Quri Launches Industry-First Summer of Merchandising

SAN FRANCISCO, May 26, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Quri, the leader in Performance Driven Merchandising™, is announcing today its Summer of Merchandising program, which will highlight merchandising performance both on- and off-shelf for 45 brands in 14 categories at Walmart and Target stores all summer long. The goal of the program is to help educate the industry on Performance Driven Merchandising™ - a new merchandising framework for manufacturers that facilitates in-cycle corrections, enables data-driven selling to retailers, and optimizes trade spend to help drive sales and improve margins.

Starting with Memorial Day, the Summer of Merchandising program will run each month in 1,000 Walmart and Target stores through Labor Day. It includes merchandising measures such as overall display presence, display type, and a variety of on-shelf availability details. Categories and brands covered in the program include:

How do we do it?

The Performance Driven Merchandising™ framework is built upon a new stream of data that quantifies the shoppers' view in-store, providing merchandising measures both on- and off-the-shelf. Collected routinely in thousands of stores daily, this data provides the information currency needed to help manufacturer's make routine, efficient improvements to the merchandising process across all functions at all levels of the organization including customer business teams, category management, brand management, trade planning, and all major headquarter functions coordinating with these teams to hit annual sales and profit targets.

Quri previewed the Summer of Merchandising for seven days, ending Wednesday, May 25^th.

"Our first glimpse of Summer of Merchandising data substantiates the significant opportunity we have as an industry," comments Justin Behar, CEO and co-founder of Quri. "Just days before Memorial Day, we see out-of-stock rates ranging from 1% to 17% and off-shelf display presence varying between 16% and 74%. These significant performance gaps leading up to Memorial Day and throughout the year are greatly minimized when brands continuously measure merchandising conditions at the store-, shelf-, and SKU-level and integrate that intelligence into a more dynamic merchandising approach. This is exactly the opportunity Quri's new Performance Driven Merchandising™ framework is designed to exploit."

Quri's Summer of Merchandising: Early On-Shelf Insights

• On-Shelf Availability (OSA) is surprisingly low for many major summer SKUs ranging from 36% to 88% on average for 12 of the 14 brands tracked, suggesting many stores have not transitioned effectively to capitalize on the Memorial Day holiday. Seasonal transitions are always challenging for the industry, but are especially important for seasonal brands. For example, OSA rates for charcoal (81%), sunscreen (71%), and insect repellant (36%) can improve significantly by applying the Performance Driven Merchandising™ framework to help direct retail execution teams during surge merchandising periods, in support of re-sets, or even to manage individual store problems in-cycle.
• Out-of-stock rates range from 1% to 17% often with a correlation between low number of facings and high out-of-stock rates. For example, sunscreen nearly topped the out-of-stock list at 14%, but had less than 2 facings on average. Other major summer categories including beer, bottled water, and charcoal showed out-of-stock rates ranging between 5% to 7%, which is surprisingly high for major brands during a vital period. With Performance Driven Merchandising™ practices employed, routine store-level data helps direct merchandising efforts in partnership with retailers to significantly reduce out-of-stock scenarios even as shoppers stock up heading into the long weekend.

Quri's Summer of Merchandising: Early Off-Shelf Insights

• Off-shelf display presence varied significantly by category with several brands and categories present off-shelf in over 50% of stores including cookies/biscuits (58%), candy/confections (59%), carbonated beverages (63%), and sunscreen (74%). That said, the majority of brands and categories had off-shelf presence in less than 40% of stores.
• Several brands and categories managed to successfully get a large percentage of their displays outside expected aisles including charcoal (96%), hot dogs/sausages (96%), cookies/biscuits (84%), salty snacks (70%), candy/confections (69%), and sunscreen (66%). Unfortunately, the majority of brands were off-shelf in their home aisle even though disrupting shoppers with product in unexpected locations is a tactic proven to drive sales lift from off-shelf displays.

Quri's Summer of Merchandising is being supported with a series of informative webinars and private events starting on June 2^nd at 2pm ET/11am PT with an unveiling of Memorial Day results. The discussion will focus on everyday applications for manufacturers across a variety of functions including customer business teams, retail merchandising and execution teams, brand management, and sales support functions including sales planning, trade marketing, category management, and shopper insights.

You can register for the webinars and also find additional information by visiting Learn.Quri.com. Additionally, any of the 45 brands tracked in Quri's Summer of Merchandising are invited to review data and insights for their brand privately by contacting us at [email protected].

About Quri
Quri is the leader in Performance Driven Merchandising™, transforming the in-store experience by providing consistent, real-time, store-level visibility into merchandising conditions across all major channels and retailers in the US market.

Procter & Gamble, SC Johnson, Nest, Red Bull, Tyson, Nestle, and Johnson & Johnson plus 100+ other global companies rely on Quri to help optimize the $4 trillion dollars spent annually on retail go-to-market and in-store merchandising. Quri is powered by proprietary data quantifying the shoppers' view in-store and collected by an on-demand retail workforce. For more information, visit http://quri.com.

Media Contact: North 6th Agency, Inc. (For Quri)
212-334-9753, [email protected]

SOURCE Quri

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