That next snack you eye on your grocery shelf? If it’s a PepsiCo brand, big data might explain its product placement, TechHQ reports.
The food, snack and beverage conglomerate behind powerhouse brands such as Pepsi, Lipton, Tropicana, Gatorade, Aquafina, Frito-Lay, and Quaker among many others, PepsiCo raked in $63.53 billion in 2017. The company believes big data drove these impressive numbers.
Pep Worx, PepsiCo’s proprietary big data and analytics platform developed in-house, helps the company and its retail partners alike ID valuable shoppers by location to enable smarter decisions on PepsiCo product assortments and merchandising. The platform provides insights for inventory selection, product placement and promotional strategies.
For example, PepsiCo tapped into latent demand for its Quaker Overnight Oats, single-serve cups of dry oats soaked overnight in milk or yogurt in the refrigerator to provide a healthy, cold breakfast cereal by the morning, using Pep Worx to identify 24 million households from a dataset of 110 million US households, according to Supermarket News.
“We were able to launch the product using very targeted media, all the way through targeted in-store support, to engage those most valuable shoppers and bring the product to life at retail in a unique way.”
“We were able to launch the product using very targeted media, all the way through targeted in-store support, to engage those most valuable shoppers and bring the product to life at retail in a unique way,” Jeff Swearingen, Senior Vice President of Marketing at PepsiCo, told Supermarket News. “These priority customers drove 80 percent of the product’s sales growth in the first 12 weeks after launch.”
Wins like this are the culmination of PepsiCo’s long road to big data that demanded years of research and testing before arriving at Pep Worx. Its first use for big data was to get a sense of its one billion customer base and streamline its supply chain across the 200+ countries in which it operates. Before being unleashed via Pep Worx, these data mostly sat in the form of tidy reports.
PepsiCo only recently saw a greater opportunity in the data and began exploring how it can leverage it in a more strategic manner. While a laborious undertaking (and less trendy than AI and IoT), the returns can be tremendous as PepsiCo’s endeavor with Pep Worx illustrates.
