[March 12, 2014]

IRI Expands Category Architecture Initiative, Offering New, Holistic Approach to Grow Revenue and Market Share

CPG manufacturers and retailers eager to elevate revenue and market share must focus on optimizing their category architecture, which is the discipline of enhancing all key shopper touch points within a store to address the specific and changing needs of shoppers. A successful, holistic approach to optimization of these touch points can result in net income increases of as much as 70 percent, analysis from Information Resources, Inc. (IRI) reveals.

Shopper touch points include assortments, product interaction, pricing, merchandising and new product offerings. IRI's new category architecture initiative brings the discipline to life by integrating leading-edge science with state-of-the-art category management solutions. It provides assortment optimization, arming manufacturers and retailers with the insights necessary to make smarter product mix and new product decisions on a timelier basis, and enables more accurate assessments of potential new product success.

"To excel, manufacturers and retailers must alter their current joint business planning process and in-store execution processes to more directly align with changes in the CPG industry," said Robert Holston, executive vicepresident and division head, IRI Advanced Analytics. "Winners must address how consumers make shopping decisions, provide products that benefit these consumers by meeting their key need states, and effectively leverage advertising, promotion, pricing and assortment to drive shopper loyalty."

Through its Category Blueprint™ solution, IRI works with clients to develop category strategy and integrates insights into assortment optimization and planogram generation solutions, which deliver the product mix that will be most attractive to a retailer's shoppers and aligned to how they place products on shelves. The end result is a soup-to-nuts predictive solution that leverages science to deliver optimized assortments customized to consumer demand patterns and retail conditions.

Category Blueprint leverages the largest syndicated source of CPG price and promotion elasticities, covering more than 90 percent of products across more than 120 categories. It provides manufacturer clients with unprecedented insights on category price dynamics and allows retailer clients to identify which category price and promotion strategies drive the highest value trips.

The solution's trade planning capabilities enable manufacturers and retailers to optimize their merchandising programs for greater growth and reduced subsidization. IRI continues to create new capabilities for understanding the impact of merchandising and discount activity across retailers within a market. Specifically, IRI is focusing on how discounts or programs at one retailer influence consumers' shopping behaviors and quantifies the related economic impact for retailers and manufacturers.

Category Blueprint also includes retail and manufacturer solutions for space planning and price architecture solutions. It is a single, holistic solution for guiding high-value category management.

About IRI

IRI is a leader in delivering powerful market and shopper information, predictive analysis and the foresight that leads to action. We go beyond the data to ignite extraordinary growth for our clients in the CPG, retail and over-the-counter healthcare industries by pinpointing what matters and illuminating how it can impact their businesses across sales and marketing.

Move your business forward at iriworldwide.com.

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