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CPG brands gain insights into shoppers, rival products via mobile tool

Consumer packaged goods brands are leveraging a crowd-sourced mobile insights engine to detect rivals? newly launched products and track their performance across key metrics nationwide, gaining valuable insights into shopper behavior and preferences. 

Instantly Product Watch gives companies and retailers advance warning about new category competitors and helps them evaluate their own market impact upon launching new products. As marketers grow more adept at communicating with shoppers in store through smartphones, knowing which products are being noticed by shoppers as well as which are driving the most interest and consumption is of inestimable value.

?Marketers today have to be hyper-responsive to the needs and shifting tastes of consumers, so having access to real-time consumer feedback is critical in knowing when and how to adjust strategies,? said Justin Wheeler, vice president of product innovation for Instantly, Los Angeles. 

?If brand managers aren?t seeing their new product resonate with consumers, or even worse, a competing product is taking market share, they will need to develop promotional campaigns with a retailer or rewards program to drive more traffic. 

?With the majority of CPG products today failing in stores, the response window is small, and every day counts,? he said.

The identities of the initial subscribing CPG companies and retailers were not disclosed. Mr. Wheeler said only that they are Fortune 100 CPG companies and retailers.

Product-hunting

Essentially, Instantly?s Product Watch has assembled an on-demand labor force of more than 350,000 everyday shoppers which it arms with a mobile app and asks to monitor retail shelves for new CPG products.

These shoppers are rewarded for each new product identified. 

Keeping tabs on rivals.

The company began gathering this data in August of last year, and with an average of 2,000 unique shopper sessions per day, it has cataloged and reviewed nearly 100,000 new products in the ensuing five months.
 
With Instantly Product Watch, companies have the ability to subscribe to one or several data sets by category and can follow product sightings over time and across any region. By adding Instantly Product Watch to its portfolio, Instantly is one step closer to building a comprehensive insights platform for marketers to access data and feedback at any stage of the product lifecycle, from research to development to consumption.  

In addition to product images, pricing data and store location information, Instantly Product Watch collects real-time feedback from shoppers to build purchase intent and success prediction metrics.   

The experience for shoppers begins when they enter a grocery or drugstore and receive an alert on their phones that a store mission is available. The iPoll mobile application then prompts shoppers to look for new products while they shop. 

The iPoll app offers shoppers free rewards ? gift cards, airline credits and more ? just for sharing an opinion about the products they buy and the places they visit.

The app provides a cash incentive to shoppers of about 50 cents for every valid submission. These incentives go into a ?bank? that they can cash out at any time for charity, an Amazon gift card or as cash value.

When they find a product that is displayed as new, they take a photo of it, capturing the price, packaging and context in which the product sits on the shelf. 

They also scan the bar code and answer a few short questions about their perception of that product, such as how interested they are in purchasing it and how successful they think it will be with consumers. 

The data is collected as a single product sighting and fed into a dataset on Instantly Product Watch in real time.
 
Subscription-based Instantly Product Watch is designed for a marketing department to use. 

Finding value
Each team, from brand managers to insights to mobile marketers, will find slightly different value in it. 

Trading rewards for information.

?Not only does it help marketers follow competitive products, but it provides visibility into the blind spot of marketing, when brands wait several weeks for sales data in order to understand how their new product is performing,? Mr. Wheeler said. 

?Mobile marketers can benefit from this kind of early insight as much as anyone.?

Final Take
Michael Barris is staff reporter on Mobile Marketer, New York