Our Expertise

Lifestyles and needs of today’s consumers differ greatly from consumers even five years ago. Time-starved shoppers are facing more choices in fresh foods with less seasonality of products. The changing ethnic population and global supply has added new items and shifted the emphasis in some categories. Shoppers have become more demanding than ever before, searching out high-quality items with great taste.

The supply chain is changing rapidly as well. The number of suppliers is narrowing and more organizations are turning to branding to establish value. The result is a decline in the commodity sales approach and the birth of a more sophisticated marketing approach to maintaining partnerships. Key suppliers continually seek ways to bring value-added services to the market and take advantage of the opportunity to better manage the category with research and data.

How to Succeed in a Changing Marketplace

Understanding what drives shoppers’ choices enables a business to identify new opportunities for growth and avoid spending resources on efforts that have little impact on sales. At the basic level, it’s about understanding a category; segmenting it by the way consumers shop the category, then creating actionable plans that drive sales and profits.

Another key to success is understanding the retail environment, including attitudes and perceptions of category managers as well as department managers at the store level. PG helps maximize performance by testing specific variables in the category in terms of assortment, pricing, promotion and merchandising.

Reaching a higher level of understanding requires more than just point-of-sale data or research. It is best achieved by creating a complete picture of the category by integrating a full set of tools, such as:

• Household panel data
• Point-of-sale data
• Internet research
• Focus groups
• Consumer intercepts
• Trade interviews
• In-store tests and audit reports

From questionnaire design through final report, The Perishables Group can provide professional research design, implementation and evaluation. All research initiatives are customized based on project goals, specific research requirements or differentiation dictated by the culture and/or needs within individual countries. PG coordinates data into a comprehensive project report.

With the best approach and tools, opportunities and success come together.

Services

In-store Intercepts

Talking to consumers at the point-of-purchase provides valuable insights into what drives shopping behaviors.

PG obtains first-hand answers to questions such as:

• What motivates consumers to purchase specific items (i.e. price, display, usage)?
• What criteria do they use to make purchase decisions?
• What trade-offs are made within the purchase decision?

Internet Research

The Perishables Group brings the power of the Internet to the fresh food industry by providing a full range of worldwide research capabilities for managing consumer market evaluations from project initiation through final analysis.

 

Focus Groups

Focus groups allow for a deeper understanding of consumer attitudes and reactions to products. As a qualitative technique, focus groups can tell you the underlying reasons for shopping behavior, the "why". The open-ended interaction of focus groups reveals thoughts and emotions, which consumers are not ordinarily forthcoming about in an intercept.

Tactical Studies

Tactical studies document which concepts deliver the greatest positive impact on category performance. They can also be used to identify the opportunity gaps to improve performance.

We recommend various types of tactical studies to maximize impact on performance:

• Packaging tests
• Cross-merchandising tests
• Secondary location tests
• Category re-set tests
• Pricing tests
• Branding impact tests

Retail Merchandising and Audit Programs

Auditing in-store activity is a critical component to retail success, because as sales dollars move from traditional marketing to retailer programs, execution at the store will determine success and value.

The Perishables Group has a network of trained produce merchandisers equipped with the latest handheld technology delivering faster, more reliable data.

With access to stores in the top markets and extended coverage in remaining markets, we can provide coverage of 75 percent of all national chain stores.

We offer the following retail merchandising and audits:

• Merchandising
• Pricing
• Promotion
• Assortment
• Product quality
• Shelf space
• Surveys
• Schematic compliance
• Seasonality expansion
• Competitive activity

Consumer Decision Tree

The Perishables Group’s Consumer Decision Tree merges knowledge from multiple consumer understanding tools to create a clear delineation regarding decision drivers for specific categories. It clearly illustrates which consumer groups value which product attributes.  The first, second and third most important decision drivers are broken out for target markets and opportunity markets (based on demographics and lifestyle).