For quite some time, Middlegame has argued that promotional price cuts are only an additional attribute for the product during those six or seven seconds that the average shopper surveys the category and makes a choice. It was probably far from controversial when we described these and other merchandising conditions as “temporary” attributes in alignment with predominant TPR (temporary price reduction) terminology. However, price reductions and merchandising conditions continue to use advanced analytics that primarily ignore that these temporary product attributes should probably be evaluated side-by-side with the permanent product attributes. Continue reading →

Sometimes we use the blog for shameless promotion, but often I like to talk about people who have been important to Middlegame. We call these our “heroes” entries. Earlier this year, we had a soft launch of our cloud-based simulator studio software . It leverages an integrated stack of primarily SQL and Python to process the data as well as some incredible HTML to provide the user interface. Continue reading →

A great discussion was started on Retail Wire in early August about “reinventing” category management. Graeme McVie offers an excellent and very Middlegame-oriented introduction of how category management should be used: Continue reading →

Market Structure has always been one of the three key elements of the CIA® platform for the assessment of assortment, pricing, merchandising, and sometimes media. Basically, our Market Structure is the first step in the modeling architecture that identifies the structure of competition among SKUs in a competitive category. Market Structure is one of the inputs for determining the drivers of Market Share simultaneously for all competitive SKUs in the category (transferred demand) as well as estimating the drivers of Market Size across geographies and time periods (incrementality). Continue reading →

One of our larger FMCG clients recently asked Middlegame if we could help them understand how to better develop and leverage Omni-Channel. Omni-channel management is a multichannel approach to sales designed to provide a seamless shopping experience. Continue reading →

The overwhelming majority of our work at Middlegame focuses on Assortment, Pricing, and Merchandising to provide what we call Shopper Response Analytics. The significance of these three to overall brand performance is enough to keep us busy and is often at the heart of enormous opportunities we see for our clients in emerging markets. However, this obviously isn’t the only place where marketers focus their efforts. Continue reading →

In the blog “Evaluating Price Response as Opposed to Price Elasticity”, I reinforced the powerful impact of transforming the marketing mindset from the “brand management” approach (which has dominated the FMCG market) to a “portfolio management” approach. Continue reading →

Over the summer, a guest viewpoint in Progressive Grocer proclaimed that shopper marketing was dead. Basically, the argument was that retailers must embrace the success in strategic targeting of promotions by Kroger and those facilitated by the analytics provided by 84.15. This is the “customer of one” approach.  Middlegame would never debate the importance of growing loyalty and increasing the portion of sales attributable to repeat purchases. However, we think that the main problem with shopper marketing is the lack of focus on transferred demand and incrementality. Continue reading →

Last year Forbes reported on a survey of more than 200 global FMCG C-suite executives from both the retailer and manufacturer sides of the business. The article summarized the findings with a fairly dire outlook: stating that, “antiquated marketing and brand-development models are hobbling retail and consumer products companies, chipping away at sales, earnings and market share”. The author went on to explain that efforts to adapt FMCG to how technology has transformed the shopper have overwhelmingly flopped. I debated these comments with the partners at Middlegame extensively. We agree that the era of E-commerce and the social nature of the internet have made things more difficult for FMCG, but they probably represented more opportunity than threat. We saw the real issue as something more fundamental. Continue reading →

In a recent client meeting, a description of the CIA® methodology led to an in-depth conversation about the use of retail tracking data acquired via scanners in developed markets or audits in emerging markets. It was a great discussion and reminded me of several of the foundational ideas that led to the formation of Middlegame. This is an excellent topic for the blog to share or refresh the conversation on whether category-wide analytics require household panel data. Continue reading →