The San Francisco firm hopes to highlight how successful product merchandising is, both on and off-shelf, for three US brands of hot dogs and sausages. The study will look at the performance over 16 weeks and will extend to 42 other household brands like Coca-Cola, Heinz, M&Ms and Pepsi.
The three sausage companies are: Oscar Mayer Hot Dogs, Applegate Sausage and Ball Park Brand Hot Dogs.
The goal of the Summer of Merchandising programme is to inform businesses of Quri’s USP – Performance Driving Merchandising. It’s a new framework for manufacturers that aims to deliver “standardised, unbiased, actionable measurements” of store merchandising across major US retail chains, according Quri’s chief marketing officer James Lamberti.
Quri is used by hundreds of leading blue chip businesses including Proctor & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson and Tyson Food to optimise the $4trn US companies spend on merchandising every year.
The preliminary insight for hot dogs suggests that sausages do much better than a range of other brands at getting displays outside of its main aisle. Around 96% of sausages are displayed outside the aisle customers would expect to find them - for example, in a refrigeration unit next to beer.
This was “very positive” said Lamberti, but display presence across Walmart and Target stores for sausages hovered at 20% for aisles where consumers would expect to find sausages. “This is not good enough and sales of hot dogs over the busy summer period will likely be hit,” he added.
Quri will be channelling the data over 16 weeks in a bid to optimise trading for the 45 brands over the summer period when sales tend to spike.
“Our first glimpse of Summer of Merchandising data substantiates the significant opportunity we have as an industry,” said Justin Behar, CEO and co-founder of Quri.
“Just days before Memorial Day, we see out-of-stock rates ranging from 1% to 17% and off-shelf display presence varying between 16% and 74%. These significant performance gaps leading up to Memorial Day and throughout the year are greatly minimized when brands continuously measure merchandising conditions and integrate that intelligence into a more dynamic merchandising approach.”