First In-Store Data from Nielsen's P.R.I.S.M.
September 28 2007
Nielsen and its partners have announced 'substantial progress' in their P.R.I.S.M. project, which aims to establish a global metric for evaluating the in-store environment. Initial results shed light on the relationship between traffic and purchases, and the level of in-store communuications with shoppers.
The global research giant is working with membership organisation the In-Store Marketing Institute and the P.R.I.S.M. Consortium of leading retailers, manufacturers and media agencies, which includes firms such as Coca-Cola, ConAgra Foods, General Mills, Group M, Hewlett-Packard, Kraft, Nintendo, Procter & Gamble, Target, Unilever and Wal-Mart.
Data from the P.R.I.S.M. project (Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric) will be syndicated in 2008. Nielsen says seventy percent of all final purchase decisions are made at the shelf, and that the initiative aims to establish the measurement of the in-store environment as a marketing medium along the lines of its TV, Internet, Box Office and other audience metrics.
P.R.I.S.M. allows in-store traffic to be measured by product category, such as in the cereal aisle of a food retailer or in the hair care aisle of a drug store. The current US-wide trial was started on April 29 this year and will finish in late December when more than 160 stores will have been studied; an international pilot is expected to begin in Europe next year.
Findings to date include:
- category transactions alone are not a reliable indicator of category traffic, counter to conventional wisdom. 'Two-thirds of shoppers who visit the salty snacks section in a food store make a purchase. Traffic is far heavier past the dairy case but the 'closure rate', or number of shoppers who make a purchase, is much lower for dairy products'.
- only 13% of food shopping trips are with kids, but P.R.I.S.M. data shows shoppers put more in their baskets overall when children are with them, almost regardless of the time of the week and the product category - hair care and water are included. 'Seasonal items are two and a half times more likely to be purchased when kids are present' says the firm, and yet 'the presence of kids on the shopping trip has little impact on candy sales'.
- shoppers face a barrage of communications of one sort or another within stores: the average number of individual pieces of marketing stimuli in a grocery store is about 3,500 and larger store formats, such as mass merchandisers, have over 5,000 stimuli. A typical drug store has roughly 2,300 individual pieces of marketing stimuli.
Panelist Steve Bratspies, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Wal-Mart Stores Inc., comments: 'The richness of P.R.I.S.M. data will complement our years of expertise to help us better understand what is working and what isn't for our customers. It can dramatically change the way we as retailers create a more compelling in-store environment by helping us to truly anticipate the needs of our customers. I believe the greatest benefit of this project will be fundamentally improving the shopping experience.'
According to Renetta McCann, CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group, also a panelist: 'By mapping store traffic and enhancing it with consumer feedback and compliance measures, we will have a much clearer, more measurable and predictable grasp of what the consumer is going to do inside a store. That absolutely changes the conversations we will be able to have with our clients as we map out the touchpoints that propel a consumer from intent to response.'
Nielsen Chairman and CEO David Calhoun comments: 'Industry-accepted metrics typically emerge because of need... There's too much money at stake for the in-store experience to be left to intuition.'
The Nielsen Company is online at
www.nielsen.com and the In-Store Marketing Institute at
www.instoremarketer.org.
All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.
