Over the last year, we’ve written lots of articles showing you how to use key IRI/Nielsen measures. In this post, I’ll pull together several of those lessons in a step-by-step mini case study. The goal of this analysis is a common one: convince a retailer to increase the number of varieties for our target […]
Velocity: How Well Your Product REALLY Sells
Velocity questions have dominated the CPG Data Tip Sheet inbox this month, with a number of readers posting comments or writing with questions about this important measure. So we decided it’s time to turn our attention to what is, after all, the third most important measure in your database. Why is velocity the #3 […]
Why You Should (Almost) Never Look at Non-Promoted Price
One of the key steps in an IRI/Nielsen pricing analysis is drilling down to look at regular price vs. sale price. Syndicated databases are chock full of price measures and, even for regular price, you still have a choice to make. There are two proxies for regular price: Non-Promoted Price and Base Price. In this post, […]
Excel VLOOKUP: Transform Your Product Descriptions from Ugly Ducklings to Beautiful Swans
For many years, I used Excel and never knew about VLOOKUP. Oh, the hours I wasted! I’m writing this post to save you from the same sad, productivity-sapping fate. What is VLOOKUP? It’s a simple Excel function that allows you to pull information from one data set to another, based on some matching value. While […]
CPG Data 911: What to Do in an Incremental Volume Emergency
If you’ve worked with CPG data for a while, you probably know that incremental volume estimates can fluctuate and look a little funky (especially in weeks with little or no trade promotion). I wrote a post about this phenomena a few weeks ago. As I stated then, usually these fluctuations are small relative to total volume […]
For Aspiring CPG Data Gurus: Incremental Volume Unveiled
If you are a CPG company with significant trade promotion spending, you probably already buy IRI/Nielsen data or are seriously considering it. Both IRI and Nielsen measure Incremental Volume: how much extra volume you sold due to trade merchandising. If you’re not sure what incremental volume is, read this first. If you’ve already got the […]