ACNielsen, a VNU group company, is the world’s leading marketing information company. ACNielsen provides surveys and analyses on market trends and on consumer behaviors and habits in more than 100 countries.
Clients use ACNielsen information to analyze and understand competitive trends, to explore new opportunities and to increase the profitability of their marketing and sales campaigns.
To provide custom services that leverage the power of data analysis and accounting, a Trade Marketing information company called ACNielsen Store Audit was created by a joint venture between ACNielsen and Observer.
The company was formed to serve the needs of large-scale Retail companies that need to combine the strengths of logistics and bargaining power with the management of new factors that are gaining importance such as assortment, layout, promotions and cards.The success of modern distribution depends more and more on how fast a company adapts the management of their critical factors with the evolution of the market. Recent changes in the market have moved leading companies to strategically manage what have historically been tactical elements such as promotions, prices and space. It is from these new priorities that the project between ACNielsen Store Audit and BOARD was born.
Large-scale retail supermarkets needed to come up with an innovative loyalty card system that would leverage and optimize the consumer data it gathered. With BOARD, the job took four months.
Key customers that the Nielsen Data Center currently supports include; Interdis (32 companies and 3400 stores) with 19 databases; SISA, a large supermarket chain that manages approximately 100 commercial enterprises with just one database; and Europe’s largest foodservice industry supplier, Aligroup.
Using loyalty cards these retailers and suppliers gather consumer data and send it directly to the servers at the Nielsen Data Center via FTP every two weeks. The Data Center processes millions of transactions according to qualitative and quantitative analyses specific to each customer, esulting inactionable information for large-scale retail improvements. Every BOARD-managed database is processing data for about 500,000 loyalty cards. In the case of the Interdis project, the data is refreshed every week with about 12 million new records.
Thanks to the flexibility, simplicity and power of BOARD, the millions of transactions flowing constantly into the Nielsen Data Center are managed by only four people in short periods of time. As mentioned earlier, the project took only 4 months from conception to delivery.
The ongoing analysis of such substantial data allows ACNielsen to learn the tastes and inclinations of consumers in an increasingly in-depth manner. Analysis of all of this information also makes it possible to clearly improve the service of these large-scale retailers, focusing on ever-increasing personalization of its offers and services.
For example, it has enabled ACNielsen’s clients to carry out rational and punctual reassortment in order to cut storage of goods to a minimum, or better schedule promotions based on the statistical data of previous years.
ACNielsen is committed to expanding this program and is planning to connect every single client supermarket to the service so that data updates will be even quicker and more direct.
Further expansion of the project empowers users to connect single brands to the server so they will have the chance to monitor the status of their goods in real-time, further sharpening their vision and market intelligence.