Measure Shopper Marketing Trends and gain consumer insight with our simple approach called The Consumer Connection™ Program. Brand Marketers struggle to capture measurement beyond quantitative metrics and scan data. Our simple three-step process is more than a Secret Shopper program (though Secret Shoppers do play a part); our process provides you with the tools to gain insight on your promotional spend, understand brand perception from consumer interviews, observe and measure buying behavior and drive sales at the actual point-of-sale.

Consumer Connection™ Program

A² – Assurance Audits via Mystery Shopping
Using a third party agency — us! — provides results Brands can depend on when planning and budgeting. Brands rely on their agency partners to execute events and promotions and deliver a return on both objectives and investment. Detailed results on findings from Secret Shoppers and our other strategies are reported within 24 hours and visible through our proprietary web-based reporting system. Our services also include photo verification. The images from the Secret Shoppers in the field provide visual assurance and are a great way to see your promotions come to life without having to be present at each and every store or event.

Brand Check ™ Consumer Intercepts

Interviewing consumers provides brands with qualitative measurement that cannot be captured from scan data or quantitative metrics. Our national coverage allows brands to capture activity from multiple retail channels or simultaneous field events to develop a complete picture, allowing brands to marry our field market research with the sales data and understand both trends and shopper behavior. More importantly, our data is captured from consumers at the point-of-sale or at the actual event, in the environment of significance, outperforming even the best Secret Shopper programs.

We deliver results that provide Brands with detailed information that goes above and beyond a typical Secret Shopper initiative; it helps measure the value of the promotion and identify opportunities for execution improvement for future events. Brands love knowing the rate at which consumers recall the messaging, the consumers’ impression of the quality of the engagement, the perception of the interaction with the Brand Ambassadors and whether or not the consumer would recommend their product. Field events are no longer an unmeasured medium; they are the best way to measure and conduct a true “Brand Check.”

UpSell™ Suggestive Selling Program:

Our unique program promotes behavior where employees want to increase the quantity of suggestive selling, which directly increases sales. ICC/Decision Services will develop a custom program for your brand, with the key placement of Secret Shoppers, among other strategies. This unique UpSell™ Suggestive Selling program is designed to drive incremental sales by retail store associates or brand ambassadors who mention your brand or promotion. Personnel are incentivized and our trained field team, including Secret Shoppers, delivers the reward on the spot. We deliver flawless execution with our Brand Managers and Secret Shoppers, and manage the logistics, reward delivery and store operations communications; it is a win-win for both the brand and retail chain!

CASE STUDY

Ensuring Accuracy and Peace of Mind: Promotional Compliance Assessment

The Challenge: Some of our clients spend millions of dollars each week making sure their product gets in front of the customer at exactly the right moment. But how can a client honestly know that its promotional events are being executed correctly? Did those promotions really look like the creative renderings seen in the design and marketing meetings? Our client demanded an objective response to these questions. And the answers would make a significant impact on subsequent decisions to continue implementation of their promotional campaigns.

Our Solution: ICC/Decision Services met the client’s objective; we delivered the third-party perspective needed to conduct an accurate assessment of its promotions. By visiting locations scheduled for our client’s promotional events, our field reps — a higher level of Secret Shopper — were able to determine firsthand whether or not those events were executed properly. Our field reps took digital photos, verified accurate event set-up, and queried on-site promotional staff about their product knowledge.

Our field reps successfully audited a 10% sample. Thus we could quantitatively demonstrate to our clients that their promotional events were being executed successfully and accurately. As a result, our client effectively secured the ongoing business of CPG, a large consumer packaged goods brand.

How We Did It: On behalf of CPG companies, national marketing organizations and others, ICC/Decision Services has successfully audited hundreds of thousands of events across the United States, utilizing Secret Shoppers, field reps and brand champions. Using specific customized parameters based on our clients’ own brand standards for measuring event execution, we can provide qualitative and quantitative data that help to assess promotions and to determine the effectiveness and compliance of onsite employees.