Nielsen Fills Blind Spot with Fridge Magnet Scanner

Nielsen has introduced Homescan® Total ShopperView, billed as 'the industry's largest panel created to capture feedback on non-bar-coded items'. The service covers 15 categories of perishables such as bakery items, meat, vegetables and coffee.

Based on response from more than 45,000 panelists, the service has been designed to give a complete view of retail shopper behaviour in the categories concerned. Utilising new technology in the form of an in-home refrigerator magnet with barcodes representing each of the categories, panel members will be able to record purchases by scanning items when they get home.

Tim Kregor, President Homescan & Spectra North America says that the service offers an 'analytical lens' which will provide insight into retailer share, shopper loyalty, penetration and spending. He believes that it will enable retailers to better deploy non-bar-coded areas of the store to achieve objectives such as differentiating store layout from competitors' or positioning consumer packaged goods to increase basket size.

The service demographically profiles which consumers are buying most non-bar-coded items to allow retailers to target them with the optimum advertising and in-store merchandising approaches. It also allows retailers to track shopper penetration by department.

Manufacturers will be able to improve category cross-selling across non-bar-coded departments by allowing them to interrogate purchase data to understand how and why consumers purchase certain products, and survey consumers to uncover their likes and dislikes about the shopping experience. The new service is currently reporting using data from Q4 2006.

Nielsen's Homescan panel captures all consumer package goods purchase information as well as non-coded random weight perishable products. Launched ten years ago, the panel now gathers consumer data in 27 countries, based on consumer purchase information from more than 260,000 households globally. Nielsen is online at www.nielsen.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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