Understanding omnishopper data is a battle on many fronts

Whether it’s rolling out their own click-and-collect or delivery services, or partnering with third parties, retailers now have a variety of new data streams that aren’t necessarily coming together to provide a harmonized view. 

Many retailers are struggling to understand their company’s sales because they’ve expanded with e-commerce beyond what traditional in-store metrics and systems can measure.

The impact story of omnishopper retail can be told through the shave category, particularly razor blades, which has exploded over the past several years. With the boom of direct-to-consumer subscription services and other e-com avenues fulfilling repetitive, predictable purchases like razors and blades, diapers, and pet food, a retailer’s competitive set is totally different. And if they’re losing their trip-driven shave buyer to a subscription service or another e-tailer, is that shopper still coming into their store for anything else?

Discovering leakage through augmented data

With so many purchase decisions now happening in all these other digital spheres, it’s hard to understand where the leakage is and what types of actions you need to take, because it’s a battle now fought on multiple fronts. Beyond the increasingly complex process of accurately measuring market share, there’s another side of what it takes to win in the omni space, and what it takes to understand consumer and shopper behavior. That’s where augmented data sets, and in particular consumer-sourced data, are really important—either secondarily, or even primarily in some use cases—to overlay and ascertain a true understanding of not just what has happened, but who was driving that purchase.

Analytics have long existed to understand these issues through a brick-and-mortar lens, but increasingly—and now urgently—it’s important to understand them across the entire omnishopper landscape. NielsenIQ’s new Omnishopper solutions suite provides a 360-degree view of shopper behavior both online and offline. It will enable retailer and manufacturer clients to understand answers to billion-dollar questions such as: Am I losing to Amazon? Am I retaining those buyers when they shift to dot-com? Is it just shifting sales or is it truly incremental to what I would have otherwise captured through my physical-store footprint? 

Omnichannel measurement’s next frontier 

There’s a broader change management component in play, which is tied to the rise of omnichannel, presenting the biggest change to the industry since category management was developed in the 1980s. The harsh reality for a lot of traditional retail and CPG companies is that their market share is going to go down, which is never a comfortable feeling. E-commerce has changed dramatically in the last year, when everyone was caught off guard and quickly realized they could no longer afford to NOT have something to offer in the omni space. It’s unlikely that the industry will revert back to pure POS data as the only approach to measurement. This is the next frontier of measurement for us, and we’re excited to be at a place where we can help clients prepare accordingly.