The quality and relevance of POS data analysis in the USA’s convenience store channel has taken a significant step forward with IRI’s announcement of its AllScan Convenience Store Tracking service, offering full scanning data analysis across a significant sample of 11000 US convenience stores (almost 8% of all US C-stores).
While some convenience retailer data has been available for quite a few years (notably ACNielsen’s Convenience Track offering), sample sizes have been rather low (e.g. maybe 3% of all convenience stores in the US) and data sourcing has been heavily reliant on retail audit rather than scanning.
Today scanning is much more widespread across the US convenience store channel than it was a few years ago. And IRI has been quick to seize the opportunity. Their new offering will be of interest to both manufacturers and retailers.
Last week RetailWire wrote extensively on the topic, including some interesting remarks from John Lofstock, editor at Convenience Store Decisions, and quite a lot of contributed commentary from panellists and readers.
To be clear though, this is evolution not revolution.
Manufacturers, already big subscribers to these sorts of data services, will of course be glad to have harder facts on which to base claims for shelf space and evaluate promotional offers in the convenience channel.
And, theoretically at least, C-store operators will be able to take better-informed decisions about product mix and stock levels. But this assumes that they have the time and training to analyse the reports provided and deduce appropriate action taking into account their own data on out-of-stocks and their knowledge of their own retail space. Major convenience store chains probably do indeed have the resource available to take advantage of this sort of analysis, and some of them are starting to do so. But in a trade where, by-and-large, even analysis of own POS tends to be rudimentary at best, will the improvement in quality and spread of channel data encourage more operators – the smaller operators, the independents – to invest both the money and the time required to fine-tune their operations? Probably not.
The real revolution will come, I think, when IRI and others start selling targeted end-to-end analytical services to C-stores, offering them not just reports and charts but proposed points of action. Even small operations might be willing to find some money for a service that could put them on equal footing with the major chains. And that’s a potential market of tens of thousands of service customers.
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