Stopping the Guessing Game

Schaumburg, Ill. — CPG marketers typically believe their in-store execution success is in the medium to high range, but it’s actually all over the map, said Justin Behar, founder and CEO of Quri.Speaking alongside client John Jaffke, senior director of in-store merchandising and sales operations at Kraft Foods Group, during a Shopper Marketing Summit presentation, Behar said it’s possible to end the guessing game. Part of that game stems from the use of traditional, costly, one-off reports that tend to lag behind reality and lead to false signals and poor decisions, Behar said.Instead, Quri uses crowdsourced execution vendors to provide fast, affordable, granular data within six to 24 hours after a promotion hits the store. These freelance vendors use built-in apps on their iPhones or Androids to complete small assignments at any retailer within 24 to 48 hours, Behar said. “We’re collecting not just one-off photos, but 20, 30 or 40 so that for every data point, there’s a photo,” he said. Overall, Quri has “a few hundred thousand crowdsourced participants,” and Behar said that “I can staff 20,000 people in the next 48 hours” if need be. Their system provides the end user “a data analytics view that meshes with the photos you’re taking.”Quri’s Justin BeharQuri compares stores with and without displays to see how much execution drives success for a given brand, Behar said. “We collect data around specific promotions and components within the store, and what is the associated sales lift,” he said. This includes “more granular data, like the location within the store.”Across Quri’s portfolio, the company can map emerging trends in the relationships among compliance, type of display and incremental sales lift, Behar said. Those with high sales but low compliance mark missed opportunities for more, he said, while those with low sales and high compliance show spots where “it’s better to reallocate your money.“As our data set grows and becomes higher quality and better structured, brands are starting to use the historical data for future predictive purposes,” Behar said. “They can use it for planning better investments.”“And if we see a retailer who’s always low on compliance, we’re having that conversation: ‘We’d like to work with you, but we need your help here.’”When Behar and his team first began working with Kraft, Jaffke acknowledged that his early sentiments included, “Oh, great, here’s another group of Millennials coming in to take over my world,” he said. “Successful people working for successful companies might be offended by, ‘Stop guessing.’ I was that way too.”But Jaffke and his colleagues got past their initial skepticism when they realized that despite being a large company with plenty of resources and partners, “We weren’t as good as we thought we were and we wanted to be” when Quri started sending back pictures from the field. “We spend a lot of time and money getting displays through the supply chain, and you’re not going to get the sales lift” if they’re not put on the floor, he said.In other cases, displays are set up but not the way the company intended, Jaffke said, showing pictures of “the good, the bad and the ugly.” In “the bad” example, the display was just sitting on top of a floor pallet, while in the “ugly,” the original shipper was sitting next to a product from a different category.Quri’s crowdsourced data sets provide real-time information about display condition, in-store placement, lift and ROI, along with regional and local differences in how well displays are performing. “One of the things we’re trying to do is build this predictive model,” he said. “If a store never sets up our displays, we don’t send them.”They can also learn what works in different sizes of stores and types of retailers. “I’m encouraged because the retailers are as interested in the information as we are,” he said. “And if we see a retailer who’s always low on compliance, we’re having that conversation: ‘We’d like to work with you, but we need your help here.’”The bottom line: In the 18 months Kraft has been using Quri’s system, compliance has risen every quarter for a total of 15%. And while Jaffke did not get into specifics, “If you look at the revenue side of that, it’s a powerful, powerful equation.”

Stopping the Guessing Game

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