Marketview: Market Intelligence Capabilities for Retailers

Which is the best way to know your customers, especially in an industry like retail? The answer to this question is getting visibility into their shopping and spending behaviors. This can be the best possible way to understand customers’ preferences and further attract them. Stephen Bridle, MD of Marketview, highlights the importance of capabilities that these technologies assure to retailers, and mentions that the tech boom has primarily helped retailers evolve as more powerful intermediaries between suppliers and consumers. In the last few years, technology has contributed significantly to the growth of the retail sector, giving consumers a reason to come back to retail stores, with more tailored experiences catered to their needs and preferences. New Zealand-based consumer spending analytics firm Marketview utilizes their unique data accessibilities to bring similar capabilities to the industry, helping retailers understand and cater to their customers’ individual preferences. “We provide our clients with all the requisite tools and knowledge to make informed decisions based on consumers’ needs and what other competitors are doing,” says Bridle.

The firm takes pride in being one of the few companies that capture a 360 degree view of consumers’ spending habits, and helps its clients in understanding their demographics. With in-depth knowledge of consumers’ spending and behavior, retailers can understand how consumers are responding to marketing campaigns, promotional offers, market changes, and new offerings. To paint a more comprehensive picture of the company’s offerings, Bridle talks about the entire process and how it works.

Marketview’s data collection begins when a consumer makes a purchase with their debit or credit card, recording the time, location, and value of the transaction, as well as whether it was online or in store. Personal consumer information is then removed, and the remaining details are sent to Marketview. Marketview’s comprehensive datasets, deep industry knowledge and experience, and data science expertise allows them to provide actionable insights and prescriptive to their clients, helping them understand their customers’ demographic details, location proximity, and spending preferences and behaviours, amongst other things. Also, to help retailers in tracking their performance, the firm provides access to an online interactive dashboard which allows its clients to evaluate their performance on a regular basis.

With over 20 years of experience in the retail space, the firm has assisted a large group of retailers in New Zealand to improve their decision-making skills and continually play an exemplary role to boost productivity. Quoting an example, Bridle explains how Marketview helped a national apparel retailer to examine the underperforming stores and prioritize areas for opening new stores. To help them in the process, Marketview analyzed the population coverage of the existing stores, competitor positioning along with evaluating other key retailers across the country. While examining each of the clients’ stores, the firm emphasized certain factors such as store size, lease commitments, revenue growth, and staffing levels along with finding areas where the client had no stores. The market survey enabled the apparel retailer to understand which stores needed to close and helped them explore areas for opening new stores to increase future sales and profitability. The retail company’s association with Marketview further enabled them to identify the value that each of their locations assures in terms of profitability. The client, with the help of Marketview, achieved astonishing results that helped them lay a profitable plan for the future.

Apart from assisting retailers with its market intelligence tools, the firm has worked with several other entities along with local and central governments. In the years ahead, Marketview is intending to diversify its network in Australia, North America, and Europe, leveraging old and new partnerships it has built in these regions. “We also aim to deliver information more conveniently in an interactive, digital format, and want to continually aid our customers to excel in the market,” concludes Bridle.