By Michelle Bennett, EVP, Consumer and Shopper Insights
If your organization is looking for a receipt panel partner, there are several important considerations to keep in mind, such as understanding the difference between a receipt panel data provider and a receipt panel consulting partner.
There are also a number of questions your organization can ask itself when embarking on the RFP process or renewing or exploring opportunities with new or current receipt panel partners. We hope this guidance helps you formulate these critical questions and more easily identify the right receipt panel partner for your business.
Receipt Panel Consulting Partner Versus Receipt Panel Provider
There’s a difference between the two. A receipt panel provider collects and sells receipt data with some methodological standards in place. A receipt panel partner:
- Applies rigid methodology to receipt panel collections and data releases
- Focuses on driving long-term growth to your bottom line through analytical education and insight support
This blog is intended to be a reference for when you’re renewing or exploring opportunities with current or new receipt panel partners. Use it to help ask the right questions and to easily identify the right receipt panel partner to make critical business decisions with confidence.
1. Unbiased Data Collection
Why is unbiased data collection important in research? It mitigates the risk of skewed results and limits misrepresentation of existing prejudices.
That is especially true for the consumer research space. One thing to look for in the receipt data collection process is how panelists are incentivized to submit receipts.
A receipt panel provider incentivizes panelists with more rewards to shop at a specific retailer or buy certain brands. The result is biased data that does not reflect true consumer behavior. The provider does this to increase submissions in certain channels where it doesn’t have enough sample size.
A reliable receipt panel partner will have a receipt panel that collects receipt submissions through a proprietary app with equal treatment across all receipts. Such apps should incentivize receipts equally regardless of basket size, retailer, or brand. This method minimizes bias and leads to more accurate consumer insights. The more rigorous the incentivization rules, the more qualified the receipt panel.
Pro tip: Ask your panel partner, “Do you incentivize receipts based on what retailers or brands they’re from?” If the partner answers no, the data will better reflect consumer behavior.
2. Calibrated to a large POS footprint
A receipt panel doesn’t necessarily need a POS backbone, but when it doesn’t have one to calibrate to, its accuracy decreases exponentially.
Some receipt panel providers may have limited data sources in the few industries they use to align panel data, and POS may not be one of them.
The first step to developing receipt data is projecting it to the U.S. census to make sure consumer demographics are correctly represented across gender, household size, annual household income, presence of children, and education level.
The second step is calibrating the receipts to POS market truth so category and brand sales are accurately represented. If a POS source doesn’t have breadth and depth, the receipt data becomes less accurate.
A receipt panel partner should have expansive POS coverage across a variety of different industries to calibrate receipt panel data. Circana’s receipt panel is calibrated to a POS footprint of over 20 industries – nearly every industry a buyer can purchase from.
Pro tip: Ask your panel partner, “How many retailers and manufacturers do you calibrate your receipt panel to?” If the number is more than 150, the receipt data will likely have a higher degree of accuracy and be more directionally aligned.
3. Richly coded attributes
Typically, richly coded attributes can only be generated through an item dictionary that’s built using a robust POS dataset. An item dictionary requires decades to build in order to collect, protect, and consistently grow UPC-level data.
A receipt panel provider might have a small item dictionary, meaning it won’t be as reliable for granular analysis. It might be able to answer a business question like, “What brand is driving the most sales in the drink category?”
A receipt panel partner takes decades to build an extensive item dictionary. It will be able to answer granular business questions like, “In that same drink category, what product attributes are driving the most sales and share growth?”
Pro tip: Ask your panel partner, “Is your POS footprint large enough to create a trustworthy proprietary item dictionary?” If the partner’s POS footprint isn’t large enough to provide adequate UPC tracking, it may not be as reliable for granular analysis.
4. Flexible reporting dashboards
A receipt panel provider might offer a platform with user-friendly, out-of-the-box reporting for broad consumer behavior questions. However, these reporting templates likely can’t be customized or fluid enough to respond to the dynamic nature of purchasing changes across specific categories, emerging brands, or niche audiences.
A receipt panel partner has a business intelligence tool in a robust technology platform that delivers reporting dashboards that are as foundational as they are flexible. This allows you to customize your reporting to market shifts with optimal efficiency, no matter how granular your consumer behavior questions.
Integrating different data sets in the same platform
Some receipt panel providers’ platforms can’t house POS data, survey data, scan panel data, and loyalty panel data, or activation planning in one system. But some receipt panel partners can. This capability allows for integrated reporting across the datasets.
Pro tip: Ask your panel partner, “If I ask a highly complex behavioral-based business question, will I be able to identify the answer easily in a custom reporting environment with analytical support if needed?” If the answer is yes, the partner’s platform allows for integrated reporting across datasets.
5. Consistent storytelling across data sets
Some receipt panel providers struggle to create integrated analyses using POS and receipt data if they don’t have POS data, or they don’t have enough POS data.
For example, if POS data shows you’re down in market share for a category, receipt panel data can then show you which consumer factors are driving that decrease in market share. Receipt data shows if your buyers are spending less per purchase, purchasing less frequently, or if there are fewer buyers altogether.
Using a category analysis as an example, here are the steps you’d take first:
- Anchor your market share numbers in POS data.
- Diagnose what’s happening at a buyer behavior level with receipt data.
Step number two is where many receipt panel providers start to miss. What clients commonly experience with a receipt panel provider is that their POS market share data will show one truth and their receipt data market share data will show another. And they should always trust POS data as their truth set.
A receipt panel partner delivers data sets calibrated across a different set of sources. These sources include POS from direct retailer relationships, raw receipt collection, the U.S. census and other publicly available macro market sources, public filings (10-K, 10-Q), and other third-party entries. This ensures a more inclusive, diversified view of the U.S. market’s buying behavior at scale across categories, brands, retailers, geographies, demographics, and more.
Circana’s receipt panel does this without creating an echo chamber or a vacuum of similar data points. Rather, it captures a more detailed picture of the market, revealing directional consistencies across those different data inputs for more cohesive, substantiated storytelling.
Pro tip: Ask your panel partner, “How will this receipt data compare to the POS data I use? Will market share in POS and market share in receipt be aligned in the same direction by an approximately 20 percentage point swing?” If it will, you will capture a more detailed picture of the market.
How to identify an unreliable receipt panel provider
There are two relatively simple ways to identify receipt panel providers that could be unreliable.
1. They rely on third-party sources in thought leadership presentations.
An easy red flag is if a receipt data provider frequently cites highly visible media outlets for macro trend insights in their webinars or articles. This may mean that their receipt data and other in-house data types don’t provide as much coverage for them to pull their own insights.
Pro tip: Ask your panel partner, “Why use an online publication instead of your own receipt data for insights?” Macroeconomic insights can be generated from receipt panels more accurately than from a lot of media publications as long as they are projected against POS data with a lot of coverage.
2. They claim receipt app user experience has a big impact on data quality and accuracy.
As mentioned above, a proprietary app is usually used to collect receipt data from panelists. A receipt panel provider may tell you its user-friendly app interface will increase data accuracy and quality. In reality, an easy-to-use app will likely only increase receipt volume, a small contributing factor in receipt data accuracy compared to quality POS calibration.
Pro tip: Ask your panel partner, “How do you make receipt data representative of the U.S. population aged 18+ across categories and brands?” If the answer is a user-friendly app, run. They may not be capturing the full story.
If you need help judging whether a receipt panel partner’s data is trustworthy, accurate, or worth the investment, be sure to talk with a NBD alignment practitioner or receipt methodology expert.
Talk to a General Merchandise or CPG Consultant
Circana’s Receipt Panel team can answer any questions your organization has as you work to unlock the full potential of your receipt panel insights.
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