Competitor monitoring in retail is for many FMCG suppliers an occasional project rather than a continuous process. Competitors’ prices change, promotions launch, new products enter the assortment and old ones are removed. What matters for an FMCG supplier is detecting these changes quickly and understanding what they mean for their own business.
Continuous competitor monitoring does not require a heavy analytical process. E-commerce data provides a fast and efficient way to track the market at store level. When information about competitors is combined with a supplier’s own POS and delivery data, it becomes possible to see how changes in the market affect one’s own sales.
What to monitor about competitors
Effective competitor analysis for an FMCG supplier starts with a clear answer to one question: what information is needed to make better sales and assortment decisions? From an FMCG supplier’s perspective, the most relevant competitive intelligence includes:
- prices and price changes
- promotions and their timing
- product availability and store coverage
- new products
- products entering and leaving the assortment
This information makes it possible to track both individual competitor actions and longer-term developments.
Particularly interesting is connecting changes to one another. If a competitor’s price drops, it is also possible to see in which chains and stores the change occurred. If a new product enters the market, its store coverage development can be tracked. For a promotion, it is possible to examine the promotional price, timing, and scope.
E-commerce data makes competitor monitoring continuous
Traditionally, competitive intelligence has been gathered through store visits, customer meetings, or individual observations. Field sales observations remain valuable, but they make it difficult to build a continuous and comprehensive picture of the entire market.
E-commerce data changes the situation. When data is collected daily from retail chains’ online stores at store level, monitoring competitors is no longer dependent on which stores sales representatives happen to visit.
FieldForce’s Price & Listing Monitor collects daily data on product prices, availability, and assortments from Finnish retail chains. It enables rapid detection of, for example, a competitor’s price change, a promotion that has started, a new product listing, or a change in a product’s store coverage.
In competitor monitoring, the strength of e-commerce data lies precisely in its speed and comprehensiveness. Instead of noticing competitor changes after the fact in sales figures, the change itself can be detected as it happens.
POS and delivery data reveals what a change means for your own sales
Detecting a competitor’s action is only the first step. The next question is more important from a business perspective: how does the change affect our products? For this, your own products’ POS and delivery data is needed.
Take a competitor’s promotion as an example. Price & Listing Monitor can show when the promotion started, in which stores it was visible, and at what price the competitor’s product was sold. When this information is examined alongside your own POS data, it is possible to see whether a change occurred in your own product’s sales at the same time.
The same can be done with price changes. If a competitor permanently lowers its price, the development of your own product’s sales can be tracked after the change. This way, competitor monitoring does not remain merely an observation of what the competitor did, but also helps assess the impact of the action on your own business.
Delivery data completes the picture by showing the development of your own products’ deliveries at store level. Combining POS and delivery data also helps identify, for example, out-of-shelf situations and stores where your own product’s sales potential is going untapped. FieldForce eForce Market Data Service combines your own products’ POS and delivery data in the same view. When this information is examined together with Price & Listing Monitor’s competitor data, it becomes possible to connect a change that has occurred in the market with its potential effects on your own sales.
Monitoring should be built into a recurring process
Competitor monitoring does not have to mean that someone goes through a vast amount of data every day. What matters more is identifying changes and surfacing the observations that are important for decision-making.
Daily e-commerce data enables rapid response to changes in, for example, prices, promotions, and availability. Longer-term analysis, in turn, helps identify changes in assortments, distribution coverage, and competitors’ ways of operating.
A good process might, for example, track when a competitor:
- significantly changes its price
- starts or ends a promotion
- launches a new product on the market
- grows its product’s store coverage
- loses coverage or is removed from the assortment
When a significant change is detected, the next step is to examine your own POS and delivery data to see whether it has had an impact on your own sales and whether action is needed.
From competitive intelligence to practical action
The value of competitor monitoring ultimately comes from how the information is used.
Sales teams and Key Account Managers can use competitive intelligence in customer negotiations and to support their own pricing, promotions, and assortment presentations. Field sales, in turn, can leverage store-level information to target visits and actions.
It is also possible to learn from a competitor’s successes. If, for example, a competitor’s promotion increases its visibility or clearly affects your own product’s sales, the information helps evaluate your own future campaigns. If a competitor’s new product’s store coverage grows, the development can be monitored and compared with the situation of your own assortment.
At its best, continuous competitor monitoring forms a simple chain: what happened in the market, how it affected us, and what we should do next. Price & Listing Monitor brings visibility into competitors’ prices, promotions, availability, and assortment changes. POS and delivery data shows alongside what is happening to your own products. Together, these form a considerably more comprehensive picture of the market than either data source alone.