COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo., Jan. 24, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Jan. 24, 2018 – Global Market Development Center (GMDC) – an association that connects its retail, supplier and wholesale members to advance innovation in the marketplace – in partnership with Nielsen and Retail Insights, have launched an upgraded GM Hierarchy research tool for a more intuitive user experience and deeper levels of analytics across multiple categories.
GMDC, Nielsen and Retail Insights launched the proprietary tool in mid-2012 to offer GMDC members the first standardized and detailed look into the $202 billion GM industry. The platform showcases 18 major categories including Apparel, Baby, Candy, and Housewares with hundreds of sub-categories. The Nielsen coded data, which is reported from thousands of stores across the North American market, can be filtered by various channels for comparison, and includes more than 20 million SKUs.
“When we launched this powerful tool for our members five years ago, we did so with a goal to connect our members to developing GM industry trends,” said Patrick Spear, GMDC President and CEO. “Our new dashboard is simple, easy to navigate, and remains an invaluable resource for retailers and suppliers as they access sales information at our events, develop future strategies to deepen trading partner relations, and curate the right mix of sku’s to grow retail sales and profit margins.”
The updated platform offers a single resource for accessing deep levels of data to gauge channel activity and sales trends by each quarter. L1 category data provides top line category information used to track macro trends, while subcategory L2 and segment L3 offers a more detailed view into segmentation and item specifics. There are now multiple options for downloading data tables, seasonal charts and market share graphs for further analysis or for importing into customized presentations.
“The GM Hierarchy offers our organization a comprehensive view to better understand shopping trends and compare our performance to the total retail market. Anything that puts us closer to our customers is crucial as we seek insights into the basket,” says Rick Cicero, Director of Merchandising at C&S Wholesale. “The rich data helps my team make decisions, ask questions, and execute next-practices.”
Participants at GMDC’s annual GM Conference find the data particularly relevant as they forge relationships and prepare for the organization’s signature SEC, CCC, and MOR meetings.
“For wholesalers with the unique challenge of choosing and stocking products, the data provides a clear perspective on relative category and subcategory size and performance trends they cannot get anywhere else,” says Jeffrey Williams, SVP Retail Business Development at Nielsen. “Through true collaboration, we’re equipping GMDC members with the data they need to make data-fueled decisions to help prioritize goals, highlight the top performers, and track underperformers. For suppliers, the data helps them defend a position, allowing sales managers to identify opportunities with customers. Accurate trends across sub-categories enhances partner engagement to accurately compare current product offerings to other sub-categories in the midst of prioritization product development decisions.”
The GMDC/Nielsen GM Hierarchy is powered by Retail Insights who offer a number of resources to maximize the user experience including a user manual, how-to-guide, and training tutorial that may be viewed at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eB3wmIgEIR4. For additional information, visit https://www.gmdc.org/gmdc-nielsen-gm-hierarchy.
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About Nielsen
Nielsen Holdings is a global measurement and data analytics company that provides the most complete and trusted view available of consumers and markets worldwide. Our approach marries proprietary Nielsen data with other data sources to help clients around the world understand what’s happening now, what’s happening next, and how to best act on this knowledge. For more than 90 years Nielsen has provided data and analytics based on scientific rigor and innovation, continually developing new ways to answer the most important questions facing the media, advertising, retail and fast-moving consumer goods industries. An S&P 500 company, Nielsen has operations in over 100 countries, covering more than 90% of the world’s population. For more information, visit www.nielsen.com.
About Retail Insights, LLC
Retail Insights, LLC is a leading provider of dynamic data solutions that enable retailers, wholesalers, and suppliers to drive stronger business performance through the integration of multiple sources of data and transformation of that data into metrics and actionable insights. Through Retail Insights, aggregated data not previously available to wholesalers, retailers, or suppliers becomes a powerful asset, enabling more fact-based decision making for all stakeholders. Retail Insight’s proprietary web-based tools are intuitive and easy to use, and offer clients reports and performance dashboards with drill-down capability, fully customizable for multiple needs, departments, partners within an organization. For more information, visit retailinsightsllc.com.
About GMDC
Global Market Development Center (GMDC) energizes members and the marketplace by advancing a culture of Connect-Collaborate-Create-Commerce. As the leading GM and HBW trade association, GMDC is dedicated to serving its ecosystem of more than 600 General Merchandise and Health Beauty Wellness retailers, wholesalers, suppliers and service/solution member companies by enabling consumer-facing innovation and retail reimagined. GMDC's combined member volume represents more than 125,000 retail outlets and more than $500 billion in sales. To learn more, visit gmdc.org.
Media Contacts:
Todd Smith, Deane | Smith
President, CEO
Mark Mechelse, GMDC
Director of Insights & Communications
Genevieve Aronson, Nielsen
Vice President, Communications
Genevieve.Aronson@Nielsen.com
Attachments:
A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/40dfaade-ded0-468c-b606-709bb4f0badd