on trade spend requires data-driven insight. You need to understand the relative profitability of each retail chain, store, promoted product group and SKU, so you can develop and execute more effective sales and promotion strategies for sales growth.


How can you maximize sales resource efficiency and effectiveness to achieve business objectives?

Like any business, you need to maximize the impact of your sales force, measuring the effectiveness of current sales efforts down to a store, category and product level. New role-specific insights delivered to account managers—on any device—can help you improve collaboration with retail partners, better allocate resources and use insights to differentiate your services so you can meet short- and long-term goals.


 

Tap into new sources of data

You recognize the importance of analyzing data for designing trade promotions, measuring promotion performance, improving operational decision making, optimizing sales resources and more. But are you capitalizing on all available data?

In addition to using traditional downstream data sources that reveal historical performance, you need to tap into available SNEW and other sources of external data—much of it unstructured data—at a hyper-local level. By deploying advanced analytics solutions designed specifically for CP companies, you can analyze a wider range of data and produce new insights that impact your business objectives.

 

Enhance decision making with IBM Sales and Promotion Analytics for Consumer Products

IBM® Sales and Promotion Analytics for Consumer Products is a comprehensive solution that helps you capitalize on a full range of data to improve key decision-making processes. By offering advanced analytics capabilities and drawing on deep expertise and experience with CP and retail companies, this solution helps you answer your most important sales and trade planning questions.

How do I improve the effectiveness of my trade promotions?

Streamline trade promotion planning, monitor execution and track compliance with IBM Sales and Promotion Analytics.

  • Integrate rich consumer, localized marketplace and retailer data to provide a more complete, timely and trusted information foundation for trade planning, analysis and execution.
  • Effectively evaluate the impact and profitability of past promotions.
  • Predict the effectiveness of new promotions on profit and lift, including category and customer impact.
  • Enhance channel partner planning and collaboration using insights into channel partner sales, inventory and merchandising conditions at the store or equivalent level.
  • Help increase speed and agility by analyzing near-real-time data to identify compliance issues and take remedial actions sooner.

How do I measure retailer and SKU profitability?

Determine which events and promoted product groups are delivering the greatest profitability so you can optimize trade spend mix and eliminate poor-performing promotions.

  • Bring together silos of data as well as social and mobile data to create a complete, trusted understanding of consumers, competitors and the marketplace.
  • Generate predictive models to identify the best approaches and analyze real-time data to gauge the most profitable promotions at any moment in time, accurately measure results and improve forecast accuracy.
  • Enhance assortment or mix planning and execution as well as store-level sales and category management reporting.

How can I optimize my sales resources?

Use a complete view of the marketplace and industry trends to allocate your sales resources for the greatest return on investment.

  • Analyze integrated data from historic and hyper-local sources to predict the effectiveness of new promotions on profit and lift, including category and customer impact.
  • Use newly generated insights to create innovative campaigns that help increase sales volume and profitability, benefiting both the CP company and retail partners.
  • Create a comprehensive, 360-degree view of consumers that spans digital and physical channels to identify opportunities to feature products with high margins.
  • Leverage consumer behavior segmentation and analytics capabilities to profile behavior, run dynamic and multidimensional segmentation models and optimize consumer experience planning.
  • Use predictive models and trend reports to quickly and proactively adjust regional spending and inventory based on budgets, pricing, retailer and category performance and overall profitability—or many other market attributes.

 

Realize tangible benefits with IBM

Producing new insights that help unlock growth opportunities

Challenge: Pabst Brewing Company wanted to generate new insight into its retail chain to improve forecasting and enhance marketing efforts.

Solution: The company implemented advanced analytics capabilities from IBM.

Benefits

  • Reduced cycle time for the accounting process to just five business days, enabling teams to focus on innovation forecasting and other growth drivers
  • Gained new insight into the chain business by measuring profitability for major retail chains
  • Facilitated better decision making and enabled midcourse corrections
  • Tapped into consumer sentiment through social media to optimize marketing and trade promotions

Enhancing retail collaboration and optimizing trade promotion spending

Challenge: A global dairy company wanted to improve collaboration with retailers to increase market share and revenue.

Solution: The company worked with IBM to develop a strategy to generate new insights into consumption. It then implemented an IBM solution that analyzes retail sell-through, promotions and inventory data to improve price, promotion and assortment capabilities.

Benefits

  • Anticipated improving trade spending by 10 percent
  • Expected 95 percent improvement in time to insight
  • Enhanced agility in a changing market space by transforming how the company sells to and through its retail customers

Reducing trade spending by minimizing losses from unprofitable trade promotions

Challenge: A global snack food company wanted to expand visibility into the true effectiveness of its trade spend. The goals included improving the trade planning process and increasing overall trade ROI.

Solution: The company implemented an IBM solution that analyzes retail customer promotional activity at the event level and measures the plan versus the actual volume, spend and retail execution.

Benefits

  • Saved more than USD100 million of unprofitable trade spend
  • Eliminated 4,300 worker days of effort to prepare, manage and integrate disparate external data
 

Deliver a rapid—and large—ROI

IBM Sales and Promotion Analytics for Consumer Products can help you see tangible results in weeks, not months. The solution facilitates rapid implementation and lets you avoid the need to rip and replace current solutions. Choose cloud-based capabilities to further accelerate deployment while maximizing flexibility.

With new insights at your fingertips, you can gain greater control over inventory and better predict demand so you can help ensure you make the right products available, in the right channel, at the right time. You can also design and execute more successful trade promotions. You can become more profitable. And you can make sure you’re using your sales force in the ways that will have the greatest impact.

 

Take the next step

Find out how you can fully capitalize on all available data to enhance trade promotions, boost profitability and optimize your sales resources. Check out these resources for trends, advice, product details and customer success stories that will help you build and implement a successful analytics strategy.

The IBM Sales and Promotion Analytics solution features pre-integrated reporting and advanced analytics capabilities including:

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Produced in the United States of America
June 2016

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