Total Economic Impact study: gfknewron delivers a 345 per cent return on investment after only three years
Manufacturers and retailers are increasingly faced with the challenge of adopting a data-driven approach to keep up with changing consumer demands and seize growth opportunities. A new commissioned Forrester Consulting study showed that a composite organisation, based on interviewed customers, leveraging the digital data platform gfknewron improved their market value, reduced operational costs, and increased the efficiency of their marketing campaigns – payback on investment took place after less than six months.
Consultants of the research and advisory company Forrester have conducted a Total Economic Impact™ study of GfK’s data platform gfknewron. The platform helps decision makers in the tech and durables industry to safeguard decisions, gain flexibility and future-proof their business using up-to-date data. Use cases range from planning market entries to tailoring marketing campaigns to improving category management. The Forrester study compiles insights from interviews with gfknewron users from the tech and durables industry. Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single example composite organisation, a large B2C brand that uses the three propositions gfknewron Market, gfknewron Consumer, and gfknewron Predict.
Significant market value increase through data-driven decisions
Managing sales and marketing tactics, e.g. adjusting channel priorities or planning price promotions, used to be a guessing game based on past experiences and quarterly trend reports. The digital data platform gfknewron allows decision-makers to monitor market and consumer trends with its always-on market insights across all categories from a single source and with up-to-date information. This allows companies to make faster, more informed decisions and to create tailored marketing strategies and media campaigns for each category based on the latest consumer trends. In the case of the example composite organisation, these capabilities improve its market value by US$2.5 million, representing 0.5 per cent of its annual revenue.
Incremental profit growth using the gfknewron Predict proposition
In addition to market and consumer data from gfknewron Market and gfknewron Consumer, the Predict proposition supports pricing and promotional insights. With the help of the Price Planner, Promo Planner and Price Elasticity, managers can monitor the performance of their products at a granular level across all categories and channels and gain the opportunity to adapt existing tactics like pricing strategy or channel mixes quickly. Up-to-date information also helps to optimise pricing decisions and facilitates advanced forecasting which adds up to an incremental increase in profits. In case of the example composite organisation, this resulted in incremental benefits of US$1.1 million.
Increased operational efficiency for data collection, analysis, and reporting
Sales and marketing teams often struggle to stay on top of market and consumer trends. Reports are valuable for high-level information, but do not deliver enough details, while data from retailers is in-depth enough, but requires a high degree of manual effort to render it useful. The data platform gfknewron streamlines this process by automating most of these formerly manual processes. This frees up to 80 per cent of marketing and performance insights teams and drastically increases efficiency. The reduction in total FTEs for data collection combined with a reduction of manual effort contributed to US$829,000 in savings for the example composite organisation.
Fast amortisation and high ROI
The Forrester Total Economic Impact™ study shows that using a data-driven approach leads to significant increases in efficiency, market value and incremental profits. The example composite organisation recorded, over a span of three years, US$4.85 million in benefits versus US$1.09 million in costs covering subscription fees, implementation and training. This added up to a net present value (NPV) of US$3.76 million and an ROI of 345 per cent – not taking into account unquantified benefits such as easy-to-use dashboards as well as improved and faster decision-making.
For more information, please access the full study here: The Total Economic Impact of gfknewron
About the study
The study “The Total Economic Impact™ of gfknewron. Cost Savings And Business Benefits Enabled By gfknewron” was commissioned by GfK and delivered by Forrester Consulting in October 2022.
To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed five representatives with experience of using different propositions of gfknewron. The benefits in this study are applied in a way to demonstrate the value proposition of gfknewron Market and the incremental benefits of using gfknewron Consumer and gfknewron Predict. For the purposes of this study, Forrester aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single example composite organisation that is a regional set up of a major, global, multibillion-dollar B2C brand with 2 million customers and revenues of US$500 million per year that uses gfknewron Market, gfknewron Consumer, and gfknewron Predict.