Home Marketing Wal-Mart to offer data to measure in-store marketing

Wal-Mart to offer data to measure in-store marketing

West Hollywood, FLA.—Wal-Mart, which stopped providing sales data to third-party firms in 2001, said this week it would offer such data for a new initiative with Procter & Gamble to measure the effectiveness of in-store marketing. “This is an initiative we think will forever change retail marketing,” said Stephen Quinn Wal-Mart CMO, during a session at the Consumer 360 conference, held May 15-17 in West Hollywood, Fla. The effort, called Prism, uses infrared sensors placed throughout stores to measure traffic and consumer exposure to product displays and other marketing materials like banners and in-store TV networks. The effort is being organized by Nielsen In-Store, a division of The Nielsen Co., New York (which also is the parent company of Brandweek). Nielsen Co. also presented the Consumer 360 event. Dina Howell, general manager-global marketing operations at P&G, said U.S. stores could start to be equipped with the sensors within two weeks. In addition to Wal-Mart, the devices will be put into 150 different retail outlets, including convenience and grocery stores, by the time of the project's full launch in early 2008. Although the effort is currently only being rolled out in the U.S., Quinn and Howell said it would be in place internationally within a couple of years. The consortium funding Prism also includes Albertsons, Kroger, Walgreens, 3M, Walt Disney, Coca-Cola, Kellogg and Miller Brewing. “This will have a profound impact on the whole industry,” she said after the session. “It’s starting in marketing but it will impact operations, sales, everything.” “This makes the store a part of measured media,” said Howell. She said that a pilot effort that ran for two weeks last year achieved an initial 76% accuracy rate in its predictions of consumer behavior and that further refinement since then has increased that to 85%. Prism is designed to predict consumer reach by category, area of the store, retail format, and day of the week. “This is not a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have,” she said afterward. Wal-Mart contributed sales information from 1,000 of its stores to the study—a tenfold increase over the amount of data the company had ever previously released, according to Quinn.

 

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