Numerator Data Shows Half Of Consumer Shopping Trips Are Being Missed By CPG Brands

Numerator, a data and tech company serving the market research space, has released a new analysis on consumer shopping trips in tracked and untracked channels for 200 major CPG product categories. Tracked channels typically include brick and mortar stores in the food, drug and mass retail channels. Untracked channels include convenience, health, beauty, pet, liquor, dollar and specialty stores, as well as all online shopping.

Tracked channels have been the historic standard for understanding CPG market dynamics, defined by Point of Sale data from participating retailers. Legacy consumer panels are typically aligned to Point of Sale data.

Because Point of Sale data has contracted to less than half of CPG shopping trips, this means that brands are making major investment decisions without visibility into the majority of consumer spending and behavior.

In an evaluation of the largest 200 fast moving consumer good categories, Numerator data shows 29% or 57 categories are missing over half of all trips. Another 113 categories (57%) are missing between 35%-50% of CPG shopping trips. In total, 85% of the largest 200 categories analyzed are missing over a third of trips based on channel coverage gaps. Additional trip coverage gaps missed in brick and mortar food, drug and mass stores are incremental to this study.

“Brands and retailers make multi-million dollar decisions with partial understanding of consumers,” said Eric Belcher, CEO, Numerator. “While there is widespread acceptance that consumer shopping behavior has radically changed over the past five years, this is the first study to quantify the extent to which legacy market research sources, still widely in use, miss consumer behavior.”

The analysis compares full omnichannel trip coverage with trip coverage to brick & mortar food, mass and drug stores. The top 50 major categories missing trips are shown below. In addition to retail channels that do not share data, trips are often missed within food, mass and grocery stores. While coverage gaps cover a wide range of categories, frequently missed categories include:

• Fresh produce — which are often sold by weight, lack UPC codes, or are in hard-to-scan packaging.
• Perishables (milk, meat, ice cream) — often quickly placed into the refrigerator or freezer prior to legacy scanning exercises.
• “On-the-Go” and/or Immediate Consumption (energy drinks, non-seasonal candy, chips, small beauty items like lipstick) — items more likely to be consumed on-the-go, placed directly into a handbag or taken to another location (work, school, social gatherings) are less likely to be captured.
• Bulky/heavy items (cases of water, large packages of paper products, large bags of dog food) — often staged in the garage, pantry or mudroom so excluded from legacy scanning.