By: Clark Passino

As we’ve noted in this space before, polling done in a recent webinar with more than 100 industry executives has been very revealing about their view of their business, current focus and action to address the impact of high value shoppers on their brands or banners.  However, the real heart of the matter is: what can brand and retail banner marketers do differently?

Not surprisingly, our polling suggested that 76 percent of executives surveyed were using vendors to service their targeted marketing efforts.  Those partners were either running the function on an outsourced basis (11 percent) or participating in a blended model with a mix of internal and external capabilities (65 percent).

Of course, not all partners are created equal.  So, what’s new?  What are industry leaders doing to develop and reap the rewards of best practices?  The answer lies, we believe, in your access to data and execution partners that enable you to target, acquire and grow high value households.

At IRI, we’re mixing the necessary data elements to target households for marketing purposes.  Our objective is to estimate the value of each individual household in the U.S. for every CPG category, subcategory and brand.  Using these estimates, we enable our clients to take action using our data to target households across direct marketing channels.  This combination of data and execution capabilities is leading the industry in driving growth.