-By Joseph Tarnowski

From the moment a shopper enters the store until the time she leaves the checkout, she's an ideal captive audience for any marketer -- yet what drives her behavior between these two points has long been a mystery. Transaction and syndicated data tells only part of the story: It won't reveal what aisles she perused, or what she didn't buy.

Most important of all, it won't tell retailers how this behavior can be influenced by in-store marketing and merchandising.

This is about to change. The Nielsen Company, as a result of its successful P.R.I.S.M. (Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric) pilot, will release in coming months a scalable tool that food, drug, and general merchandise retailers can use to understand which specific in-store media types are most influential in driving incremental sales, margin, and lift. (Nielsen is the parent company of Progressive Grocer.)

"Now, all of a sudden, the store is the marketing medium that everybody's assuming it was," says George Wishart, global managing director of Nielsen In-Store. "You know who's there, you know what she's being exposed to while she was there, and that's when you can really start painting the picture of what drives her behavior in the store. And perhaps most importantly, you can answer the question: 'Did my in-store marketing campaign deliver incremental sales, and what was the cost per consumer reached?'"

How it works

The tool uses a combination of technology, consumer insights culled from multiple sources, transaction data, and in-person auditors to determine who shops a particular store and what marketing and merchandising activities drive their behavior in the store.

Its key components are:

In-store audience: Nielsen installs infrared sensors at entrances and exits of the sample audience measurement stores, to provide a store traffic count at any given point in time for each store. In-store audits: Nielsen auditors conduct two types of sweeps. One is a full store sweep, during which they walk through the whole store six to eight times a day for seven consecutive days within an eight-week period, counting audiences across each part of the store. This is complemented by continuous store counts, where the auditor stands in one store part and counts all traffic walking in and out of that area. Retailer transaction-level scan data: Nielsen identifies the relationship between the audience data and the daily sales transaction logs across all categories, across the participating stores. Homescan panel: The Homescan panel is used in two ways: Homescan panelists are surveyed to determine the demographics (age and gender) of all shoppers on the given shopping trip, and to identify the time and day of that trip, and Homescan behavioral data on cross-retail, cross-category, and cross-outlet shopping is used to create a matrix of frequencies across the different demographics and day parts. Displays: Any display associated with the licensed category is captured across all store parts. Items on display are captured at the UPC level, and this UPC-level detail is coded to the individual brand and category. Shelf media: All shelf-centric media in the licensed category's primary location is recorded, and Nielsen specialists assign a vehicle to brand. Signage: All signage throughout the store is captured. As with shelf media, Nielsen specialists assign a vehicle to brand.
The system is applicable for large and smaller food, drug, and mass retailers, and Nielsen is investing in a new scaled technology to support convenience stores' smaller footprint.