innocent – Monthly monitoring of category performance

Category: Category Management| Solution: Datama Compare| Type : Recurring| Instries: FMCG| Extension: None
Tags : #CategoryManagement #PerformanceEnseigne #RelationRetailer #OpportunitesBusiness #waterfall #Quantification

"The Datama solution enables us to be more efficient in analyzing performance, and to quickly identify the key levers impacting market and brand trends. As a result, we can focus on the points that need to be explored in greater detail, and the action plans that need to be put in place. It's a tool much appreciated by our in-house staff. We're also open to testing new functionalities of the tool that could help us go further in understanding the impact of external factors on performance."

Mayya Marinova

Category & Trade marketing Manager at innocent Drinks

Background

Launched in 1999, innocent is now Europe’s leading producer of fresh fruit juices and smoothies. Its mission is to facilitate good living through the benefits of fruit and vegetables, and it always strives to do things the right way. Becoming a certified B Corp company in 2018 (then 2021) is proof of this. It also donates 10% of its profits to causes large and small. innocent is now present in over 18 countries.

Every month, the innocent marketing team analyzes the performance of the fruit juice category. The main objective is to gain a precise understanding of market dynamics and the specific performance of innocent and its competitors in this context.

As with many FMCG categories, fruit juices are particularly complex to analyze, as performance is influenced by many dimensions: distribution, pricing, promotion, etc. This monthly analysis must be carried out quickly and efficiently, so that the right information can be drawn from it, and a suitable action plan put in place to continue developing the category. To meet this challenge, the innocent team adopted the Datama Compare solution to automate and accelerate its monthly analysis, while increasing the precision and depth of the analysis.

Approach: Breakdown of sales values into 6 key KPIs

Market equation

The “market equation” materializes the logical link between the main performance KPI (North Star Metric) and the associated explanatory sub-indicators.

It’s common to analyze KPIs in isolation, but in reality, in-store sales volumes depend on many factors: promotional efforts, marketing activations, product distribution, in-store prices (each retailer is free to set its own prices) and the product offering.

In Datama Compare, these indicators are connected to each other, making it easier to understand the real impact of each sub-indicator on overall sales values.

For innocent, the market equation we use enables us to quantify precisely the relative impact of each KPI (Price, DV promo/non promo, volumes sold per DV, etc.) on the evolution of value sales.

Dataset

Datama’s integrated dataset is structured to cover all relevant dimensions (banners, brands, formats, fragrances, promotion types, etc.). In particular, it includes the absolute metrics required (volume, value sales and distribution) to automatically calculate essential derived metrics such as average price and demand (volume per DV point).

This data, imported directly from a simplified Excel file, is automatically fed into the Datama Compare solution each month.

We obtain the following file (obviously, the data is fictitious).

Data is imported into Datama from a simple Excel file (available in our Gsheet)

Key points

Once connected to Datama Compare, the innocent team can immediately view and automatically compare monthly, quarterly or annual (CAD or CAM) performance, simply by modifying the time filters.

The image below is a good example of a concrete analysis to illustrate the loss of over 1M€ in value sales between 2022 and 2023 due to a significant drop in value distribution (promotional and non-promotional). Similarly, the analysis revealed an additional loss of 220K€ due to lower demand during promotional periods.

We can also see that the drop in promotional demand (volumes/promotional sales) within the 4 brands had a negative impact of -220K€ on market sales.

With one click on each KPI, innocent can see how other features impact performance.

To make life easier for the “analyst”, so that he doesn’t get lost looking at the impact of each dimension/characteristic on each KPI, Datama integrates an interest score that highlights the characteristics that have the greatest impact on performance.

Results

Since integrating Datama Compare, innocent’s marketing team has benefited from a faster and deeper understanding of market dynamics and their brand.

Top management particularly values the ability to instantly identify, thanks to intuitive visualizations, the major levers for growth or decline. This gives the team more time to focus on its real added value:

Build a relevant and impactful storytelling from data,
Develop clear strategic recommendations for the category and the brand,

Datama Compare not only improves the accuracy and responsiveness of analysis, but also makes teams’ day-to-day work more pleasant by drastically reducing the time spent on data processing.