DATABEACON, STORECHECK TEAM UP TO FIND MARKETING'S BETTER HALF

“Reporting and Data Analysis software helps UK retail marketing firm ‘guaranteed’ positive return on investment for its customers”

Whoever said “Half of what I spend on advertising is wasted. Trouble is, I don’t know which half,” ought to meet Colin Harper.

Harper is managing director of Storecheck Marketing Ltd of Berkshire UK. Storecheck, now ably assisted by Databeacon of Ottawa, Canada, helps manufacturers who sell their products through retail stores cut the colossal amount of wastage normally associated with in-store advertising and promotion. Storecheck’s clients include many of the largest players in the retail and consumer goods industry.

“Research has shown that fully fifty percent of the money spent by manufacturers to promote their products in store doesn’t even reach the consumer,” Harper says. “Our job is to get that figure down as close to zero as humanly possibly.”
In a nutshell, the problem is this: Manufacturers know that the best place to reach a customer is right in the store. So they spend a great deal of effort, creativity and money developing ways to entice the shopper and move more product / price-off deals, coupons, special placement, catchy displays, and such. Trouble is, the managers and staff operating those stores often have other things on their minds and other demands on their time. So, very often, they just don’t bother – markdowns aren’t made, placement arrangements are ignored, displays languish in a back room, shelves lie bare while stock piles up, and so on.

“In the business of retail promotions, the buzzword is ‘compliance’,” Harper explains. “At Storecheck, we work with store managers on behalf of major manufacturers to ensure compliance.”

Storecheck’s researchers gather compliance data on ongoing promotions at stores across the country. This data is then combined with the national EPOS (electronic point of sale) data of retail sales from nearly every major store in the UK. By analysing and drawing insight out of the relationship between these two sets of data, Storecheck can tell manufacturers which stores are in compliance and can identify stores that are not.

“Once you’ve got the data and you know how to slice and dice it, it’s amazing what you can learn,” Harper says.

“If we know, for example that for stores not in compliance, sales drop by a certain percentage, we can flip that around and say that here’s a list of stores with a sales drop, chances are they’re not complying.”

Storecheck then uses its findings to encourage managers to bring their outlet into compliance. “We can go in and prove to a manager that, even though he’s busy and understaffed, if he makes the effort to get the displays out or to re-stock or whatever, he’s going to see a rise in sales. And we can actually tell him fairly accurately just how big that rise is going to be. If you deliver it right, the data is very convincing.”

The EPOS data comes in a range of formats; Storecheck’s own data is stored in a SQL Server database. Until recently, IT staff laboriously created MS Excel pivot tables for analysis and reporting. It worked for a while, but after five years of business growth (now nearing £4 million annually) the firm needed something new and better.

“We identified a need for an analysis and reporting application that was powerful, that would generate reports dynamically without any work on our part, and that had a look-and-feel our customers would be comfortable with,” Harper recalls. “But more than anything, it had to let us deliver our product up-to-date and over the web. We had clients calling up saying ‘I need a current report in an hour’ and we couldn’t do it because a report takes about three hours to produce!”

Storecheck hired an outside consulting firm to build something from scratch. But after a year of fruitless work and a lot of wasted money, the consultants gave up. In desperation, Colin Harper turned to Google and, after a bit of searching, discovered Databeacon. Soon after, John Caiger of Databeacon’s UK partner Matraxis turned up to offer a test drive.

“Right from the start, it was an obvious fit,” Caiger says. “They had a lot of data, but as a mid-sized firm, those huge client/server apps weren’t even an option. But they were spending too much time and too much money delivering reports too slowly and it was holding them back.” Matraxis took a chunk of Storecheck data, built a few data cubes based on product information by store by geography, and created some self-serve explorable reports. They then arranged a one month evaluation. Databeacon was a clear winner from the start and Storecheck soon gave Caiger the go-ahead.

It took under a month for Matraxis to get Storecheck up and running Databeacon. Today, about six months later, up-to date EPOS data is automatically drawn from a variety of sources and in a range of formats into Databeacon. As well, Storecheck field researchers from across the country input their data daily via a simple web interface. Databeacon reports are dynamically generated in near real-time and available to clients whenever they want them and wherever they happen to be.

Marketing managers and retail analysts from major retail and manufacturing companies who use the system say the Databeacon interface is intuitive and comfortably familiar to spreadsheet users, but offers subtle enticements to dig a little deeper into the data and learn a little more. At Storecheck, manual creation of spreadsheets is now a thing of the past, saving the company the equivalent of two full-time IT staffers (a £50,000 annual saving, Harper estimates). The firm is currently working with Matraxis to evaluate and implement the new .NET version, called Databeacon Smart Client.

“Most software lets you down a little bit but Databeacon has given us what we needed, plus what we wanted, plus some functionality we didn't expect”, Colin Harper says. “There’s no letdown – Databeacon does exactly what it promises to do.”

Read the DMReview of the application at http://www.dmreview.com/article_sub.cfm?articleID=1026085