Filter through the noise to transform disparate data sources into consumer-first strategies

Consumers today are constantly connected to brands through digital channels, creating huge stores of consumer data. Unfortunately, retailers’ reliance on surveys, social listening, and large teams of data scientists limits their ability to develop insights from that data let alone in real-time, leaving them in a no-win scenario. Retailers who ignore this consumer data in favor of surveys, a go-to tactic for understanding consumers’ expectations and experiences, waste time and money collecting information that contains consumer bias and is often already largely available. For retailers who dip their feet into online data with social listening solutions, they risk getting a superficial, biased understanding of their brand’s standing with consumers; listening only focuses on the vocal minority of content creators as opposed to lurkers and observers. Meanwhile, diving headlong into the fray with large teams of data scientists poses scalability risks to many retail companies.

New analysis and insights solutions leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to bring audience segmentation back to the speed of culture and business, enabling retail companies to understand how audiences engage with brands and products by analyzing their interests and affinities in real-time. With machine learning-enhanced insights into the tertiary interests of shoppers through their online interactions, and by harvesting customer data throughout their retail journey, retailers can understand how and why consumers shop and interact with their brands. Plus, AI empowers retailers to identify white-space promotional opportunities defined by audience clusters they never would have known existed.

[msce_cta layout=”image_center” align=”center” linktype=”blue” linkurl=”https://info.microsoft.com/ww-landing-Retail-Trends-Playbook-2020-eBook.html?lcid=en-us&wt.mc_id=AID723257_QSG_SCL_327861″ linktext=”Get the Retail Trends playbook 2020″ ][/msce_cta]

Land content with optimized engagement strategies to inspire customers

Digital transformation has given consumers access to more content than ever before. In a single minute, 500 hours of YouTube video are uploaded, 449 thousand tweets are posted, and 3.3 million posts are made to Facebook.¹ With so much content available at their fingertips, consumers are no longer willing to interact with content that doesn’t resonate with them—80% of consumers say brands must demonstrate that they understand and care about customers before they will purchase from them.² Unfortunately, many retailers can’t gain the insights they need to provide this level of personalization at scale. Despite the overwhelming customer desire for retailers to personalize the shopping experience, 63% of retailers admit to being unable to respond to consumer demands and insights in an agile manner.³

Retailers can leverage the customer intelligence they gain from audience segmentation solutions by combining them with powerful experience management tools to develop more effective engagement strategies. With insights into the interests and passions their audiences share, leading retailers deliver content that will resonate most with audiences, keeping them engaged. From curated promotions that enable retailers to effectively target and sell to specific customers, to location and intent-based recommendations that leverage customer intelligence by delivering the offers and products customers want, when they want them, a successful engagement strategy dramatically boosts revenue.  Plus, by tracking the effectiveness of campaigns in real-time, retailers can react quickly to ensure campaigns, curated promotions, and recommendations land effectively with key audiences.

Enable employees to collaborate and deliver exceptional, personalized service

While first-line workers are critical to representing the brand when engaging with customers in-store, many employees are unprepared to deliver the level of service customers expect due to consumers’ preference for relevant information. Without deep insights into products and people, employees are unable to deliver the level of personalization expected by customers. In fact, the standard of in-store service has fallen so low that 83% of shoppers think they are more informed than store associates.⁴

Arming employees with intelligent tools enables them to collaborate internally and build stronger relationships with customers. With insights delivered on mobile devices, for example, sales associates are empowered to deliver relevant suggestions to consumers wherever they are in the store, and by aligning digital and physical channel operations, retailers provide employees with a full view of customer purchasing history and online activity, enabling them to seamlessly pick up service where customers left off online.

Deliver seamless, streamlined shopping with a true omnichannel experience

As e-commerce continues to grow, retailers are trying to find a new equilibrium between digital and physical channels. Unfortunately, while 87% of retail leaders agree omnichannel strategy is critical to business success, 74% are dissatisfied with the execution and progress of their omnichannel approach.⁵ Worse, consumers agree that their shopping experience across channels is not as connected as it should be. 61% of millennials find retail experiences to be disconnected from channel to channel.⁶

Leveraging new technologies to deliver a true omnichannel experience, retailers can meet shoppers where and when they want to shop. Aligning inventory across digital and physical channels enables retailers to provide services like buy online pick-up in store (BOPUS) and mobile checkout. Additionally, with a clear view of the customer across digital and physical channels, retailers can inform customer experiences with recommendations based on interactions on different channels.

Realize the Intelligent Customer Journey with Microsoft

The Microsoft Intelligent Customer Journey scenario enables retailers to maintain brand relevance and loyalty in an increasingly competitive landscape, imbuing retailers with intelligent systems to personalize engagements, deliver seamless shopping experiences, and provide exceptional services. While many companies are being swept away in a wave of data and content that limits their ability to stand out to consumers, the Intelligent Customer Journey scenario provides retailers with the back-end tools to supplement the customer journey and deliver experiences that delight, inspire, and build loyalty. To learn more about the Microsoft Intelligent Customer Journey for retail scenario and other technologies available in Microsoft’s suite of consumer goods and retail solutions, visit the Intelligent Customer Journey page.

^{[1] SmartInsights, What Happens Online in 60 Seconds? 2017}

^{[2] Wunderman, Wantedness, 2017}

^{[3] Deloitte, Consumer Experience in the Retail Renaissance, 2018}

^{[4] Tulip, Understanding the Value of Store Associates, 2017}

^{[5] ResearchLive, Retailers Struggling to Master Omnichannel, 2017}

^{[6] Connected Shoppers Report, 2017}

The post Is your customer journey living up to consumer expectations? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

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Gain insights by collecting and analyzing billions of consumer interest data points

Ophelia manages her company’s flagship soda brand, Cool Cola. She’s just stepped out of a meeting that established the campaign schedule for the following quarter. Now that she has a clear idea of when the new campaigns will launch, it’s Ophelia’s job to figure out what those campaigns will be, and who they will target.

Ophelia returns to her desk and opens her audience analysis solution. She enters the name of her brand, Cool Cola, and the solution begins analyzing billions of audience data points to reveal the naturally occurring interest segments. As the solution continues working, Ophelia heads to the kitchen to set up her French press.

An hour and a half later, the solution notifies Ophelia that her results are ready for review. Front and center on her dashboard is the interests graph, an easy-to-read visualization of the different clusters within her audience. Ophelia recognizes many of them – sports fans, gamers, and moviegoers – but somewhat more surprising is a large group of environmentalists. She looks at the solution’s affinity graph to see how her company is performing within this group, and realizes that neither Cool Cola nor its competitors are effectively marketing to environmentalists. Even though it’s a niche market, she knows that a compelling campaign that resonates with this group will lead to a notable boost in sales and brand relevance especially given that Cool Cola’s parent company is well-known for their focus on environmental issues.

Drive revenue-generating campaigns and land them successfully with your audience

Ophelia clicks into the environmentalist group to see what other brands, media outlets, and influencers they follow. She sees several niche blogs and forums dedicated to environmental issues, but one surprising influencer is Sebastian Randol, a well-known soccer player in Toronto. Ophelia realizes that in addition to tweeting about soccer, Randol often tweets about environmental issues. She surmises that Randol would also resonate with her brand’s sports fans. Sure enough, clicking through to his followers, she sees a significant amount of Toronto sports fans, many of whom also follow a small, local sports blog.

Leveraging these insights, Ophelia reaches out to Jordan Randol’s agent to talk about a strategic partnership. Over the next several weeks, Ophelia and her creative team develop a campaign centered around a new partnership between Cool Cola, Randol, and the city of Toronto, to grow awareness about sustainability. To ensure her campaign lands successfully, she targets the environmentalist forums and local Toronto sports blog uncovered by the solution.

When the campaign goes live the next quarter, Ophelia’s company sees a notable increase in engagement from their sports fan and environmentalist subgroups. Equally significant, when Ophelia runs her consumer data through her audience analysis solution again, she sees that her brand has jumped well ahead of competitors in loyalty and relevancy within both subgroups.

As represented above, Ophelia’s audience analytics solution enabled her to uncover hidden insights surrounding the passions and interests that segment her audience. She utilized these insights to create an effective campaign that resonated with consumers, enabling her brand to connect with its consumers and drive brand relevance, affinity, and loyalty.

Microsoft’s partner, Affinio, offers an Integrated Audience Analysis solution that empowers CG companies and retailers to gain similar audience insights from their consumer data as part of a suite of cloud-based retail and CG solutions. To learn more about these solutions including Inventory Optimization, Pricing and Promotion Execution, Retail Execution, Retail Personalization, Demand Planning and try the Affinio Integrated Audience Analysis solution today, visit Microsoft AppSource.

The post Capturing brand relevance with audience-first marketing appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Can you tell us a little bit about Affinio and how it started?

Affinio was built six years ago when my co-founder and I realized that many of the analytics associated with social listening were only based around what people were talking about, not what they truly cared about. We decided to take a different approach and see if we could go deeper to extract customer behavioral patterns by looking at what people are liking and following.

What we discovered was a massive amount of data that could be leveraged to better identify the passions and interests of key consumers. By applying our core technology, we’re able to consolidate this consumer data and make sense of it through automation and machine learning, enabling us to identify the signals that draw people to a certain company. We also uncover patterns in that data, empowering advertisers and marketers to hone their message and make sure their brand stays relevant to the audience segments they want to attract.

What marketplace challenges are you helping to address with the Affinio solution?

Marketers and advertisers currently limit themselves by relying on weak signals and low data volume from single surveys and focus groups. As a result of those guesses and hunches, targeting and segmentation becomes predominantly demographic in nature, but not necessarily reflective of what people are actually interested in (or who a brand’s true audience may be). They can identify and analyze all they want around the individuals they’ve already identified as customers, but what they can’t do is analyze customers whose data they don’t have.

Another challenge is consumer buying behavior shifts so fast, making traditional personas no longer useful. Marketers must be more dynamic in how they approach campaign strategies and product development, and change campaign strategies based on new data that’s being aggregated on the consumer side. However, reconciling flexibility and detailed data analysis isn’t easy. You can’t keep up with the volume of data you’re bringing in and still identify these opportunities while shifting gears on the fly. In the market today, we’re seeing a massive hiring surge of research teams, data scientists, and data analysts who comb through large amounts of consumer data. Unfortunately, that’s not a scalable model, and certainly not one that can be achieved within organizations or enterprises that don’t have the volume or resources to build those very expensive teams.

How does your solution address these challenges using advanced technologies like AI, machine learning and advanced analytics?

Our solution provides end users with strong signals that identify “white space”—unexplored areas of opportunity within their market—leading to entirely new campaigns directed at audiences who were previously unmarked in their datasets. The platform uses an engine that continuously and dynamically adjusts to new data to identify opportunities. This wasn’t possible before the advent of advanced cloud technology.

We also see AI and technology as a vehicle to deliver the capability of building highly valuable models, automating the results from those models, and providing simple visualization layers that anyone can use. We want end users who may not have math, data, or statistics backgrounds to interpret and make decisions around customer data on behalf of their brands and enterprises. We’re placing data-driven personas, built at the speed of culture, in the hands of strategists and planners so they can understand what audiences they want to reach and what campaign, copy, and content to create.

You mentioned the solution was built for marketers. How did you integrate the marketing end user into what eventually became the Affinio solution?

From the beginning, we placed a heavy focus not only on collecting and analyzing consumer data, but making it easy to interpret and accurate as possible. We’ve iterated, evolved and expanded a visualization layer to such a point that we’re heavily recognized as a company. The back-end data clustering is extremely complicated and advanced, but its simplification into an easy-to-interpret visualization makes audience analysis actionable for everybody – it democratizes the data.

What we’re seeing in the market is a shift towards this approach becoming the single source of truth within enterprises. The visualization layer is something that everybody in an enterprise can collaborate on and discuss relative to strategy and opportunity. When data is formatted in Excel sheets, pivot tables and custom graphs that change from meeting to meeting, you never get that sort of commonality that you can lean on and leverage.

Why did you choose to build the solution on Microsoft cloud technology?

We saw very early on that we had a massive global enterprise opportunity. When deciding what the core stack of our technology would be, we wanted to work with a partner that was known for enterprise-ready, fully trusted, and highly secure solutions. Azure was the natural choice, especially due to the opportunity to work closely with Microsoft. Now, we have the benefit of working with all the technology they continue to add into Azure, as well as the ability to work as partners.

What are some upcoming functionalities that you’re working on with Microsoft?

One of the unique things that we’re working with Microsoft on is related to the translational functionality that’s embedded in Azure. Our goal is to be able to have any team, from any location, speaking any language, interpret and leverage the solution to collaborate in their own language, with their own interpretation. When you have teams in global office locations that all speak different languages, building a centralized marketing strategy is a massive task. What we’re seeing is an opportunity to keep marketing control with the local regions while also collaborating at a global level, which has never been possible before.

We’re also working on image and video analysis. We’re analyzing hundreds of thousands of videos and images across different channels to figure out what signals they have, so we can start being more programmatic in what kind of content we create. We don’t ever envision a space where the creative aspect is entirely replaced by machine learning, but we see a massive opportunity where it can support the ideation of content in a very prescriptive way. The signals are all there, but traditionally there’s been too much to absorb and act on.

What transformations are you seeing in customers that use your solution?

At the end of the day, any marketing intent is to consumer behavior in your favor. From our perspective, when you’re able to start detecting that signal, you’re also able to establish a baseline at the beginning of a campaign and see the shifts in those behaviors over time. We believe letting the data tell its own story will lead to companies buying in and changing how they operate their business. We’ve seen customers like Unilever and Danone change the way they create campaigns by identifying “white space” opportunities and targeting entirely new audience segments. They’re generating new campaigns and using our platform to identify what channels and formats drive those campaigns, because they now understand the audience affinities through audience analysis. By the end of their campaigns, they have true measurement that wasn’t possible before.

We’re also seeing our customers transform their thinking around brand loyalty and realize it’s built gradually over time. For example, if someone’s intending to buy a car or house, those decisions should be influenced at a brand level, which means connecting with consumers months, if not years, in advance. Companies need to keep demonstrating relevance so when consumers are making decisions, their brand is always top of mind. They can’t simply put an ad in front of potential customers at the last minute and expect a sale, they must connect with people at their interest and passion levels, which our solution empowers them to do. This new approach drives affinity and loyalty, and changes consumer behavior when it’s time for them to make a buying decision. I think the shift towards this vision is probably the most exciting and tangible outcome we see today.

Affinio Integrated Audience Analysis, built on Microsoft Cloud technology, is now available on Microsoft AppSource. Learn more about the solution by trying the demo today.

The post Integrated Audience Analysis – a Q&A with Affinio CEO Tim Burke appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Increasing consumer engagement across a global brand portfolio

Danone is a global producer of food products such as Evian water and Dannon yogurt. Despite the strength of these widely recognized brands, Danone faced the challenge of engaging diverse consumer groups across their extensive product portfolio. Achieving successful engagement required their marketing team to connect with the appropriate audience for each product. Until recently, Danone relied on traditional market segmentation techniques to identify and understand key audiences. While these techniques were an important first step towards understanding customers, Danone couldn’t identify the underlying passions and interests that drive consumer behavior on a daily basis. In addition, Danone realized their existing market segments were theoretical and didn’t align to actual consumer communities united by shared interests. To match the right product and message with each customer, they needed a new approach to audience analysis.

Delivering a data-driven approach to audience analysis

To enhance their ability to understand and engage customers, Danone’s marketing team chose Affinio’s Integrated Audience Analysis platform. By leveraging Affinio’s powerful solution to connect billions of customer data points and identify key audiences, Danone is transforming its approach to product design and marketing. Instead of relying on traditional market segments, Danone now uses Integrated Audience Analysis to learn what motivates customers’ purchasing decisions. These insights help the marketing team map the competitive landscape, engage new customer communities, and land the right message with the right customer using the right channel.

Achieving transformative results for marketing teams

Affinio’s Integrated Audience Analysis platform has significantly impacted Danone’s business. According to Dieter Deceuninck, Danone’s Global Director of Strategy and Insights for Waters and Aquadrinks, using Affinio’s solution makes his team “sharper in our positioning, sharper in identifying the right people we want to focus on, sharper in making that translation, and sharper in getting the right assets for the right moments.” With Affinio, Dieter and his colleagues have advanced beyond theoretical market segments to identify naturally occurring groups of consumers united by shared interests. By focusing on the passions that define these groups, Danone’s marketing team has improved its ability to recognize opportunities for market disruption, generate compelling marketing assets, and effectively deploy them. By partnering with Affinio and Microsoft to deepen the connection between products, content, and consumers, Danone is taking critical steps to achieve brand relevance in today’s content-saturated marketplace.

Partner with a leader in consumer insights

For consumer goods companies, generating online content and hoping it resonates is no longer a viable option. As Danone discovered, today’s marketers need intelligent customer analysis tools to identify and engage consumers. Affinio’s Integrated Audience Analysis platform delivers the rapid, reliable, and scalable access to customer insights required to succeed in this environment.

Affinio is part of Microsoft’s suite of cloud-based CG and retail solutions, which includes solutions such as Inventory Optimization, Pricing & Promotion Execution , Retail Execution, and Demand Planning. Start uncovering actual audience interests and building brand relevance today with the Affinio solution, available on Microsoft AppSource.

¹New York Times, Anywhere the Eye Can See, It’s Likely to See an Ad, 2007

The post Driving brand relevance in the digital era: How Danone succeeded appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Marketers now see content marketing, big data, AI, and machine learning as the activities that will have the biggest effect on business in 2018¹. Already, leveraging consumer data to develop content marketing that fits into the context of consumer’s lives is proving to be a much greater driver of consumer action than advertising². Evidently, it’s not the type of ad that matters – it’s the ability to target the right audiences that makes a difference.

While many CG organizations and retailers have spent years building comprehensive buyer personas to model customer behavior, these personas fail to keep up with rapidly-occurring cultural and spending shifts. CG and retail organizations have access to the data necessary to create relevant consumer personas, but most companies can only analyze 12% of the data³ at their disposal. Without the ability to create data-driven personas, CG companies and retailers lose out on the insights that would help them understand their consumers as people and effectively communicate with them. Grabbing peoples’ attention in the age of the consumer requires a new, dynamic approach.

Stay relevant to consumers by discovering their interests and aligning to them

Today, advances in machine learning and big data analysis make it possible for CG companies and retailers to gain real, actionable insights from consumer data. The Affinio Integrated Audience Analysis solution enables marketers to see the connections between billions of behavioral data points that lead to real insights about consumer interests. With a powerful marketing intelligence graph powered by the Microsoft cloud, businesses turn huge volumes of consumer data into easy to interpret and identify trends to inform everything from content strategy to product development.

With Affinio, CG companies and retailers leverage advanced audience discovery and graph analysis to understand the passions and interests of the people using their brands and uncover naturally occurring audience segments. With a full view of the people who follow their brands, marketers discover new subgroups that aren’t engaged by marketing campaigns and promotions.

Advanced audience analysis also enables marketers to evaluate their product portfolio and compare it against competitors. With a better understanding of their competitive landscape, CG companies and retailers get a better idea of where their brands and products rank within target audiences. CG companies and retailers use these insights to identify the most effective ways to further extend their reach.

Driving relevance to better connect with your customers today

Ultimately, insights from customer and audience analysis enable CG companies and retailers to maximize their marketing efforts. Marketers are empowered not only to understand the content key audience segments engage with, but also the individuals, celebrities, and media that influence them. Leveraging Affinio enables marketers to create content that resonates with their audiences and deliver it through channels that they know their audiences will listen to.

Danone, an industry-leading food production company, wanted to connect with consumers on a holistic level, but traditional usage and attitude techniques limited them to segmenting audiences into buckets based on the products they used. Partnering with Affinio enabled Danone to improve the efficiency of marketing efforts and agency engagements, gain insights into consumer passions, and reveal niche subgroups and their competitive landscapes. Dieter Deceuninck, Danone’s global director of strategy and insights for waters and aquadrinks, summarized the benefits of partnering with Affinio in the context of precision marketing: “we can now create more relevant assets that can be delivered in the right moment to the right audience.”

In a content-saturated world, Affinio helps CG companies and retailers stay relevant with consumers by delivering the insights that enable businesses to better connect with their audiences. Affinio is part of Microsoft’s suite of cloud-based retail and CG solutions including Inventory Optimization, Pricing & Promotion Execution , Retail Execution, and Demand Planning. To learn more and try the Affinio Integrated Audience Analysis solution today, visit AppSource.

^{[1] https://www.smartinsights.com/digital-marketing-strategy/10-marketing-trends/}

^{[2] https://www.salesforce.com/blog/2017/11/5-future-marketing-trends-of-2018.html}

^{[3] https://www.forrester.com/The+Forrester+Wave+Big+Data+Hadoop+Solutions+Q1+2014/-/E-PRE6807}

The post Can brands stay relevant in today’s attention economy? appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Demand Planning Tips, One: Refine your digital strategies

The effect of the Retail Apocalypse was touched on above, with leaders in the industry embracing fundamental shifts in how they think about retail. To compete and win during 2018, brick-and-mortar retail must embrace external factors such as digital, which is driving a notable percentage of sales. According to Senior Economist Andrew Duguay, online sales have grown rapidly, by about 12 percent year over year.² This growth is from a variety of factors, but it is certain that data-driven insights have given retail executives visibility into industry shifts such as these.

In embracing digital strategies brick-and-mortar stores should avoid common misconceptions around digital business decisions. For example, it is commonly misunderstood that to compete online retailers should pull the pricing lever to match or beat lowest prices found online. Data-driven insights, however, reveal that such a strategy would be inadvisable. Brick-and-mortar stores should instead focus on more nuanced strategic insights, such as incorporating micro-holidays (think Mother’s or Father’s Day) in marketing instead of going big at the end of the year in November and December. There is less competition during these times, yielding an increase in sales for retailers who adopt this strategy. By putting an increased emphasis on digital strategies, and avoiding common misconceptions, retailers will be successful in 2018.

Demand Planning Tips, Two: Understand the external indicators that affect your business

Many retailers, especially those with brick-and-mortar retail locations, tend to rely on historical performance data when forming their business strategies and forecasts. While that is a good place to start, there are a variety of factors outside of a retailer’s control that affect their customers’ ability and willingness to buy. And while these external factors may be outside a retailer’s control, retailers can still take them into account in demand planning, and adjust their strategies accordingly.

One challenge in identifying these external factors, such as macroeconomic trends, is that looking at individual components in a vacuum can cause confusion. For example, inflation and employment are typically good indicators of the spending power of U.S. consumers, and ultimately, of the performance of the retail sector. Lately, however, unemployment rates have been consistently under the 5 percent mark, meaning that more jobs are available to Americans. Yet inflation is also rising—and at a faster rate than non-management wage earnings—thus creating a gap that has the potential to hurt spending power.³ By combining macroeconomic trend data with geographic, demographic, and company-specific data inputs, retailers can create a highly accurate company sales-channel forecast model, and use the insights they produce to refine their strategies around demand planning.

Leverage Prevedere Demand Planning for a successful 2018

Prevedere, an industry insights and analytics company, has partnered with Microsoft to provide actionable data driven insights at the speed of business. ERIN, their patented analytics engine (using Microsoft technology) enables industry leaders to monitor global economic and industry activity to forecast future demand spikes and declines 12 to 24 months ahead of the competition. The Prevedere Demand Planning for Consumer Goods and Retail solution is just one example of how Microsoft and its partners are providing a suite of solutions for retailers to better enable their digital transformation. Learn more about Prevedere Demand Planning on AppSource and start a free trial today.

¹ NRF

² Prevedere

³ Prevedere

The post Two demand planning tips for retailers to consider for 2018 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Introducing Prevedere Demand Planning for Retail and Consumer Goods

Learn more

The post Demand planning in the age of digital transformation appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Mistake 1: Inheriting static, legacy systems

Imagine a business that operates using a 25-year-old ERP system. Imagine that the system was completely dependent on Excel spreadsheets. Now imagine that the last person in the country who knew how to update that system was closing their business.[iii]

Unfortunately, this isn’t just a hypothetical. It’s a real situation that a CG company found themselves in and one that could happen to any of the 40 percent of retailers and CGs who use an Excel-based or homegrown solution for their business.[iv]

Not only are they difficult to update, legacy systems prevent retail and consumer goods from operating efficiently and effectively. They slow down analysis and open the door to manual errors and version control issues that devastate day-to-day operations. Unless someone in the organization is actively working to create integration, data inputs into the CRM system must be manual. The time-consuming nature of this task means that companies won’t always have access to the up-to-date data they need to create optimal prices for specific customer segments, company sizes, or geographies. Manual data inputs don’t give sellers the flexibility to include and exclude specific products or customers in their promotions or adjust volume and discount breaks in real time to keep up with demand shifts. Legacy systems are not only cumbersome—they create silos of data that make it nearly impossible for companies to standardize pricing and promotion practices across their organization.

Mistake 2: Trying to operate with siloed data

Most retail and CG organizations have ERP and CRM systems, but when these aren’t integrated, the result is an organization burdened by siloed data and processes. The disconnect leads to management of different aspects of trade agreements in multiple places. Handling prices and promotions across multiple systems leads to complexity and a skyrocketing possibility of entry errors. Valuable time is spent trying to integrate promotional agreements with accounts and retrieving accurate pricing for products and transactions. Instead of spending their days on sales, teams find themselves bogged down by manual administrative tasks that don’t produce accurate or measurable revenue results. Furthermore, manual tasks and data entry cause inconsistencies that create even more time-consuming audit compliance and maintenance issues downstream.[v] All this time spent on other tasks means teams are unable to make adjustments quickly enough, impacting their ability to capture all profits and keep up with customer demand.

Mistake 3: Managing channel prices in different places

Forty-seven percent of customers say a consistent experience across channels is important to them when engaging with a retailer or CG brand.[vi] And while most retailers and CG organizations engage with customers in multiple channels, they struggle to create that consistent experience. One of the most inhibiting factors is the fact that ecommerce channels often use different price models and sources than the traditional business. Pricing teams find themselves spending time maintaining two pricing systems and reconciling errors instead of working to meet customer demand. When companies cannot keep up with the speed at which product prices need to change, it results in unmet demand and delayed end-of-month reconciliations. Without a single source of pricing truth across their enterprise, companies create pricing and promotional strategies that aren’t derived from the right data. Companies must constantly bring together information from CRM and ERP systems to make sure customers are offered the right promotions and pricing if they want to meet customer demand across channels and see a return on their promotions.

Mistake 4: Spending money on promotions that aren’t showing returns

Facing the previous three mistakes, it’s no wonder 59 percent of retailers and CG brands  experience a net loss on their promotions. Sales teams operating with the wrong price going into a promotion will face massive losses, and without access to real-time data, promotion performance review doesn’t occur frequently enough to provide the insights that would enable sellers to shift promotions to meet actual demand. Sellers unknowingly end up implementing the same ineffective promotions over and over. It’s especially difficult to gauge promotion value when sellers don’t have visibility into how different variables such as discounts and rebates impact success. The best way for them to manage promotions and pricing is through a single, integrated solution that ensures their company meets customer product and pricing demand anytime, anywhere.

Deploy a pricing and promotion execution solution that addresses all these mistakes and drives revenue

There is a simple solution to prevent these common mistakes—Pricing and Promotions Execution (PPE) from Flintfox. Built on the Microsoft Cloud, PPE offers CG organizations and retailers a new way to manage their promotions and prices, calculating up to 17,000 prices per second. With a single source of truth in the cloud, a leading consumer goods manufacturer saw a reduction in pricing errors worth US $100k per month.[vii]

Try the Pricing and Promotion Execution solution on Microsoft AppSource today, and for more information follow @FlintfoxIntl. Flintfox’s solution is part of Microsoft’s cloud solution portfolio for the retail and consumer goods industries, which also includes AFS Retail Execution, AFS POP Retail Execution, Plexure Retail Personalization, Neal Analytics Inventory Optimization and Dynamics 365.

[i] https://www.flintfox.com/trade-revenue-management/advanced-pricing/

[ii] http://www.nielsen.com/uk/en/press-room/2015/most-grocery-trade-promotions-lose-money-for-suppliers.html

[iii] https://www.flintfox.com/customer-stories/tasti-products/

[iv] Forrester, 2015  https://www.forrester.com/report/Market+Overview+Trade+Promotion+Management/-/E-RES115669

[vi] http://www.supplychain247.com/article/2015_warehouse_dc_operations_survey_results

[vii] https://www.flintfox.com/trade-revenue-management/advanced-pricing/

The post Four avoidable pricing & promotions execution mistakes appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

Disparate systems lead to slow processes

Many companies house their trade revenue, pricing, and promotion information in different locations with disparate, incongruent technologies. Retailers and CPG companies alike often rely on unrelated ERP, CRM systems, and external spreadsheets, forcing them to rely on manual updates. Because of the attention these disparate systems require, any pricing changes require a long, manual effort.

Similarly, it is difficult to develop or execute new promotions swiftly. On top of the already slow pricing process, retailers and CPG companies often manage different channel promotions in dissimilar places, adding another level of complexity to an already slow process.

Current strategies lead to pricing errors

External spreadsheet calculations and manual reconciliation to the enterprise resource planning system (ERP) lead to mistakes and inaccuracy. With incongruent systems, retailers and brands have fewer ways to guard against pricing calculation errors. Often with these non-reconciled systems, there is a high risk of human error due to no single source of pricing truth for different pricing requests. It is essential companies’ pricing and promotion information is correct because managing prices more closely makes a significant change. In many cases, even a simple one percent increase in effective net price moves operating profit upwards of 10 percent[i]. Businesses need real-time clarity into those promotions that are profitable and those that are not, to be able to adjust the promotions accordingly and avoid losses.

These pricing errors can lead to a loss in profit, but also entail legal ramifications due to inequitable pricing from customer to customer. In an age where legislation defines financial compliance, it is not feasible for retailers and CPG organizations to lack a complete and real-time audit trail of all assets, liabilities and expenses.

It’s difficult to quickly garner insights

Many retailers and brands have a poor understanding of trade profitability. It is hard to drive incremental sales via cross- and up-sell, and mix and match promotions. In addition, outdated performance information is not tolerated in a now digital age. If retailers and CPG companies do not adjust in real-time, they won’t be able to keep up with disruptive competition. They must empower their sales staff with tools to help them deliver pricing and promotions as fast as possible, without impacting the bottom line, with greater organizational insights.

Flintfox’s Pricing and Promotion Execution solution can help

The Flintfox Pricing and Promotion Execution solution, built on Microsoft Cloud technology, provides the real-time pricing visibility, and control, retailers and CPG companies need. The solution uses a cloud-based pricing engine to calculate thousands of pricing requests per second, streamlining processes, improving pricing speed, and calculation accuracy. The Pricing and Promotion Execution solution provides rapid information on product costs and margins, enabling sales teams to quickly respond to omnichannel pricing pressures and adjust the complex trade promotions they need to stay competitive. This empowers companies to quickly and easily maintain pricing rules and trade agreements, while maximizing earnings and minimizing the amount of money left on the table.

Try the Pricing and Promotion Execution solution on Microsoft AppSource today, and for more information follow @FlintfoxIntl.  Flintfox’s solution is part of Microsoft’s cloud solution portfolio for the retail and consumer goods industries, which also includes AFS Retail Execution, AFS POP Retail Execution, Plexure Retail Personalization, Neal Analytics Inventory Optimization and Dynamics 365.

[i] https://www.flintfox.com/trade-revenue-management/advanced-pricing/

The post 3 common pricing and promotion challenges and how to solve them appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.

As the retail environment becomes more complex, keeping up with pricing and promotions is a growing challenge

Retailers and Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies are selling across more channels than ever before to meet customers’ expectations for their shopping experiences and keep pace with competition. Additional channels such as e-commerce inevitably lead to a more complex sales process, as retailers and CPG companies find themselves managing pricing and promotional activities across disparate systems and devices.

Disconnected spreadsheets, apps, and manual processes exacerbate the challenges of managing promotions and trade spend across multiple stores and channels. Many retailers and CPG brands are unsure of how successful their prices or campaigns are until end of month reporting comes through. The lack of consistency and visibility hurts: on average, 20 percent[1] of CPG revenue is spent on trade promotion, yet more than half of that[2] promotion spend results in a loss.

In addition to cutting the costs associated with promotions, retailers and CPG companies must adjust prices faster than ever to keep up with an ever-changing global market. As an example, online retail giant Amazon changes its prices more than 2.5 million times a day, balancing between maximizing revenue and preserving margins.[3]

Existing pricing and promotion tools weren’t designed for today’s fast-paced environment. Traditional, multi-channel software for managing pricing and promotions often contributes to slow information flow, is too cumbersome to allow swift reactions to price changes, and requires manual processes for updating and managing pricing. Companies must ensure gross margin is higher than product costs for successful promotions—reducing associated operational costs is key to that endeavor.

Retailers and CPG brands need a new approach to drive real-time pricing and offers and maximize opportunities. Managing prices more closely makes a major difference. In many cases, even a simple one percent increase in effective net price can move operating profit upwards of 10 percent.[4]

Introducing Pricing and Promotion Execution from Flintfox

The Flintfox Pricing and Promotion Execution solution, built on Microsoft Cloud technology, provides the real-time pricing visibility and control retailers and CPG companies need. The solution uses a cloud-based pricing engine to calculate thousands of pricing requests per second, streamlining processes, improving pricing speed and calculation accuracy. This empowers companies to quickly and easily maintain pricing rules and trade agreements, while maximizing earnings and minimizing the amount of money left on the table.

The solution integrates seamlessly with existing systems and consolidates disparate sources of pricing into one—providing companies one source of the pricing truth for all their omni-channel trading needs. This approach maximizes efficiency and provides unrestrained pricing flexibility on any product or customer attribute, enabling companies to keep up with ever-changing customer demand and match competitor pricing without compromising accuracy. The solution also provides real-time performance and transactional insights that give teams a deeper understanding of trade profitability. With these powerful insights, retailers and CPGs are empowered to take corrective actions more quickly to keep up with competition and improve revenue growth.

Learn more

Flintfox is a leading Microsoft ISV that develops pricing and trade promotion execution solutions for manufacturing, wholesale distribution, and retail businesses on the Microsoft Cloud. Try the Pricing and Promotion Execution solution on Microsoft AppSource today.

Flintfox’s solution is part of Microsoft’s cloud solution portfolio for the retail and consumer goods industries, which also includes AFS Retail Execution, AFS POP Retail Execution, Plexure Retail Personalization, Neal Analytics Inventory Optimization and Dynamics 365.

2http://www.nielsen.com/uk/en/press-room/2015/most-grocery-trade-promotions-lose-money-for-suppliers.html  

[3] https://qz.com/157828/amazon-changes-its-prices-more-than-2-5-million-times-a-day/

[4] https://www.flintfox.com/trade-revenue-management/advanced-pricing/

The post A new approach to pricing and trade promotions appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs.