How can I influence the KPIs?

In the category overview, there are several KPIs, most of which you can influence. The most important KPIs are the number of families buying the products, the frequency of purchase, and the amount per trip.

You can view the KPIs at different levels, ranging from category to article. Depending on the level, other things may be going on. To attract new customers, communication is important as well as the offer (right articles at the right price).

At category level:

A low percentage means that the category is still new, or that there is a limited audience for the products. If you want to stimulate this, you should mainly do category development and convince customers that they need the product. Decreases can indicate a lower interest, due to, for example, too little innovation or a problem with the offer.

At brand level:

If there is a large gap between the penetration of the category and the penetration of your brand, there is usually still potential to grow further. Your communication will then mainly focus on your brand and its benefits. A decrease can have various causes, such as a problem with the positioning of the brand, less promotion compared to competitors, price increases, the removal of products from the list, …

At article level:

When a new article has difficulty attracting customers, this can have various reasons: it may be that the product is not popular, or that there is a problem with the positioning (price, packaging size, brand awareness, utility, …). Quick follow-up is therefore important to be able to adjust quickly. You can follow this up in the ‘Category Overview’ report in the graph per period, or you can order an ad hoc Launch Pack. With more mature products, there may be a decrease because customers often choose new articles. In addition, price changes and fluctuations in promo can also have an impact on the number of customers who buy a product. You can gain more insight into this via a Gain-Loss analysis. 

In addition to attracting new customers, you can also get existing customers to buy more. You can find more insight into the purchases of existing customers in the Heavy-Medium-Light (HML) report. Frequency is often influenced by communication.

Increasing the frequency can be done in several ways. With new products, it is important to get customers who have tried the product for the first time to buy the item again, until the purchase of your product becomes a habit.

Another, slightly more difficult method is to provide new usage moments or innovation.

In addition, you often have customers who buy an item once, for example to give as a gift to someone else (pralines, cookies, wine). You can then play on the fact in your communication that customers can also buy these products to reward themselves. 

The most popular method within the Colruyt Group to get customers to buy more is through the Xtra discount or through the service cost actions. This gives customers an extra discount when they buy more.

In addition, there are other methods, such as adjusting the volume of a package. When you make the packaging larger, customers will also buy more. If it is a replacement, where you replace a small package with a larger package, there is a risk that some customers will drop out. You can follow this up in the ‘Category Overview’ report in the graph per period, or you can order an ad-hoc Gain-Loss. In addition, you can also check in the ‘receipt analysis’ how much a customer buys of an item.

When customers buy items per 2 or more, there is probably a demand for a larger package. Finally, you can ‘shrink’ products that you can buy separately, so that the customer often takes the full package. Here too, you can check the ‘receipt analysis’ to see how much a customer buys of an item.