Business Tip 3
Case History - Brand Optimization

Top Line
A major soft drink manufacturer uses XP3 to automate the process of recommending brand lineups to foodservice accounts.

Situation
Recently, a major soft drink manufacturer came to Interactive Edge looking to automate the time consuming process of recommending profitable brand assortments to fast food and convenience accounts for various fountain lineups. In the past, this was a manual process. Sales personnel would analyze demographic and historical sales information to determine sales potential. Then they would apply common sense to create a varied lineup.

Goal
Success in the project was defined as automatically generating both graphic representations and actionable recommendations on a monthly basis for each of about 1,200 scenarios (combinations of bottler ownerships, geographic locations and number of fountain valves). These finished presentations were to be available via the web for sales reps.

Action Taken
Using its XP3 tool, Interactive Edge integrated Spectra demand indices by geography with historical sales data from a syndicated provider to determine the potential share of each brand present within a market. From there, the logic was put in place to recommend only brands that were present in the bottler's portfolio.

To ensure that a varied lineup was presented to the consumer, when the tool found that a non-cola was the best choice, it was asked to see that each flavor was used only once, unless a certain potential share threshold was crossed. At that point, the tool would begin searching for additional brands of potentially profitable flavors. Using this methodology, XP3 took the guesswork out of selecting brands.

To push updates out to the field on a monthly basis, Interactive Edge used the automation capabilities of XP3 to load and integrate updated data into the tool, refresh each presentation and post the completed analyses to the customer's web portal.

Key Benefits

• Using XP3, the manufacturer was able to provide a consistent and fact-based approach to a situation that, in the past, was primarily subjective.
  
  
• The manufacturer was able to free up valuable time for its sales force to focus on strategic initiatives at its partner accounts.

The data, products and accounts depicted in this example are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual data, products or accounts is purely coincidental.