Rob Saker's Blog

During Summit, the mornings are the general sessions and the afternoons are the breakouts.  Most of the breakouts are sales pitches, but you do learn about the methodology people are using to get their results.  If you understand the methodology and the output, you can reverse engineer the tool and determine the critical deficiencies.

Attended the session on “Generating Actionable Consumer and Brand Insights from Blogs, Boards, and Internet Newsgroups.”  This is an IBM partner solution, where they use an enhanced search to identify, group, and report on mentions in viral communities like blogs and boards.  I’ve seen this technology before and it looks like they’ve improved the text grouping capabilities.  They still haven’t identified a good way of identifying the authoritativeness of the source, and their approach (basic number of visitors) doesn’t sound right.  Traffic doesn’t equal impact.  I’d love to see something tied up to panel, sort of like BuzzMetrics meets Homescan in the way Yahoo Consumer Direct works.

Skipped over to the “Pricing Strategies in an Emerging Inflationary Environment,” session.  This session has been packed every time today and that’s probably because we’re in a very difficult environment.  High inflation and low growth (stagflation) are causing the elasticities to shift higher.  People are more price sensitive overall, and companies are trying to take price increases.  IRI evaluated the data and found some key learnings:

1. The first mover on a price change loses disproportionately more market share than everyone else.
2. A price change of over 10% has disproportionately worse effect than under 5%.  It’s better to take two 5% increase as customers have the opportunity to adjust.
3. Once you take price, don’t give it back.  Volatility in price changes increases price elasticities, and trains the users to expect the discounts.  It’s somewhat counterintuitive to me, but rather than elasticities driving pricing, price volatility is driving the elasticities.

Needless to say, this is a very difficult challenge the entire industry must face.  The upside is that it provides us a window to change price and consumers do adjust.  Poor execution of the price changes could lead to an increase in private label.  We’re at 16% in the U.S. where Europe is in the 30’s.

Didn’t attend the next session, instead attending the showcase.  Looked at IRI Impact, which appears to be the next generation of CPGN Plus.  Impact seems evolutionary from CPGN Plus, but it does feature a potential integration with ILD.  So if you had custom hierarchies within ILD, they’d be cascaded into Impact.

I then checked out ILD.  The people demonstrating these tools have a script, and I think I threw my host off when I told her I wanted to fast-forward.  “I’ve seen ILD before, I understand it’s workings, I have very specific questions.”  I ended up seeing the 30 minute demo anyway.  Note to IRI, give Disney their animatronic figures back and use live humans next time.

ILD does not do the key thing I need it to do.  It’s “integration” capabilities consist of creating an extract that can be imported into another tool.  This is my biggest critique of any syndicated provider, it isn’t about your data and my data.  It’s data.  I don’t want to send users to your tool to do one task and then back to my tool to do another.  That’s inefficient and error prone.

IRI needs to do some serious research on web services and mashups. 

I want to have an internal tool that would make a web service call for specific measures by geography, time period, and product, and have that specific set returned to my tool.  I don’t want an entire extract.  I don’t want to do work in your tool, then somehow copy/paste it over to mine.

Demand Drivers seems to be another pricing promo tool meets post-event.  The nice things about the Demand Drivers are 1) it calculates post-event automatically based on the consumption data, and 2) it does the same for your competitors.  Still, we have post-event tools and have limited need.

Dinner was nice, and Frank Caliendo was hilarious.

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