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Maximize your NPD Solution Folders and NPD PowerView software to make more informed business decisions. Read on for insight from NPD Techworld's Steve Dodge, who shows how Solution Folders can help NPD Techworld clients understand their competition.
How Do I Use Solution Folders To Understand My Competition?
By Steve Dodge, Senior Account Manager, NPD Techworld
To better understand how you stack up against competitors, it is helpful to start with three goals: understand your performance in relation to competitors', analyze product mix to determine where you can make improvements to maximize revenue opportunities and pinpoint the product features most important to consumers. Solution Folders are the most efficient and effective way to locate the answers.
Benchmarking Performance
To understand the competition, two Solution Folders are key: Category Insights and Account Level Overview. These Solution Folders reveal the top models, brands and retailers in the categories users select to help companies evaluate whether they are capturing their "fair share" of the market.
The Category Insights folder contains such reports as Top Brand Trends Within Product Attribute, which quickly reveals who the key competitors are in a particular product category. Companies can see where their brand stands in comparison to the performance of competing brands on a unit and a revenue basis.
The Account Level Overview Solution Folder contains the Top Retailers by Category report, which helps companies benchmark their share within the top retailers, compared to their market share overall for the category. Often when doing this, companies find there are retailers where they are not obtaining their fair share of the business. Then they can develop strategies to better address their sales performance at these retailers.
Analyzing Product Mix
The item-level information accessible in Solution Folders and through NPD PowerView allows NPD's clients to examine the product mix in the market so they can manage their models more efficiently to gain revenue and market share.
With Solution Folder reports like the What's Hot report, clients can start by viewing the top-selling items in a category and then perform further analysis by filtering the report based on product attributes. This highlights if there are product segments where the client's brand is under-performing and identifies which items are not competing up to their potential in a specific segment. PowerView is the ultimate tool for this kind of item analysis because you can view item sales by price segments as well as by product attribute. By examining their product mix and the performance of each model, companies can manage their offerings efficiently from pricing decisions on models that have been in the market to the timing of introduction and feature sets of new models.
Understanding a Product's Appeal to Consumers
Companies often want to understand which product features are compelling enough to entice consumers to spend extra dollars. NPD's consumer information helps companies determine what's behind consumers' purchases - brand, price, features or other factors - to round out their knowledge of what's happening in the market. Solution Folders can provide trended data to show how current feature sets are performing in the marketplace. They also provide consumer insight to help companies understand purchase drivers over given time periods to assess which features matter most to consumers.
The Category Drivers Solution Folder displays how a particular product category is trending based on a certain product feature. For instance, in the notebook computer market, the Category Drivers folder provides a way to quickly see what percentage of notebooks are selling at a specific screen size, and what the average prices are for these notebooks over a period of time. A company can then compare this to their product offerings and those of their competitors to gain insight into whether a particular brand is able to garner more revenue in a particular feature segment.
This analysis provides part of the picture. The Brand Drivers folder, which contains the Purchase Motivator by Brand report, rounds things out by examining the reasons consumers said they purchased a particular brand in that category. This report shows to what degree consumers are brand loyal or what importance consumers place on the relationship between product features and price.
Want the same insight for your world? To apply these scenarios to industries beyond technology contact your account representative or e-mail insights@npd.com.
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