​GfK’s Data Platform for Business Decision-makers Delivers Payback on Investment After Less than 6 Months

Gfknewron enables brands to reduce 30% of time spent on root cause analysis

Consultants of the research and advisory company Forrester have conducted a Total Economic Impact™ study of GfK’s data platform gfknewron.

Manufacturers and retailers are increasingly faced with the challenge of adopting a data-driven approach to keep up with changing consumer demands and seize growth opportunities. A new commissioned Forrester Consulting study showed that a composite organization, based on interviewed customers, leveraging the digital data platform gfknewron improved their market value, reduced operational costs, and increased the efficiency of their marketing campaigns – payback on investment took place after less than six months. 

The platform helps decision makers in the tech and durables industry to safeguard decisions, gain flexibility and future-proof their business using up-to-date data. Use cases range from planning market entries to tailoring marketing campaigns to improving category management. The Forrester study compiles insights from interviews with gfknewron users from the Tech and Durables industry. Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single example composite organization, a large B2C brand that uses the three propositions gfknewron Market, gfknewron Consumer, and gfknewron Predict.

In the Middle East region, GfK is committed to helping consumer product companies to deliver growth with data-driven intelligence by offering access to critical knowledge in real-time powered by gfknewron around consumers, markets, brands, and media. We are also continuously strengthening our position & operation in geographies with significant growth potentials like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iraq, and Pakistan.” said Nacho San Martin, Managing Director – Middle East, GfK.  

Significant market value increase through data-driven decisions 

Managing sales and marketing tactics, e.g. adjusting channel priorities or planning price promotions, used to be a guessing game based on past experiences and quarterly trend reports. The digital data platform gfknewron allows decision-makers to monitor market and consumer trends with its always-on market insights across all categories from a single source and with up-to-date information. This allows companies to make faster, more informed decisions and to create tailored marketing strategies and media campaigns for each category based on the latest consumer trends. In the case of the example composite organization, these capabilities improve its market value by $2.5 million, representing 0.5% of its annual revenue. 

Incremental profit growth using the gfknewron Predict proposition 

In addition to market and consumer data from gfknewron Market and gfknewron Consumer, the Predict proposition supports pricing and promotional insights. With the help of the Price Planner, Promo Planner and Price Elasticity, managers can monitor the performance of their products at a granular level across all categories and channels and gain the opportunity to adapt existing tactics like pricing strategy or channel mixes quickly. Up-to-date information also helps to optimize pricing decisions and facilitates advanced forecasting which adds up to an incremental increase in profits. In case of the example composite organization, this resulted in incremental benefits of $1.1 million.  

Increased operational efficiency for data collection, analysis, and reporting 

Sales and marketing teams often struggle to stay on top of market and consumer trends. Reports are valuable for high-level information, but do not deliver enough details, while data from retailers is in-depth enough, but requires a high degree of manual effort to render it useful. The data platform gfknewron streamlines this process by automating most of these formerly manual processes. This frees up to 80 percent of marketing and performance insights teams and drastically increases efficiency. The reduction in total FTEs for data collection combined with a reduction of manual effort contributed to $829,000 in savings for the example composite organization.  

Fast amortization and high ROI 

The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study shows that using a data-driven approach leads to significant increases in efficiency, market value and incremental profits. The example composite organization recorded, over a span of three years, $4.85 million in benefits versus $1.09 million in costs covering subscription fees, implementation and training. This added up to a net present value (NPV) of $3.76 million and an ROI of 345 percent – not taking into account unquantified benefits such as easy-to-use dashboards as well as improved and faster decision-making.