Actionable Marketing Insights from Retail Audit Analysis

Today the need for a holistic approach to marketing information is greater than ever. Fortunately, parallel to this need the marketing professionals have rich data sources at hand. Besides the consumer information coming from usage and attitude studies, ad hoc researches, tracking studies, consumer panel research, etc., retail audit plays a very important role. It is easily the number one information source of manufacturer performance, pricing and distribution in the FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods) world. Still, the methodology of retail audit analysis is not well-known and understood to the details, even among the marketers at the client side using the data on a daily basis. The purpose of this book is to give practical guidelines to retail audit analysis, mainly from the manufacturer point of view. It also intends to raise the attention of marketers on how useful this tool can be, with sufficient creativity to ask the right questions it can answer. The book is written in a practical, real-life business style. The concise messages are aided by easy-to-follow charts, visualizing the vast variety of potential findings retail data can provide. The book also aims to summarize the market logic and dynamics that can be explored via retail audit. This is why the author purposefully created charts well explaining - among many other (brand) marketing tactics and strategies -, the ex-pocket pricing tactics, the impact of psychological price points or how a concentrated brand portfolio looks like.