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Walk Away from Closure Rates?

By Bill Schober, Editorial Director

I can't say I was surprised by the late-breaking news from Nielsen In-Store that Walmart has opted out of the national launch of the syndicated version of P.R.I.S.M., scheduled for 2009. I will admit to a little disappointment though. While we're supposed to remain objectively neutral about all industry news, it's no secret that the In-Store Marketing Institute has been an active, vocal supporter of the P.R.I.S.M. (Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric) initiative from Day One. It's hard to believe that Walmart is going to just walk away from such a promising project.

People inside this building have been championing the basic idea behind P.R.I.S.M. -- a functional industry metric and in-store measurement toolbox -- ever since I arrived in the early 1990s. Yes, we pooh-poohed some initiatives announced in the years before P.R.I.S.M. -- and took heat for it -- because we thought the methodologies chosen were non-starters.

History has shown we were right.

But when P.R.I.S.M. was first proposed back in late 2005, it had us from hello -- and still does -- because the project design for gathering data inside stores was sensible and elegant; the right brands and retailers were involved; and there were plenty of brainiacs on conference calls who seemed to speak nothing but fluent Algorithm.

Evidently, it made a lot of sense to Walmart, too. The world's largest retailer, who famously stopped providing POS data to syndicated market research firms in 2001, got involved early and enthusiastically, providing, in Peter Hoyt's words, "rocket fuel" for the entire project.

After reading the statement issued by Nielsen In-Store (which I assume was issued with Walmart's approval), I've been thinking that there must have been two schools of thought competing inside Walmart. On one hand, it says the chain's reasons for not continuing to participate are "consistent with their internal data sharing policies." But the statement also notes that Walmart "was pleased with the insights they gleaned" during the development phases, and "acknowledges the industry value of the national service and the quality of the service provided to those participating." Every report I'd ever heard during the test phases indicated that there were more than a few people in Bentonville who were excited about various metrics like closure rates, store cluster insights, daypart breakouts and other tools that P.R.I.S.M. is only just beginning to unearth.

Walmart is going to forego all of that? This is merely one man's opinion, but I doubt it. When Walmart shut off its POS-data stream to the syndicators in 2001, it started crunching data on its own via Retail Link, which was offered to various suppliers. It may not be today or tomorrow, but I imagine that somewhere inside Walmart there's a will to let history repeat itself and develop something similar. Heck, I can suggest a name right now: "Retail-Metrics-Link."

And if there's a will, there's certainly a way. This is, after all, a company with research, logistics and super-computing abilities the Economist magazine calls "the world's most powerful [only] after the Pentagon's."

P.R.I.S.M., meanwhile, will soldier on with all of the other original consortium retailers as well as a lot of blue-chip CPGs such as P&G, Kraft and Unilever. And we'll keep cheering for it from the sidelines, because as far as this magazine is concerned, P.R.I.S.M. represents the best methodology yet devised for reaching the ultimate goal, a practical in-store metric.

Published: December 2008

Source: In-Store Marketing Institute

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