When consumer packaged goods (CPG) brands make changes to their packaging, they want to improve perceptions about certain product features, such as taste, health or other trending characteristics. The goal of making these significant and visible changes is typically to enhance brand equity, not to increase sales. But at the same time, you need to be aware that there’s a real possibility the new packaging will harm sales or cause the product to lose shelf presence.

TABS Analytics’ sister company, Decision Insight (DI), has extensive packaging research experience. Read on to learn more about strategies for making packaging research work for your brand.

As we enter 2020, let’s take a look at how some key grocery retailers have performed in 2019 through their first three fiscal quarters. I want to share my thoughts on what I think has worked – and hasn’t worked – for several prominent players. Below are sales and profit results from the top 4 grocery chains in the US plus Walmart Global for comparison (60% of their sales are grocery/consumables) for 2018 and the first three quarters of 2019.

TABS Analytics continues to rank among the top of vendors supporting trade promotion and loyalty programs, according to the Promotion Optimization Institute's 2019 TPx Vendor Panorama report. 2019 marks the 4th year in a row that TABS has been included as a best-in-class vendor. For 2019, TABS was cited with this distinction in two categories: Dashboard and Data Management. POI noted that the company is "highly innovative, shows the insights in very consumable formats, and has deep insights."

The TPx Vendor Panorama was developed to help guide consumer goods companies to successfully execute trade promotions at the headquarters level by identifying vendors’ strengths and weaknesses. The report examines all aspects of trade promotion – also referred to TPx, which includes trade promotion management, optimization, effectiveness and analytics.

For some strange reason we are fielding lots of inbound traffic from managers seeking a better model for baseline sales. This has been a persistent issue in the industry for at least 20 years, but only now are the calls coming…odd. For those of you not familiar with the concept for the CPG industry, a sales baseline is an estimate of sales in the absence of retailer price promotion. You can learn more about the concept in this sales baselines blog post and trade promotion optimization white paper.

Just know that without an accurate baseline, trade promotion optimization analysis will be inaccurate, and more importantly many of the decisions made from the analysis will be wrong. Some in the industry will say there are many ways to calculate a baseline (true), and given that, there is no way to tell which model or estimates are the best (false). There actually is a method for measuring which baseline estimates are the most accurate, and if you are interested in the technical details you can find them in this academic paper.

7th Annual Food & Beverage Study Shows Gains in Organic and E-Commerce Driven by Changing Lifestyle of Millennials

Shelton, Conn. – September 24, 2019 – Consumers are more frequently shopping for groceries online, according to the TABS Analytics 7th Annual Food and Beverage Consumables Study. E-Commerce grocery purchases nearly doubled in the past year, with 66 percent of consumers noting their loyalty to shopping through this channel and Amazon, Walmart and Target making the largest gains in penetration. However, the greater demand is revealing significant structural problems – low margins and unpredictable shipping and fulfillment costs – that will impact the profitability and sustainability of the business model.

Drogue Offers Significant Tier 1 CPG Experience as TABS Continues Strategic Evolution

Shelton, Conn. – July 22, 2019 – TABS Analytics today announced that Arthur (Art) B. Drogue, who held executive roles at Unilever, Best Foods, Nabisco and other major Consumer Packaged Goods companies, has joined TABS’s board of directors.

2019 Report Offers Analysis of Top 10 VMS Trends Defining the Past Decade

Shelton, Conn. – June 27, 2019 – Mass market brick and mortar stores, like Walmart and Target, and eCommerce retailers have seen the most success in attracting buyers of vitamins, minerals and nutritional supplements (VMS), according the TABS Analytics 12^th Annual Vitamin Study. However, after more than doubling in the past decade, overall online penetration has plateaued at about 17%. This stagnation in online purchasing leads to questions about whether eCommerce can ever exceed more than one-fifth of the total market in any consumer package goods (CPG) categories.

Single platform to provide manufacturers with unprecedented, full-spectrum analytics suite for their trade promotion spending

Shelton, Conn. – June 20, 2019 – TABS Analytics today announced that it is collaborating with CPGToolBox to deliver an integrated trade promotion and optimization solution for consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers. The joint venture brings together the two organizations’ best-in-class solutions to forecast, plan, settle and analyze promotions, and then conduct a rigorous analytical overview of the optimal promotional strategies and tactics for clients' brands.

Chances are that when it comes to eCommerce, one of the biggest trends you may be hearing about is the rise of online grocery. Some of the biggest names in grocery retailing are adopting online services, and many others in consumer-packaged goods (CPG) are considering branching their operations into this area of eComm. However, much of the data that TABS Analytics has collected suggests that online grocery not only doesn’t have the explosive future potential that some may believe, it is also inherently economically flawed. Yes, some retailers may be making money off of it now, but for the vast majority of them, online grocery will never work.

With so much buzz - and misinformation - about the world of online grocery, it is a prime subject to which TABS can apply its analytical approach and weigh in on the matter, as we did in our April 2019 webinar, Online Grocery, Are We There Yet?. As an industry leader in outsourced CPG analytics and consulting, our goal is to give our clients and the industry at-large analyses to drive fact-based, effective decisions.

Read on to learn about our findings in online grocery. 

Addition of Leading Virtual Shopper Research and Retail Strategy Firm Enhances TABS's Data Analytics Expertise and Extends Platform to Support Expanding Array of Clients and Categories

Shelton, Conn. – May 7, 2019 – TABS Analytics today announced that it acquired Decision Insight, a Kansas City, Mo.-based global shopper marketing research and analytics firm with expertise in both brick-and-mortar and online shopping environments. Decision Insight is a pioneer in virtual shopping research, providing shopper insights and retail strategies about shopper behaviors and motivations for manufacturers, retailers and restaurants.