Kantar has launched an integrated retail, sales and marketing consultancy, Kantar Consulting, by merging its four founding brands: Kantar Retail, Kantar Added Value, Kantar Futures and Kantar Vermeer. The new firm employs more than 1,000 analysts, thought leaders, software developers and expert consultants.
Kantar Consulting will provide a range of tools for clients to understand the drivers behind shopper behavior and create transformational brand and retail experiences. Some of the offerings include:
• A Retail Virtual Reality Lab that will be integrated with RichMix, which uses analytics to measure the incremental impact of changing items and facings in a retailer’s inventory assortment. This allows companies to optimize their store layout and product offerings in an immersive, real-time environment;
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• RetailIQ, which uses data-driven research to examine market, shopper and customer trends; and
• Insights 2020, a customer-centric analytics tool containing information from 10,500 consumer surveys and 350 CXO interviews.
Kantar Consulting has linked its separate practices to help retailers and other companies achieve growth in a rapidly changing global environment. “For the large multinational companies that are the bulk of our business, growth is much harder to find than it used to be,” said Bryan Gildenberg, Chief Knowledge Officer of the Retail Sales and Shopper Practice at Kantar Consulting. “Our hypothesis is that increasingly, growth is coming from ‘uncomfortable’ places that these big companies don’t access as well. These places can be small niche opportunities, unusual markets, new formulations or new ways of reaching consumers.
“One of the major barriers to dealing with these changes is the siloed approach that clients take,” Gildenberg added in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “This is particularly seen in the separation of marketing, responsible for creating brand engagement, and sales, responsible for execution and demand conversion.”
“In order to find growth in these uncomfortable places, these companies need to integrate their approaches, so we thought that we should do this too,” said Gildenberg. “There’s been an unspoken need for the different parts of our company to work better together, so the corresponding parts of our client organizations can work better together.”
Kantar Consulting is part of Kantar, WPP’s data investment management division.
