Dunnhumby, Placer.ai partner to provide competitive threat knowledge to retailers

Dunnhumby is debuting Competitive Threat Evaluator, a tool that diagnoses the intensity and nature of a retailer’s competitive threat. It also provides actionable knowledge about competitors and their attractiveness to shoppers at the chain, geographic and store levels.

This web-based tool combines geo-location data from Placer.ai—covering cross-shopping behavior, proximity to competitors and the density of competitors within a store's trade area—with customer perception data on price, promotions, assortment, in-store and online store experience from dunnhumby’s annual Retailer Preference Index.

“Grocery retailers often manage hundreds, if not thousands of stores, across diverse geographies and different competitive landscapes. Before today, there wasn’t a single dataset that provided a holistic understanding of both the intensity and nature of each competitor a retailer faced,” said Matt O’Grady, dunnhumby’s president of the Americas. “But with dunnhumby’s Competitive Threat Evaluator, retailers have a single dataset that provides invaluable shopper insights and store preferences to make sure they stay on top of their competitive threats.”

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With the Competitive Threat Evaluator, retailers will be able to determine:

• Which chains are a retailer’s biggest competitive threats, in the short and long-term.
• Which retailer’s stores are the most and least threatened by competition.
• Which retailer’s stores are facing the biggest threat from competitors that are strong on price, promotions, rewards, assortment, experience, quality, speed and convenience of brick and mortar, and digital channels.

By understanding the nature of their competition, retailers can prioritize which levers to address when developing overall banner, pricing and assortment strategies. This insight will allow them to optimize resource allocation across their chain, focusing on stores facing the greatest competitive challenges. Additionally, it can aid retailers in making informed decisions about where to build new stores, as well as bring retailers up to speed quickly on new markets they have entered.

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The Competitive Threat Evaluator provides benefits to retailers across business units:

• Strategy and Insights. Prioritize which competitors to respond to when setting overall banner strategy. Identify stores and regions to prioritize growing competition. Access competitive and cross-shop diagnostics, to help explain why certain stores may be under or over performing.
• Store Operations. Prioritize stores for remodeling and identify current and future locations that need enhanced speed of shopping, increased convenience, improved online fulfillment, and better digital shopping experiences. Provide store managers with comprehensive insights into the local competitive threats they encounter.
• Marketing. Prioritize markets and neighborhoods for increased marketing support, and tailor marketing messaging to effectively counteract competitors.
• Assortment. Identify which stores may need to lead with higher quality assortment.
• Pricing and Promotions. Determine which stores should adopt a more competitive pricing strategy and identify the appropriate pricing approach for each store, including which competitors to benchmark against.

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Accessed through an easy-to-use dashboard, the Competitive Threat Evaluator allows retailers to identify and extract insights through three separate user views:

• Banner Level Insights. This dashboard view ranks the retailer’s competitors by intensity and nature of competitive threat, combining RPI and Placer.ai data. 
• Store Level Insights. With this dashboard view, a retailer gets a complete ranking of each store in their chain, as well as store level diagnostics.
• Store-Level Threat Maps. This dashboard view provides additional functionality that helps a retailer visualize the competitor threat, banner by banner.

Early access to the Competitive Threat Evaluator is now available to grocery retailers, with other retail sectors to follow soon.