Data analytics companies dunnhumby and Placer.ai have teamed up on a new AI tool that assesses a grocer’s “competitive threat” and offers insights on “their attractiveness to shoppers at the chain, geographic, and store levels.”
The release of the Competitive Threat Evaluator comes a few months after the two companies announced they were expanding their partnership to “introduce a new range of connected insights from dunnhumby, powered by Placer.ai’s suite of location data.”
The new tool offers insights such as:
- Which chains pose the biggest short- and long-term competitive threat.
- Which stores in a chain are most vulnerable to competitors.
- Threats from competitors on price, promotions, rewards, assortment, experience, quality, speed, and convenience.
“Grocery retailers often manage hundreds, if not thousands of stores, across diverse geographies and different competitive landscapes. Before today, there wasn’t a single dataset that provided a holistic understanding of both the intensity and nature of each competitor a retailer faced,” Matt O’Grady, dunnhumby’s president of the Americas, said in a press release. “But with dunnhumby’s Competitive Threat Evaluator, retailers have a single dataset that provides invaluable shopper insights and store preferences to make sure they stay on top of their competitive threats.”
Grocers can more effectively allocate resources in response to competitive threats, according to dunnhumby. “Additionally, it can aid retailers in making informed decisions about where to build new stores, as well as bring retailers up to speed quickly on new markets they have entered,” the data analytics firm said.
The Competitor Threat Evaluator service offers insights into various business units, according to dunnhumby. That includes strategy and insights, store operations, marketing, assortment, pricing, and promotions.
The tool offers banner-level insights that enable grocers to rank their competitors in terms of threat level. Users can also review store-level insights that rank each store in the chain.