Data-intense profiling of points of consumption to increase sales and marketing effectiveness

Defining an optimized sales and marketing strategy can be a tough challenge for a fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) manufacturer. Points of consumption (POC) are countless, and even though they can vary widely in terms of characteristics and consumers they serve, it’s usually difficult to differentiate among them due to a general lack of data.

Cecilia Marchi shares a case history of a major beverage company that wanted to get a detailed picture of the French out-of-home market. The combination of unusual data sources, technology assets, geographical analysis, and advanced analytics led to the deployment of a tool now supporting both sales and marketing team in understanding the market and optimizing activities and investments.

Given a list of geolocalized points of consumption (bar, café, night clubs, etc.), the company collected and integrated two main data sources: social media pages of the POC on the one side and location signals coming from mobile apps tracking people (devices) visiting the POC on the other. The former are used to define both POC characteristics (category, price band, opening hours, etc.) and its social popularity (reviews, average ratings, likes, etc.), while the latter are used to estimate overall POC audience and define the profile of actual consumers in terms of sociodemographic and lifestyle traits: What is her age? Where does she live? What does her neighborhood look like? What other points of interest does she visit during the day? What are the interests we can infer from these visited places? Cecilia explains how answering these questions and combining all data sources has led to the creation of different POC segments in terms of overall potential and consumer’s affinity to the brand target audience. These segments are now the basis for a data-driven sales and marketing strategy.