Nielsen
Performance Management for Better Decisions and Profitable Growth

Measuring the effectiveness of sales and marketing programs is one of the greatest challenges for Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) manufacturers. This challenge is underscored by the complexity of gathering all the relevant data and applying the right data science to pinpoint the specific impact of each program. And who better to do this than the pioneers of consumer measurement— Nielsen. Richard Hall, Senior Vice President, Revenue Management and Optimization at Nielsen, believes the company has the only end-to-end solution that fully addresses this need, both now and into the future.

Since inception in 1923, Nielsen has expanded into a global enterprise serving thousands of CPG clients in more than 100 countries. Headquartered in the Big Apple, the company measures and delivers media and marketing information with a keen focus on the consumer— across markets, channels and devices—to capture the most complete view of trends and habits worldwide. Nielsen was a Big Data company before the term was coined. This comprehensive data enables total measurement of consumer sales, an optimized set of marketing programs and applications to drive improved performance across the sales process. “We’re constantly evolving, not only in terms of where we measure, or what we measure, but in how our insights can help drive profitable growth,”says Hall.

As the world becomes increasingly digital and connected, “Big Data” and 1-1 marketing are the new reality for CPG. Hall sees an increased pressure on CIOs to embrace the opportunity and use data to connect with customers directly. “The digital revolution is redefining every aspect of business—from how companies market to how customers shop,” remarks Hall.

The formula for success is also changing. “It requires the ability to integrate the ever increasing and burgeoning amount of data from all its sources, to apply data science, advanced analytics and modeling to that data, and generate insights that can be accessed and activated seamlessly across the enterprise.”

Hall adds that no other company can address the complete ecosystem–data, analytics, applications and interoperability with enterprise systems–all of which are critical to improve efficiency, increase revenue and achieve profitable growth.

According to Hall, Nielsen’s manufacturing clients have ever-changing challenges to first measure the effectiveness of their trade spend and then improve their sales activities. He highlights three recent Nielsen innovations that are helping clients do both and enhance their overall business processes—consumerization of the domain, market-wide promotion benchmarks, and comprehensive sales predictive planning applications. “Consumerization is the process of not only measuring a marketing and sales program, but drilling into it to identify individual consumers and segments. “We have also amassed a database containing sales data to measure the performance of millions of trade promotion events. This arms our clients with predictive sales planning tools that build insightful analytics of customer’s buying trends which are then integrated into the business process,” explains Hall. Nielsen focuses on offering enterprise-class applications to support the full spectrum of revenue management.

Nielsen’s differentiator lies in its ability to drive meaningful insights into the applications that seamlessly integrate into the business model. Nielsen, in recognition of the industry’s need for accurate and consistent metrics to measure digital shopping experience, is developing enhanced applications based on the current market needs. “We foresee a huge impact of the internet across verticals,” offers Hall. For Nielsen and its team, helping customers to understand the impact of the changing environment has always been the key focus and it is what they continue to do.

Our comprehensive data and software applications provide better data insights to enhance the client’s business processes