Data: To maximise volume, operators have to tempt consumers by filling their machines with the best-selling products available on the market. In this edition of his feather-ruffling blog, Planet Vending Editor Ian Reynolds-Young asks: ‘how do you make sure you get that right?’
Hello again.
Let’s be honest: there are a lot of people out there who restrict their use of vending machines to the making of ‘distress’ purchases. For many, vending machines are there for the things they forgot to buy elsewhere, or for the times when they’ve been caught short and the ‘real’ shops are closed. So, to maximise volume, operators have to tempt consumers by filling their machines with the best-selling products available on the market.
CTN’s these days are doing ‘mega’ deals on crisps, confectionery – pretty much anything; so consumers, by and large, will look at a premium priced item in a vending machine and think to themselves, ‘sod it, I’m starving, I’ll buy it’.
To make that decision, you have to tempt that consumer by having the right product on offer, which in itself doesn’t sound like rocket science. But, how do you make sure you get that right?
Imagine that, instead of relying on the sales data from your own vending machines in one location, you could amalgamate the data from 50 other machines in similar locations, or better yet a hundred, or a thousand… The odds on getting the product offer right are much more likely to be ‘odds on’, the more data you have to refer to.
We’re not talking about data about a specific consumer
We’re not talking about data about a specific consumer, we’re talking about the trend within a given location or type of business; we’re talking about what sells and what doesn’t sell in any particular niche. Operators don’t need a consumer to tell them that; they get that real granularity of insight thanks to the robust data that can be harvested from multiple points of consumption.
Any single piece of data is insight. It tells you what’s happening at a specific moment in time; but it goes without saying that the more data you have about that particular moment in time, the more accurate your insight is.
So, for example, if you receive a piece of information that tells you: ‘at 9:45 last night, Joe Bloggs bought a bar of chocolate from a vending machine’, what do you learn? You learn that Joe Bloggs bought a bar of chocolate from a vending machine at 9:45 last night. Can you extrapolate that to conclude that Joe Bloggs is going to buy a bar of chocolate from that vending machine at 9:45 every night? Of course not!
To all intents and purposes, therefore, the consumer is largely irrelevant in all this. Consumers define what they want to buy, of course; but they’re influenced in that respect not by the place they make their purchase, (be that store, a forecourt or a vending machine – planograms aside), so much as by the brand’s marketing, positioning and promotional activity. That’s why a vending operator, with a raft of products from which to choose and a limited number of spirals to be filled, has to get that choice right.
You need as much data as possible
Here’s the key question: ‘what products sell best in the environment in which my asset – my vending machine – is deployed?’ Answer that correctly, and there’s your best chance of maximising product sales from that machine. And at the end of the day, isn’t that exactly what it’s all about?
You need as much data as possible to help you build the right solution to address the needs of your customer. To replace ‘subjectivity’ with ‘objectivity’, what you actually need is data, the whole data and nothing but the data.
As an industry, vending is in competition with every other form of retailing and, let’s be honest, sales through vending machines of drinks, chocolate, crisps or what-have-you represent a miniscule proportion of total retail sales.
Operators, then, are not in competition with each other, not really… They’re in competition with the Big Wide World and as I said last time out, if the vending channel is the seal in the water, data alone can help it survive against the big, hungry fish with the big, sharp teeth.
Ladies and gentlemen, hasn’t the time come to extract as much data as we can from our machines and then share that data – maybe, for starters, with fellow members of buying groups such as NIVO, AVS, Cover Group and so on? Surely, that’s the only way that we, as an industry, can compete effectively for an increasing share of the consumers’ business…
NEXT TIME: The big fella’s about to disappear in a skirl of remote Scottish beaches so no blog and no Vending Insight next week. We’re back to normal on 15 June, just in time for the footy.
You might like the two preceding editions of this blog…
Data: Has The Time Come To Share And Share Alike? CLICK
‘Just Like The High Street?’ The Data You Need – And The Data You Don’t. CLICK
