The Challenge
PUMA’s mission of “Forever Faster” is the global sports brand’s promise to provide their customers with the right product in the right place in terms of design, pricing, and distribution.
What’s happening with the brand and products in the marketplace? What feedback and reports are coming in from retailers? A lack of visibility across the market is a major challenge for many brands. “As a brand that sells into hundreds of retailers, it can be quite common to only get data back from 20% of them,” said Danny Brown, PUMA UK’s Business Operations Manager. “What about all the rest? What’s my discount in the market at the moment? What’s my average selling price?”
How do you formulate a successful pricing strategy in a saturated market such as the UK to get high sell-through, but not negatively impact margin? “As far as price goes, is the product situated in the right place?” asked Danny Brown. “I know personally, that if you overprice by £5, your sell-through can fall off by 70%.”
Additionally, understanding global trends and translating them to a specific market means the PUMA UK team must be sensitive to the nuances of their market, and provide those insights back to the central PUMA team.
“EDITED gives you access to data you’d never be able to get by manually searching. This allows me to make decisions on a local level and share with the wider global team.”
The Solution
With the world’s largest retail data source, the EDITED Retail Market Intelligence Platform tracks global data on more than 4+ billion SKUs. For a global firm such as PUMA, being able to look at pricing across different markets helps individual regional management teams around the globe. EDITED’s Market Analytics technology helps PUMA’s team analyze the pricing architecture of UK competitors and the positioning of PUMA’s range to identify that sweet spot.
Danny Brown, PUMA UK’s Business Operations Manager says, “EDITED allows you to get your assortments right. You need to act as soon as you see something evolving. The trends that we spot in EDITED go into our rapid response packs.”
For example, PUMA UK relied on internal data to identify the right colors to capitalize on, leading the team to prioritize a neutral black or grey color in key categories. Using the EDITED Market Analytics color chart tool, PUMA UK was able to analyze the breakdown of best-selling colors in the market, where the team discovered that in some categories, bright colors outperformed neutrals.
“At the moment, France is a leading market when it comes to identifying footwear trends,” said Danny Brown “So analyzing trending products in the French market with EDITED helps the PUMA UK team to identify trends that are likely to impact the UK and the rest of Europe later in the year.”
PUMA used EDITED Market Analytics assortment and option pricing tools to spot gaps in the PUMA assortment within specific price points at a key retail partner. “We launched on a key partner’s site first and our product sold well, but not as anticipated. I wanted to understand why this was,” asked Danny Brown.
EDITED Market Intelligence technology provided the insight that led to PUMA’s creating three new custom styles of footwear for that retailer. This decision increased sales with this key account, where one design became a PUMA UK top 10 footwear best seller, with a stock turnover of thousands of units per week.
Using EDITED’s Market Analytics tools for market intelligence helps PUMA make data-driven decisions to quickly pivot product and pricing strategies to react to an ever-changing market. Moreover, the team can analyze impacts on the wider business and how it affects their day-to-day processes.
“EDITED gives you access to data you’d never be able to get by manually searching. This allows me to make decisions on a local level and share with the wider global team,” said Danny Brown.
So what advice does Danny Brown have for other brands out there looking to incorporate market intelligence into their processes?
“Bring everyone onboard, don’t just silo use of data to one team. Anyone who makes big product decisions should use it.”
