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Inside Retail & U Group

U Ask brings industry-standard research capacity to small FMCG players

Businesses conducting consumer research inevitably bump against corners of the market that are hard to reach.

Taking a broad overview of customer purchasing habits at the supermarket is already a difficult prospect, while tracking data from venues such as fast food outlets, convenience stores and corner cafes can be trickier still.

Nielsen’s Homescan panel has been one high-end approach to gathering customer data via direct scanning of grocery barcodes, allowing more granular dives into spending behaviour and efficient surveying of known consumers of any given product. This approach has recently been shifting to focus more on store receipt barcodes, providing greater depth of purchasing information and richer fields of data for market analysis.

Australia’s largest receipt panel The U Group, which has been working with NielsenIQ over the last 18 months to help clients better understand the omnichannel consumer, has an even better solution – a new surveying tool based on deep OCR technology to scan all readable data on store receipts, yielding information that is then organised and categorised by the firm’s machine learning algorithms. The system, called U Ask, allows consumers to submit images of their receipts captured by mobile phone and provides a more omnichannel perspective of their purchasing decisions.

“This allows us to give research access to smaller brands at a more cost-effective data point,” explains The U Group CEO Tyler Spooner. “Instead of giving consumers a market tracker like Homescan does, we just want to be able to survey actual buyers of products. A consumer signs up for the application and we profile them – so age, sex, income, state, household size. From there, they take photos of all the receipts they purchase. This means that, for example, if you’re Coca-Cola and you want to understand why Pepsi buyers purchase a product to test a new concept, you can select only buyers who have uploaded those receipts and then ask them questions directly.”

The upshot of the U Ask system is that it allows affordable trigger surveys after purchase, giving brands the ability to target survey panels based on verified purchase behaviour without having to ask pre-qualifying questions. Unlike other survey products, U Ask uses actual transaction data, so brands always know they’re asking the right buyer.

“We did a study recently with a major brand looking at mass merchandise buyers,” says Spooner. “We asked if there were any item categories that are missing, in terms of what kinds of items they want. But the way we got mass merchant buyers is we looked at everyone who uploaded a Costco receipt within the last 30 days, and then we could target them directly instead of having to ask ‘have you shopped at Costco, yes or no’ as a lot of questionnaires do – where you might not end up talking to your actual buyer. We’re getting rid of all of that by saying, here’s the actual transaction data, these are people who have actually bought these items or been in these stores during the target period, and then we can ask them the right questions.”

What’s most appealing about the U Ask system is that brands can build their surveys directly from The U Group website without the need to consult with the agency.

“What we found is that the consulting part needs to go, just due to the fact that it slows everything down,” says Spooner. “That also means we don’t have to put a ridiculous price tag on the service. It allows smaller FMCG players – who may want to launch into Coles or Woolworths, or who may just want to look at how their online eBay stores are going – to select their buyer, select their category or their product, and then use the template or fill in their own questions. We automate everything.”

The U Ask survey product is built on a rich data resource, with the firm having spent the last year and a half accumulating categorised data across more than seven million transactions across Australia and close to 70 million items purchased at both online and offline outlets. The automation feature on the group’s new website provides small brands and independent grocers with access to the same kind of data quality usually only available to major brands, at the same time allowing for ethical business practice that preserves the confidentiality of private consumer information while providing transparency at all levels.

“Even though we use mobile first to capture data, it’s all very clear about where the data is going,” explains Spooner. “We protect the users’ personal information, but they’re aware that we’re using the information to help brands grow and to help brands make better products for them.”

To check out The U Ask platform, click through to www.UAsk.io