Are you thinking about buying scanner data from IRI or Nielsen? Want to make sure you get a good return on your investment? Answer each of the questions below and you’ll be on your way to a smart purchase.
If you skimp on this pre-purchase analysis, you may find you bought the wrong data, didn’t buy enough data, or have way more data than you can handle.
To coach you through this process, we’ll be adding future posts that address many of these questions in more detail. Some of these have already been published and are linked below.
1. What business questions do I expect this data to answer? This seems kind of obvious but it’s surprisingly easy to skip this step! Make it explicit. Write down what you are expecting this data to do for you and review the list with your Nielsen/IRI sales person before you sign up. Complete this step first because it will form the basis for answering all the other questions below. Here are the posts we’ve written about answering business questions: https://www.cpgdatainsights.com/category/answer-business-questions/
2. Which of my brands do I need to track? How should I define my product categories?
3. Which markets/geographies should I get?
4. What time periods do I require and how much history do I need? How often do I need data delivered?
5. Which facts should I purchase?
6. Do I need a syndicated or custom database?
7. How am I going to analyze and distribute this data?
8. Do I have the internal resources to get full value from this data? If you don’t have experts on staff, we can help! Contact us to learn more about our consulting services. We can improve your data ROI at any stage in the process (including coaching you through these 8 questions).
Want to read more? In addition to posts linked above, our article on the 4 dimensions of syndicated data will help with questions 2-5.
All valid points. I would try to further link into actions. That is move from what questions to answer to what decisions to implement. I have seen far too many lengthy so what powerpoint packs with analysis paralysis and both a lack of implementation and a lack of data enabled follow up monitoring and evaluation.