Portfolio has arrived. The newest addition to gap intelligence’s Dashboard is here to save you time in your weekly workflow and help you make better decisions in retail and online. This tool aggregates weekly placement, pricing, promotion, and advertisement data into a clean and easy to digest graphic. Further, Portfolio expands on the quantitative data sets provided by gap intelligence, with product images for an additional layer of competitive intelligence. With so many different applications for this tool, it is best to start with some use cases to illustrate its functionality, followed by a list of benefits offered by the tool.
Product Managers
You are a product manager. One of your responsibilities is to manage the full life cycle of the products launched by your company. There are a handful of products that you currently track on a weekly basis. By using the “Merchant Assortment by Product” view in Portfolio, you can create an assortment for every product under your purview.
Once you are in the tool, you can expand the date range, viewing up to three years of a product’s shelf life at any merchant that assorted the SKU during that time frame. This view provides an easy, side-by-side comparison of pricing and promotional strategies at the relevant merchants. In addition to viewing a full year trend, you can collapse rows to allow for Quarter-over-Quarter (QoQ) or Year-over-Year (YoY) comparisons.
Sales/Account Managers
You are a Sales/Account Manager. One of your responsibilities is to keep track of your brand’s portfolio with a specific customer (merchant). With Portfolio, you can create a grid for a specific retail and/or ecommerce storefront, viewing the full assortment for a category of interest. Once you generate your Portfolio grid, you can analyze a full year’s worth of promotional data, including net price, shelf price, percentage discount, and promo value.
If you are an account manager or sales analyst with multiple customers (merchants), you can easily copy your assortment. The original will be preserved, however, you will be redirected to a copy of the original, allowing you to change merchant or even the promotional data within your grid. A major benefit offered by this tool is the ability to subscribe to any assortment you create. This function allows you to receive an email each week, letting you know your updated assortment is ready with the newest data. Additionally, the email will include the option to download and view an Excel variation.
Go-to-Market (GTM) Teams
You are on the GTM team. One of your responsibilities is to determine what your customers (merchants) need within their existing assortment, the white space. Within the Portfolio tool, you select the “Product Assortment by Merchant” type, choose the category of interest, and finally the account that you are interested in evaluating, online or brick-and-mortar. The retailer’s assortment will populate, including all products within the view. To narrow down your selection and find the white space within a specific sub-category, you can customize your assortment within the “Product Specifications” filter.
Once your view is concise and specific, there are additional ways to narrow down your selection through the brand and product filters. To better understand competitive advantages provided by the current assortment, you can select various product specifications to be displayed under the product images by clicking “Configure My Grid.” This is where you also have the option to change your grid values from the default “Net Price” to “Promo %,” “Promo Value,” or “Shelf Price.” Once you have found the white space you believe your company could fill, there are several ways for you to proceed:
- Share assortment w/ colleagues, providing them the same view on their own Dashboard profile
- Download assortment where you can make notes & adjust as needed
- The downloaded version will closely mimic what is generated on the Dashboard
- This will reduce time required to create a proposal for the target customer
- Subscribe to assortment to keep track of any changes to competitive SKUs of interest
Marketing/Sales Analytics Teams
You are on the marketing team. One of your responsibilities is to analyze your competitor’s promotional strategy for a specific product across multiple merchants during Q4 2019 and Q4 2020. You will select the “Merchant Assortment by Product” type, choose your category, and input the product of interest. Once your file generates, you will expand your date range, ensuring it includes Q4 2019 as well as Q4 2020. After the additional quarters populate, the tool provides the ability to collapse down rows, leaving just Q4 2019 and Q4 2020 visible.
At this point, depending on your needs, you can change the values in your calendar grid to reflect “Net Price,” “Promo %,” “Promo Value,” and “Shelf Price.” This view will provide you insight into your competitor’s promotional strategy over a multi-year or multi-quarter period. Not only will you be able to identify where competitors appear to concentrate promotions, you can identify periods with an absence of promotions at specific accounts.
Once You’ve Created a Grid…
Portfolio provides our clients an easy to manipulate tool, allowing for customization based on each individuals’ role and responsibilities through the following functions:
- Download – Prefer to view your trend in Excel in preparation for retailer meetings? Want to create a macro to analyze sales data alongside the Dashboard generated grid? Portfolio provides you the option of downloading into an Excel file, including the same information and design format.
- Copy – Managing multiple accounts? Tracking promotional activity of a select number of SKUs? The copy feature of Portfolio allows to preserve your original grid while creating an exact replica where you can adjust one or two aspects.
- Share – Working with a team? Find an interesting competitive grid? Portfolio provides you the ability to share a grid that you created with others in your organization, reducing the time required to share information.
- Subscribe – Tracking pricing trends on a weekly basis? Need the same grid for a weekly report for the leadership team? Rather than visiting the Dashboard each week to view the grid, you’ll receive an email each week letting you know the updated grid is available.
Additional key features include:
- Quick customization
- Timely and accurate data – updated weekly
- Category specific core specifications
- Extensive historical pricing
- Assortment subscriptions and automatic updates
gap intelligence’s overall services include more than 25 categories across the appliance, consumer electronics, audio, computing, and printing segments. For a demo of Portfolio, please contact sales@gapintelligence.com.
