Abstract:

The following, linked, papers argue that representative consumer panels, reflecting actual purchasing behaviour, have a unique role to play in the provision of relevant, actionable information to both the retailers and the manufacturers who wish to sell to them, whether nationally or on a pan-European basis. Allan Breese draws on his own, and TN AGB's, extensive experience in working with such information in Great Britain, which has been in the forefront of many retailing trends and in the development of a panel based response to changing data needs. His case histories cover three main areas: 1) The basic, but important: evaluation of retailer strengths and weaknesses by market, Private Label levels, penetration and trip size/frequency, demographic profiles and loyalty. 2) Shopper studies which analyse why retailers under trade or over trade, and who is benefiting from lost sales. 3) Tailor made studies of the behaviour patterns of a retailer's shoppers, with specific reference to segmentation by size and frequency of shopping trip. Richard Piper examines briefly the current similarities and differences in trade structures and developments in the main European countries, using a major retail study conducted by Europanel, before moving on to illustrate the essential cross- country comparability of consumer panel data and the steps that are being taken to increase its utility at a European level. He includes a description of both the existing Europanel Database and the disaggregated version that is being developed.