ACNielsen Joint Venture for Category Business Planner

ACNielsen U.S. has announced that its category management intelligence system, Category Business Planner, is to be made available to more companies through an alliance with CROSSMARK, a leading sales and marketing agency serving clients in the consumer products industry.

Under the agreement, CROSSMARK has adopted CBP as its category management system and is authorised to market CBP to potential clients on behalf of ACNielsen.

Jim Borders, president of CROSSMARK Sales Agency, said, 'Category Business Planner is without question the preeminent category management system available to the consumer packaged goods industry. Our alliance with ACNielsen will enable many more companies to benefit from this powerful tool.'

Tim Callahan, president, ACNielsen U.S., said, 'Our alliance with CROSSMARK is a perfect fit. Category Business Planner is the technological intermediary between retailers and manufacturers, providing a common language that facilitates efficient category planning. That's the space where CROSSMARK works as well, so we're extremely pleased with CROSSMARK'S decision to adopt CBP as its category management system and to help make the system available to more companies'.

Accessed through the ACNielsen Answers Internet portal, Category Business Planner provides category and product sales information on a retailer-by-retailer basis. Organising the information according to each retailer's custom definitions of product categories allows retailers and manufacturers to work much more effectively on category plans. Previously, the two sides often spent valuable planning time trying to determine whose category definitions were more accurate. Even different manufacturers within the same product category often worked from different definitions.

Also unique in the marketplace is CBP's capability to automatically turn information into an analysis that appears onscreen and provides key category performance indicators in the form of 'news headlines.' With this easy-to-use format, clients simply click on a headline for more details.

All articles 2006-22 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas unless otherwise stated.

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