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Photo Finish

The world loves racing.  With little effort, it doesn’t take long to come up with 10 different types of racing we enjoy watching.  Auto Racing, Track and Field, Horse Racing and my favorite… Baby racing (saw it during halftime of an NBA game once) to name a few.  When did humans transition from racing for their lives to racing babies?  Humans are so competitive.

 

Thinking about this a little deeper, maybe we are always in a race.  Race to get the kids to practice, race to hit a deadline or race to work.  We just need more time I guess… for everything we are racing against.

 

Are you winning?

In my final blog exploring the ways AI Image Recognition can help brands, retailers and distributors through the annual “reset” process, I’ve come to my final thought on the topic “are you winning?” In today’s complex retail environment, winning at retail is hard to measure.  If you can’t measure something, it’s hard to improve.  There are many “metrics” or “KPI’s” to see if your brands are winning from the last reset such as “share of shelf”, “strike zone” (eye level), or growth.  Do we really know where we stand across a channel or retailer when we track these KPI in a “sample” of stores?  When a retailer has over 500 planogram variations do you really know if you are winning with the customer or against your competition?  Maybe sales are growing 12% but the category is growing 24%- you must be losing somewhere?

Brands that operate in mature categories, innovation attacking them from all sides, determining if you are winning is tricky if not impossible today.  Understanding where you are losing is even harder.  Mix a little “I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time” with “the buyer likes our competitor more” and add a dash of “who has time to sort thought all of these POGs” and you have a recipe for being under informed or mislead.  The primary cause of making poor decisions or mis-allocating precious resources such as trade dollars or labor.

Is winning really that important?

YES! We are all still racing for our survival when it comes to our brands.  Brands that are losing, are vulnerable for getting trade, R&D, and marketing support taken away.  Brands that are winning, have the revenue to invest in more sales driving investments. I guess Ricki Bobbie is right after all…

The good news is there is technology to help brands understand where they are losing and where they are winning by leveraging AI technology.  The data and visibility obtained from AI help brands prioritize investments across all departments to begin winning again.  Think of AI as producing the “Photo Finish” of your race.  Good luck!

I hope you enjoyed “The Reset” series.  Check out “Where did we land?”, “The Contract Talk”, “Just the Facts”, “Why do we walk against traffic”.   In my next series, I will explore Retail360 which will focus on how we can leverage AI in measuring perfect store initiatives. 

For more information regarding AI- Image recognition visit maxerience.com or contact JDerienzo@maxerience.com.  To learn more about other services leveraging AI visit Visiongroupretail.com.

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