Digital Shelf Analytics: Managing brand compliance across online marketplaces

Any company focused on maintaining its brand value will pay close attention to providing a consistent and superior customer experience across its online and offline channels. With e-commerce growing from strength to strength, one of the world’s largest CPG brands manufacturing an assortment of foods, beverages, cleaning agents, personal care products and more, was hard-pressed to ensure brand consistency across consumer touchpoints.

The stalwart knew it would need complete visibility into how its brand is being represented online; especially to ensure brand compliance by their online retail partners and third-party sellers. A constant eye on aspects like price, product availability, visual and text content was crucial to foster brand loyalty and consumer trust. To do this, the company employed Netscribes’ digital shelf analytics expertise.

About the client

One of the world’s largest consumer goods companies. Its products include foods, beverages, cleaning agents, personal care products, and water purifiers.

Business Challenge

As a major consumer brand, maintaining its brand value requires providing a consistent and superior customer experience across online and offline channels. It wanted to ensure compliance to its brand standards for key product information, including price, product availability, visuals, and text. However, the lack of a cohesive view of its products sold online made the enforcement and monitoring of compliance difficult.
The client wanted a solution that offered visibility into how their products were represented on online marketplaces. Through this solution, they hoped to:

• Foster brand loyalty and trust by helping sellers adhere to its brand guidelines.
• Deliver continuous insights into price and inventory movements over time to higher management

Solution

To track its products across online marketplaces, our client utilized Netscribes’ digital shelf analytics expertise. Through the solution, it now has better control over how its products are represented online and can track over 22,000 SKUs across 16 leading marketplaces for 71 zip codes every day.

• Identifying product content inaccuracies: By comparing the marketplace content with the content on the client’s website, our platform identifies inconsistencies in product content across categories including titles, images, descriptions, benefits and features, logos, and trademarks. By measuring the variance between the two, the platform automatically determines gaps in content quality, if any
• Tracking product pricing and availability over time: Our client needed a holistic view of how the pricing and availability of specific products changed across marketplaces. A digital dashboard, accessible to the client from anywhere, helped meet this need. It captured multiple data points in real-time, including product and inventory information across several categories. This allowed our client to slice and dice the data to gain a deeper understanding of different viewpoints.
• Tracking inventory levels across marketplaces: In addition to tracking inventory levels, the client receives alerts when any of its products go out-of-stock across stores and locations. By analyzing this data over time, it now has better foresight into customer demands for better procurement and supply chain planning.
• Monitor search position changes for multiple keywords: As sales conversions on marketplaces largely depend on how easily customers can find your brand, tracking search position for relevant keywords is crucial. With Netscribes’ digital shelf analytics solution, our client can determine how its products rank on marketplaces for popular keywords versus the competition in both organic and sponsored results.