6 Reasons Grocery Retailers Need Competitive Intelligence

Grocery retailers, squeezed by razor-thin margins and customer demands for the lowest prices, must move beyond manual price monitoring and guesswork.

To stay ahead, you need high-quality, reliable competitor pricing data.

…That’s where a competitive intelligence program comes in. 🎯

What is Retail Competitive Intelligence?

Retail competitive intelligence is the process of collecting, analyzing, and leveraging data on competitors’ pricing, promotions, product assortments, and product availability to help retailers make more informed decisions.

Competitive intelligence turns data into action – giving grocers the insights needed to optimize and execute pricing, improve product selection, and understand the competitive landscape. 

Accurate and consistent competitive intelligence data helps grocers stay competitive, meet customer expectations, and drive growth / profitability. 

Today’s competitive retail landscape demands a flexible approach to pricing. Competitive intelligence is one of the tools retailers need to make confident pricing decisions and maintain a competitive advantage.

1. Monitor Competitor Prices

Competitive intelligence makes monitoring competitors’ pricing, promotions, and product assortment easy. This proactive, data-centric approach helps retailers make informed decisions, rather than reacting after the fact. 

2. Identify Risks & Opportunities

Competitive intelligence helps retailers spot gaps in their competitors’ offerings, such as product categories you’ve overinvested in or flavors and scents you aren’t offering to customers. Capitalize on these assortment insights to capture more market share. 

3. Support Private Label Growth

Competitive intelligence can reveal opportunities for private label products by showing where national brands dominate or where competitors have a strong or weak private label presence. Expand or refine your private label strategy with confidence.

4. Streamline Strategy & Operations

By analyzing competitor prices, you can make better decisions about your own pricing strategies. This ensures that you’re competitive while staying aligned with your strategy – protecting margins and building loyalty.

5. Data-Driven Decisions

You have a ton of data! Make it work for you. The best part of competitive intelligence data is that it helps you make informed decisions, adjustments, and strategies across pricing, promotions, and product assortment, which leads to growth.

6. Fuel Your Price Engine

Competitive intelligence is a critical input for your retail price engine. It provides the market intelligence necessary for adaptable pricing decisions. A price engine relies on accurate data to recommend the best prices for thousands of SKUs. Without competitive retail data, a price engine operates in a vacuum, which can lead to suboptimal pricing that either erodes profit margins or loses customers to competitors with better price perception. 

So, retailers who invest in competitive intelligence stay competitive but also drives profitability, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction. 

How Grocery Retailers Use Competitive Intelligence

Whether you’re a category manager, pricing analyst, or merchandiser, competitive intelligence provides the data you’ve been looking for!

It empowers your teams to see competitor moves, understand trends, and fine-tune pricing strategies based on data instead of relying on intuition or historical performance. 

This insightful data even provides leverage when negotiating with vendors. Arm yourself with insights on how competitors are pricing or promoting products. One of our customers saw that a non-KVI item was on promotion at a key competitor. The promotional depth and start date were greater than what the vendor offered our customer. The category manager called the vendor, and they honored the same agreement. 

Plus, high-quality data plays a critical role in your long-term strategy. Tracking competitor data helps grocers refine to a pricing approach that align with market needs. 

Automation

Automation plays a pivotal role in retail competitive intelligence.

It reduces the manual effort required to track and analyze competitors’ pricing, promotions, and product assortments. Instead of relying on time-consuming processes, automated systems gather and analyze the omnichannel market at scale, providing you with insights faster. This means you can adjust prices, know what risks and opportunities exist, and know what price changes are making the biggest impact.

Ultimately, automation streamlines your operations – putting you ahead in the competitive landscape.

Our pricing solutions equip you with the intelligence needed to make faster, data-driven decisions. Be competitive in a constantly evolving marketplace.

Competitive intelligence is a powerful tool that fuels smarter pricing, better customer experiences, and more profitable growth. See your data in action — Click here to schedule a demo.