5 Steps to Set Up an Excellent In-Store Competitive Benchmarking Strategy

Consumer goods companies need to ensure that they are on top in terms of addressing unmet consumer needs in the best way. The field team’s feedback in terms of consumer & trade feedback, on-ground insights, and competitor knowledge proves to be a very effective way of gathering all intelligence. Competitive benchmarking is a big step in the right direction here.

In terms of competition, companies need to know their products, price points, below-the-line promotions, the range available, and placement strategy on a territory level in order to make changes in their market strategy if needed. Competitive benchmarking is all about acquiring that information so that new strategies can be formed to overtake the competition.

This feedback gathering is a dynamic activity which needs to be done on a periodic basis whenever needed. These types of market intelligence can be facilitated by setting up campaign forms, which is very different from a mass campaign running all the time, a lot of configurability is needed in terms of targeting, setting up which data needs to be captured, and ensuring that the response rate is more than required.

Let’s discuss the steps required to set up an excellent competitive benchmarking strategy below.

Campaign setup for competitive benchmarking

Whether it is capturing competitor data, the share of shelf, product display & visibility, BTL promotion setup, consumer feedback & complaint – There needs to be a configurable setup to create these campaign forms with an option of targeting these forms to specific geography, type of customers, sales team or an incident based feedback involving escalation and approval within a sales team. Campaign forms can as well help in requests for community events, asset requests & audits, field complaints, and connecting with customers directly.

In-app targeting

Once it is decided what’s the goal of a campaign form and whom to target, that campaign form needs to be visible to those individual customers who are targeted for that specific campaign while the salesman is taking orders for that particular customer. This decreases the resistance which comes from changing to another app or screens in getting a higher fill rate for any campaigns. The sales team/Manager/Customer app should have the configurability to set these campaigns in-app.

Gamification

Any of these activities which need to be completed through campaign forms are non-core activities for a sales team. The sales team’s incentives are normally tied to their sales as an outcome. So to get these activities done, the brand needs to gamify its teams where in they get some points on each of their key behaviours related to them achieving their goals as well as non-core sales activities. Gamification becomes a key lever to create healthy sustainable competition between teams wherein the salespeople exhibiting key behaviour get certain medals that they can share on their social handles.

Option to directly target customers

Sometimes instead of the sales team collecting feedback, the brand might want to listen to their retailers directly and collect feedback from them. Then these campaigns need to be targeted directly to customers via social media channels or customer engagement apps. It should be linked to the salesman being able to check whether a particular customer has filled, if not nudging them to do at the time of visit on pending campaigns. At the same time, customers can as well be rewarded in terms of reward points as a part of an integrated loyalty program which they can later redeem.

Automated Visual Merchandising Audit with Machine Learning

The platforms being deployed for this customer-level data capture should either have in-house capabilities on machine learning image recognition to provide intelligent insights, or the platform should have integration capabilities to integrate with a specialist and committed MLIR partner and routing insights back to the field team.

We at BeatRoute visualize our campaign form workflow to be built on the above principles providing a great deal of scalability, setup & targeting capabilities across different personas, and integrated approval workflows in the team hierarchy. Our workflow can help consumer goods companies in feedback capturing, asset request, travel expense & travel plan approvals, competitor surveys, visibility capture, the share of shelf campaigns, etc. Do get in touch for a quick demo here.