In the current increasingly challenging and competitive environment, retailers rely heavily on promotions and offers to generate higher returns. Though promotions are powerful tools for enhancing sales, for many businesses, effective execution still remains a challenge. They fail to comprehend the negative impact of promotions, and in other instances, they find it difficult to understand why there wasn’t a noticeable lift in revenue despite aggressive promotion planning. This can be attributed to the lack of clear insight and disparity between activities associated with promotional campaigns.
At Happiest Minds, we enable retailers to derive maximum gain from promotions through promotion analytics. Our solutions offer valuable insights that facilitate better planning, assessment, forecasting, tracking and execution of promotional campaigns. We connect the customer, the product and the retail organization on a centralized platform, giving a single view of the promotion to all decision makers. The promotion, customer transactions and inventory are managed and viewed on a single platform.
Happiest Minds focuses on targeted campaigns to accelerate revenue generation. We offer our clients across industries powerful analytics that drive these campaigns even under complex circumstances—very short shelf life of certain products despite prolonged time to market is one such example. Our solutions intelligently consider the history (data from earlier promotions) and future (investment and inventory forecasting) to plan promotional campaigns effectively and generate more leads.
Neural networks, hybrid models and fuzzy logics help infer trends and forecasts. We leverage our machine learning and deep learning expertise to offer accurate insights that help facilitate rewarding promotions. We perform market basket analysis using the Apriori Algorithm, and algorithms like ARIMA and Holt Winters for forecasting.
At Happiest Minds, we follow a methodical approach for deployment:
By measuring performance, we help retail organizations to explore their strategic potential to the fullest. We offer them the competitive edge by running promotional campaigns in the best manner.
Our transformations help build the future
Promotion Insights
We guide organizations and enable them to come up with the right promotion strategy to improve awareness, footfall, revenue, reach and referrals. Happiest Minds offers strategic advice on products, pricing and promotions with an objective to enhance efficiency across the extended value chain and at the same time boost customer loyalty and basket size. Clients receive analytics data on:
- Campaign effectiveness: The impact of a similar campaign run around the same time in the previous year
- Shopper behavior: Deep in-store and online customer behavior analytics
- Competition and market: Detailed evaluation of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats
- Product information management and price classification: Crucial details on price and products that help sell products effectively
- Profitable promotions: Identification of value-adding promotions and the reasons behind their success
Forecast and Simulate
Extracting and mining historical data helps us to accurately suggest and predict meaningful outcomes from promotional campaigns. Happiest Minds focuses on the following parameters while forecasting to ensure predictable sales:
- Exogenous variants: Understanding the influence of external factors such as the weather, end of season, promotions and customer demand on buying patterns
- Inventory: Forecasting, planning and timely replenishment of the inventory during the entire promotional cycle
- Halo effect: Forecasting increase in sales of one product due to promotion of another product, and its contribution toward the overall ROI
- Cannibalization: Detection of visible and hidden patterns that have the potential of slowing down sales of another product in the same category
- Pull forward effect: Examining if a promotion is likely to offer only short-term gains but decrease over a longer term
- Advertising spend: Identifying the right channel and time for promotion advertising
- Target audience: Targeting the right customer segments for better promotion effectiveness
Promotion Monitoring
Happiest Minds offers solutions that equip category managers with accurate, real-time information using these four powerful “I”s to check if the promotion is managed properly without any lost opportunities, and if it has been offering returns as planned:
- Information: Actionable insights on promotion, transaction, click through, product performance, customer relationship management (CRM), reviews & ratings, inventory and pricing
- Intelligence: Role-based access to intelligently corelated information to key roles such as the CMO, marketer and class managers for informed decision making
- Investigations: Intelligent dashboards with information on promotion-related performance to enable key stakeholders to perform necessary investigations
- Insights: Crucial details on signals, cannibalization, elasticity, bundling, attribution and pull-forward effect to assist with inventory management and improve brand perception
Causal Analysis
We explore the cause-effect relationship between certain groups of variables and estimate the impact of the promotion precisely. Through post-promotion causal analysis, we have been able to increase accuracy of future sales and promotion forecasts. Causal analysis has also helped our clients separate meaningful data from the noise, shedding light on the influence of individual parameters such as the following toward the success or failure of a promotional campaign:
- Was the promotion or a certain advertising channel responsible for the surge or decline in sales of promoted products?
- Did the promotion have an impact on sales of a product even weeks after the promotion ended?
- What type of alternative scenarios could have been considered to maximize return on investment?
- What marketing tactic within the marketing mix was responsible for driving traffic to the promotion site?