A singular and shared understanding of today’s consumers needs to be at the centre of business building strategies and supporting marketing campaigns. Consumers today, as always, are motivated by better shopping experiences and more relevant marketing communications – brand and retail interactions that reflect their individual wants and needs will win. This customer-first focus must be the foundation for all strategies to connect with consumers across the lifespan of a marketing campaign, building brand loyalty and growth.
Collaboration supports a rising tide that lifts all ships. But there are rough waters when it comes to data, as true collaboration can’t happen without harmonised data, shared goals and common measures of success.
A shared workspace is critical to this journey. It allows for ongoing joint business planning and thus fluid, real-time, impactful and profitable decisions. The benefits of collaboration on a shared workspace include:
- Sharing of information/real-time discussion, analysis and reporting
- Measurement against agreed-upon goals Identification of tactical and strategic opportunities
- Rapid assessment of arising threats via prescribed alerts
Insights and action must move fast – and can and must be specific to customers, markets and the time and place.
To win share, retailers and manufacturers must:
- Have a 360-degree view of the consumer, including digital and physical buy moments
- Deliver personalisation based on propensity to purchase
- Gain near-instant consumer feedback plus traditional research
- Automate analytics, engaging with artificial intelligence and machine learning
- Have visibility of omnichannel coverage
How do you create a true collaborative relationship for mutual growth?
To help build a more collaborative retailer-supplier relationship driven by internal and external data sources, IRI has created a retailer collaborative gateway solution, enabled by the IRI Liquid Data technology platform. With this platform, retail partners can quickly integrate disparate data without sacrificing security and control, creating a simple and consistent way to access the data and the insights. Integrating data – IRI and third-party data from more than 40 data assets on the Liquid Data platform, plus the ability to integrate more than 125 additional data sources via IRI’s open API connectors – creates a rich, harmonised data pool in one place.
These assets can be used in all internal decision-making processes, including joint business-planning sessions with suppliers, and they drive significantly easier and more effective collaboration.
Users have more meaningful metrics and reports on-hand to allow manufacturer and retailer partners to make faster, better, smarter decisions together. These harmonised data sets alleviate the need for manual efforts, and they significantly increase speed to insights.
Furthermore, integrated data provides a more efficient link between market demand and actual market behaviour, keeping users aligned against category-focused and customer-first efforts.
With IRI’s collaboration gateway solutions, retailers and their suppliers can look at the same information and in the same way, in the retailer’s own hierarchy view, in order to work together more efficiently and effectively. The proof is in the results: Sales, product trip growth and average spend per trip are higher for gateway participant
