A very interesting report was published about two weeks ago by NCH Marketing Services, a Valassis company. It was titled, “2010 Coupon Facts Report”, and the most important insight it offered was that CPG manufacturers offered $485 billion worth of coupons in 2010. That is a 13.9% increase over the previous year and a 47.4% increase over five years ago.

Clearly grocery and cosmetic shopping have become different ballgames ever since the latter part of 2008. Consumers are more strategic in their shopping due to worries about their pocketbooks. But to dig a little deeper past the obvious recession era trends, I thought it would be interesting to pull out a few of the more prominent points brought up in the report:

• Nearly two thirds of all coupons offered in 2010 were for grocery items – up 8% from the prior year.
• The remaining one third were for health and beauty care products.
• The average coupon face value distributed for HBC products was $1.94 – up 6.6 percent from the prior year.
• Consumers now have a week and a half less time to use coupons, compared to the prior year, due to an overall shortening of offer expiration dates in both the grocery and HBC segments. The average expiration is 10.1 weeks. Read more…

Over a year ago on this blog I posted information about the rate at which new data was being produced each year. It involved the plethoric number of iPods it would take to hold the year’s data – a number which would have filled a similarly excessive number of football stadiums with said iPods. The point is that this is the language we have begun to use when discussing the ever-increasing amount of data generated by humans and machines each year.

Well here’s a new one: according to Google chairman Eric Schmidt, quoted in a recent CGT Magazine article, the company now creates 5 exabytes of data every three days. To trump the iPod-football stadium illustrations of yesteryear, 5 exabytes is the amount of information created from the beginning of time through 1978. Read more…

Resulting from innovation and customer feedback, DataAlchemy is now a cleaner, more efficient solution with the release of DA 6.3.  This major release provides increased productivity through greater automated functionality and additional formatting, which allowfor quicker data translation. During our June 14th live webinar, alqemyiQ’s COO Glenn Geho will demonstrate time-saving features that are being introduced in this major release of alqemyiQ’s data analytics software solution.  Experience how DA users will benefit from the ease of use in: Read more…

Within the conversation surrounding the evolving effort of processing and analyzing the ever-expanding amount of retail data, there is an interesting new development. The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has added a minor in Retail Technology to their offered curriculum. The first of its kind in the country, this program will offer students specialized computer-based courses resulting in greater exposure to the technology that has been transforming the industry over recent years. It will also, the university hopes, allow graduates to practically walk into jobs that utilize this technology – being better prepared than their peers.

The minor will be offered for the first time this coming fall. Assistant Professor of Retail and Consumer Science, Rod Runyan, says of the new minor, Read more…

Date/Time:  2/2/11, 2:00-3:00 PM EST

Registration: https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/392270160

Overview: Whether you are familiar with the Data Import Wizard or new to the DataAlchemy solution, this 45 minute webinar is worth your time. The webinar will highlight the use of the Data Import Wizard that is available within the DataAlchemy tool, demonstrating how non-standard data sets can be quickly transformed into easily interpreted DataAlchemy reports. Read more…

The amount of necessary information that businesses must process in order to stay competitive grows with each year.  Because of this, the need for a unifying platform to manage that data will only become more evident as time goes by. If your company has not yet found a solution to make incoming data as valuable as possible, rest assured it will have to. In recent consumer goods news, we see another example of a company with global  presence climbing aboard the bandwagon of a unified data management solution. Read more…

 In the 2010 Reader’s Choice Survey in CGT magazine, the Consumer Products National Industry Practice Branch of the company Hitachi Consulting was ranked number four in the nation.  What is a nationally  ranked consumer goods consulting company researching in 2010? If you are in an organization that makes business decisions informed by specified industry data, the answer shouldn’t surprise you: Read more…

The business practices of the massive retailer Wal-Mart are both praised and hated by different members of the CPG community. The main tenet of those practices has been lowering Wal-Mart’s costs, thereby allowing them to pass the savings onto the consumer, offering the lowest price in the market for a given product. One of Wal-Mart’s classic avenues for cutting costs on their own end is to reach back into their supply chain to identify what operations can be taken on by the company rather than outsourced. The retailer did this most prominently with the distribution of their demand data. When Wal-Mart pulled out of common practice of providing their data to large scale content providers such as IRI, they began to provide that data, via Retail Link, straight to the producers who stocked their shelves. In doing so Wal-Mart cut out the middleman, in this case the data content providers, both saving on costs and taking complete control of how and to whom their data was distributed.

A recent article posted online from Bloomberg Businessweek shows Wal-Mart employing similar tactics in regard to the transportation of their suppliers’ products. Read more…

The sheer amount of compounding demand information being created on a daily, weekly and yearly basis is causing a shift in the way CPG companies need to approach data capture and governance. Entirely new tools are becoming not only helpful, but necessary. This phenomenon could not be displayed more clearly than it was in a recent article posted on the home page of MarketWatch discussing the sharp rise in use of the Demand Signal Repository, or DSR. Read more…

            The article “Are You Prepared to Store All This Data?” recently published by SourceMedia offers some staging numbers on the growth of digital information. As previously mentioned on this blog and myriad websites, the world’s mass of digital data is constantly expanding – and constantly quickening its pace of expansion. SourceMedia writes that the amount of information created in 2010 will equal about 1.2 zettabytes. Here are a few statistics to show what 1.2 zettabytes would equal in layman’s terms: Read more…