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April 7, 2017

Read time: 2min

Reporting and strategy houses to the rescue

Market Logic Team

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a brand manager in possession of good Friday night plans must be in want of numbers ASAP. Every brand manager in the world has the fundamental responsibility to know how her brand is performing against a competitor set – geographically, distribution channel, across a category, etc. That means every week, every month, every quarter, and every year. For example, a brand manager needs to know how A is performing against B.  This means tapping 100 or 200 waves of numbers – 20 types of reports coming through her desk. The vast majority of these reports are monthly, so one can imagine how many numbers end up on her desk – 250 waves of numbers, maybe 500 waves of numbers. Now the brand manager knows she’s either 2% percent up or down. So, where does she sit in her product class compared to her competitors? Where does she sit on brand recognition? Sales? Units sold? Overall usage? Brand image? Shelf sales? How loyal are her consumers? Is it their first time trying the product, or are they coming back again and again? Did she get all of the sale of wallet? What about different brand touchpoints? She needs to know that. Does she have enough shelf space? Did her stuff make it on the shelf? Was the weather working in her favor? Was everyone going to restaurants? Disruptive innovation? What’s going on the industry at large? All of this feeds into her performance, brand, category, and ultimately my company. And because of that, she has to know the numbers to do her job. So, here comes the question: how do she get the numbers? Business intelligence teams or strategy and planning teams work with all the vendors and provide the most accurate and reliable reports. Then, they review the analysis the vendors put in the report and review the analysis themselves. This team explores the data and goes deep – uncovering new insights themselves with their thinking. So essentially, there are hundreds of brand managers who need reports and only 10/20 people to analyze these reports to come up with insights and deep-dive into issues. At Market Logic, we work with clients to introduce fundamental technical platform innovations to turn the situation around – a central platform where all of the reports are stored and are organized in a strategy house. With this, you can look at reports to see your good results (brand or everyone in the category) or maybe a poor performance (what caused this)? What are the relations between the numbers? Our clients can view all of this in one central location, saving time, resources, and stress. So, enjoy your Friday evening – who knows, maybe even happy hour at TGIFs.