CHICAGO and SAN FRANCISCO – Feb. 28, 2006 – To grow their businesses profitably in today’s complex marketplace, manufacturers and retailers across the consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry must address and anticipate the needs and wants of today’s growingly sophisticated consumers. Information Resources, Inc. (IRI), the leading global provider of enterprise market solutions, announced plans to meet this demand by offering new “Consumer Understanding” solutions that will empower manufacturers and retailers to accomplish their objectives by better understanding consumer drivers, loyalties, habits and concerns.
IRI also announced new solutions in the area of “Market Performance” that are focused on delivering state-of-the-art predictive and an integrated view of the total retail marketplace, including granular information by account and by geography. The solutions combine a variety of disparate data sources, including sales data, market data, shipments data, loyalty data, inventory data, and other third-party sources in a single solution to drive insights about a manufacturer’s or retailer’s entire business and marketplace.
“With retail channel fragmentation on the rise and the array of individual consumer preferences continuing to expand, a comprehensive view of a consumer, a brand or a market requires multiple sources of information,” said IRI President and Chief Executive Officer Scott W. Klein. “The IRI Market Performance Solutions provide the next generation of data integration capabilities and supporting business applications required to help manufacturers and retailers gain a total view of their business.”
Innovative solutions offered in the Market Performance area include the IRI Market Performance™ data integration solution that leverages the newest data integration technologies to empower better understanding and more effective targeting of customers for branding, demand and supply, and merchandising activities.
Innovative new solutions offered in Consumer Understanding include IRI Consumer Decision Maps™ and the IRI Shopper Insights™ Solution as well as newly expanded BehaviorScan® capabilities in the Grand Junction, Colorado market. Other solutions in the area focus on gaining deeper insights into store performance, specific events, and feature a myriad of information on consumer behaviors and attitudes.
“The key to successful product innovation is driven from a deep understanding of shoppers, consumers and individual users,” added Klein. “The IRI Consumer Understanding solutions provide significant insight into consumer preferences that manufacturers and retailers can use to stay ahead of the competition and win at the shelf.”
Consumer Decision Maps
IRI Consumer Decision Maps (CDMs) is an easy and fast way to discover how a consumer makes decisions and describes the interaction between products. For example, retailers can find out which products are viewed by consumers as close substitutes, how consumers divide a category into segments, and which products are least likely to compete for the same purchase occasion.
A CDM analysis is based on thousands of household purchase transactions, documenting each household’s category purchase patterns during a one-to-two-year period. The IRI methodology lets retailers distinguish substitutable products from complementary products. This is important when analyzing consecutive household purchase transactions in categories, such as deodorant, where a household is likely to purchase different products for different members of the family. By using CDMs, retailers can create a mix of products on the shelf and a mix of products on promotion each period that will generate more incremental sales for the category.
Shopper Insights Solution
From where to shop and when to shop to what to buy, consumers have endless shopping options. Understanding shopping behavior at its deepest levels is critical to achieving success in the modern marketplace. The IRI Shopper Insights Solution provides this vital “why behind the buy” information, so that retailers and manufacturers can determine how to leverage shopper data to their benefit. The foundation of this solution is the IRI Shopper Insights Platform, an enterprise software solution that powers a suite of Shopper Insights modules.
The solution helps analyze shopper behavior by customer segment and by retailer, with a level of detail and ease of use that was previously unavailable. A variety of reports and analyses let users leverage this information to produce actionable insights and recommendations, such as defining target markets where there is a clear competitive advantage and providing direction on how to best address that target to drive category traffic and sales.
For retailers and manufacturers seeking new and innovative ways to define their target markets, IRI Shopper Insights – Custom Analytics offers a set of analyses that enable users to segment the CPG marketplace in completely new ways. Users capture a detailed view of the marketplace by consumer, type of shopping trip, type of products and type of retailer according to the IRI Trip Typology™. This information allows retailers and manufacturers to target unique market segments and implement marketing strategies, so that they can win in the marketplace by serving a defined customer need better than anyone else.
Expanded BehaviorScan Capabilities
After celebrating the 25th anniversary of its in-market testing service, BehaviorScan, IRI is continuing to expand the relevance of its existing service. IRI is expanding its multi-outlet panel capabilities to its BehaviorScan market in Grand Junction, Colo. IRI panelists will now show an identification card at participating stores and use a handheld ScanKey at home for purchases in non-participating stores. These multi-outlet ScanKeys enable IRI to capture more consumer purchases in more outlets and make BehaviorScan the only fully-integrated testing solution in Wal-Mart. The multi-outlet panel empowers CPG testing clients to get faster and more comprehensive evaluations of new products and advertising campaigns.
In addition, split-cell media testing capabilities will be implemented in Grand Junction, allowing IRI to have test and control cells within the same market. This high level of control enables IRI to isolate the impact of test advertising on sales, while virtually eliminating cross-market differences that can hide the true effect of advertising changes. BehaviorScan offers the only “split cable” advertising system in the country, which will be offered in all BehaviorScan markets in 2006. Expanded BehaviorScan testing capabilities will close the gaps in outlet data and optimize accuracy for all tests taking place in the Grand Junction BehaviorScan market.
For more information on these solutions, visit: http://us.infores.com
About Information Resources, Inc.
Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) is the world’s leading provider of enterprise market information solutions and services, empowering its clients to grow their business profitably in a complex marketplace. Driving the transformation of the consumer packaged goods (CPG), retail, and healthcare industries, only IRI provides a unique combination of real-time market content, advanced analytics, enterprise performance management software, and professional services. The company’s portfolio of services, solutions, and technology enable leading retailers and their suppliers around the globe to see what they are missing, act faster with greater confidence and win at the shelf. Ninety-five percent of the FORTUNE Global 500 in CPG and retail leverage IRI to power their business. For more information, visit http://us.infores.com.