The War of the Grocers

We are currently working for one of the leading grocery retailers in the UK and amongst the most aggressive price wars seen for years between the heavy weights is an increasing demand for price and competitor analysis.

For years now we’ve seen certain chains of stores fighting for our custom offering varying levels of offers, deals and bogoffs which quite often clearly advertise their deals are better than the “leading competitor”. These companies are arguably the most transparent to the consumer in their use of competitor analysis in their corporate strategy and as such they are constantly striving for new ways to encourage us through their doors.

Our clients are asking us to find analysts that can keep them ahead of the game. The key to this kind of analysis is to provide a great stance for the clients’ offensive and defensive strategy. Our clients need to be able to make decisions on prices and discounts based on what the consumer has been doing as well as insights into what they will accept as the next pricing structure in relation to what the competitors are offering.

However we have discovered there is a lack of candidates active in this market place. Couple that with a skill shortage in pricing and/or competitor analysis experience and we come up with a drought in data analysts that can take up the role in identifying competitor threats for our clients and advising the best next steps while also monitoring the consumer activity data in real time.

The candidates that our clients want to see are those that have experience in business analysing customer behaviour, campaign data responses and manipulating data using SAS or SQL. These skills are easily transferable to the price and promotion sectors and we believe a good analyst will quickly pick up the industry knowledge for these role whilst also developing analytical techniques in SAS and SQL.

Contact Paul Culmer on 0207 886 0720 for more information on the roles he has available in this field or check out our latest jobs in the search bar on the left. Or Email Paul at paulc@xcedesolutions.com.