What advice would you have for using multiple data sources for category and customer insights? Where do you see the core challenges in managing and aligning disparate data?
Interactive Edge’s CEO, Zel Bianco comments, featured on RetailWire’s Braintrust :
Utilizing multiple data sources cannot be overstated. This is the first critical step in elevating your shopper and category data to the insights process. Aligning, and sometimes truly integrating, data sources around naming conventions, measures, attributes and sometimes even UPCs is a process that needs to take place, but is well worth it in order to achieve the types of wins Amy Joyce alluded to.
There is also another very important factor that cannot be overstated and that is the importance of making it easy for the field sales organization to be able to use and present the insights. That is, the need to have a very user friendly interface in which multiple data sources can come together without the user having to figure out the appropriate data selections to make for each data source. We call it “Quick Picks” which allows the user to select what retailer they want to customize the story to from a drop down menu. All data sources are mapped appropriately and displayed on the appropriate slide/analysis so that some will utilize panel, syndicated, Kantar, Numerator, Shopper Intelligence, Market Track and more.
The days of walking into your retailer with syndicated and perhaps panel data only are over. The need to tell a more elevated data driven story with multiple data sources is a need to have and no longer a nice to have in order to be a true collaborative partner with your retail customers.
Read the entire article from RetailWire: