Assortment is becoming an increasingly important business issue for retailers and manufacturers. Whilst new products are seen as essential to drive category growth, the space allocated to most FMCG categories in store remains under pressure.

Manufacturers are in need of a method of determining the relative benefit that a given product's store presence delivers to the category, in order to maximise internal efficiencies and minimise external shelf pressure.

Range Optimiser

Range Optimiser offers a consumer-based solution to the question of which products are truly adding value to the category. It can be used as an argument for retention of SKUs under threat of delisting, and as an aid to range or category rationalisation.

Key questions addressed:

• Which items add most incremental households to the buyer base?
• Which products could be removed with lowest risk of of impacting the buyer base?
• Which combination of products reaches the highest number of buying households?
• Do any items under threat of withdrawal on a value rate of sale basis justify their listings by appealing to a unique buyer base?
• Which items appeal to heavier category buyers?
  

Applications:

• Brand management: Use for internal range rationalisation
• Sales: Use to defend against delisting
• Category management: Use to understand which items are most important to the category, and which items are duplicative.

Key benefits:

• Understand which products bring in incremental households to the category
• Pinpoint lines that could be delisted without losing consumers from the category
• Determine the most efficient way for a range to reach the highest number of households.

Project content:

Data from the ACNielsen | Homescan panel is used to analyse the relative importance of products from a consumer perspective. Homescan is the world's most advanced consumer panel designed to monitor the purchasing habits of Australian consumers. Using this technique, ACNielsen collects information on over 900,000 shopping trips per annum.

Project output:

Reviewing the example output table below, which two of the six SKUs should be delisted?

Conventional volume rankings may overlook item C's appeal to incremental households, and item E's appeal to heavier category buyers.

Example output table: