The Branded Pantry

A Progressive Grocer article on September 1, 2008 gives some additional insight about the collection techniques that Nielsen will use in trying to connect the stimuli that a consumer is exposed to in-store and their reactions. 

Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric is at its core, a movement to move budgets that have been tied up in traditional advertising channel into the in-store environment.  In order to do this the industry has to bring transparency into what happens to the consumer between the time they enter the store and the time they checkout.  What did they see, what aisles did they visit and what messages were effectively delivered and either acted upon or ignored. 

Nielsen has proven over the years that gathering information from a sample of consumers can be both insightful and representative of actual consumer trends.    In this case however, they also need to “project” executional behavior.  The consumer is not the only element that disappears when it hits the store door and doesnt reappear until checkout.  Products and promotional execution also disappear when they hit the back door and the reappear in the POS sales reports.  What happens to those products in terms of merchandising, POP support and other advertising/promotion support is every bit as important as which aisle the consumer visits. 

Nielsen will capture in-store stimuli in their sample of stores, but when dollars are at stake and with increasing scrutiny on ROI, both trading partners are going to want indisputable, in-store intelligence to help tune the plan and document the execution.