Thought Leaders in Big Data: Keith Anderson, VP Strategy of Profitero (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let me see if I’ve got this. You help retailers with pricing information and you help manufacturers optimize their channels through these retailers. Is that a good summary?

Keith Anderson: That’s a great summary. The retailers also care about assortment. We can also help them, very efficiently, identify products that they don’t carry and that their competitors carry that may be selling well and or that shoppers have reviewed positively. The retailers are getting more sophisticated in how they leverage our capability but it’s primarily about price and assortment for the retailers. For the brands, it’s an even broader set of analytics that they care about.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down a bit and give us the kinds of insights that you are able to extract for pricing optimization.

Keith Anderson: There’s a slight distinction between price intelligence, which is how we characterize ourselves, and price optimization, which is about automatically re-pricing products not only based on your competitor’s prices, but also the stock availability and all kinds of other factors. For the scale of customers that we work with, the same way that we’re highly specialized in accurately collecting the data, there are highly specialized price optimization vendors like Demand Tech and several others. We prefer to partner with those companies rather than trying to compete as an all-in-one solution.

The types of analytics around price that we can offer are on products that are exactly the same—the same UPC, packaging, and pack configuration. How competitively priced are you versus your competitors on that product? Of course, we can very easily aggregate that to a category or a department level because the hierarchy inside these retailers goes all the way down to sub-category buyers and all the way up to Vice Presidents. We can show our customers how competitive they are versus their key competitors at whatever level of granularity they want. In some cases, they want to see it even down to the local store level and in some countries, it’s to monitor local pricing as well. That really depends on whether the retailers vary price store by store and how those online orders are fulfilled.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Keith Anderson, VP Strategy of Profitero
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