NPD Providing Consumer-Tracking Service For Wal-Mart, Sam's Club

By Alan Wolf -- TWICE, 5/7/2008

Bentonville, Ark. — The NPD Group is providing its customized consumer-tracking service for Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club.

The service, which charts consumer purchasing activity across a wide swath of demographics and product categories, is a collaborative effort between Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club for vendors doing business with the chains.

NPD said it developed the customized service based on Wal-Mart’s and Sam’s Club’s consumer segments, departmental structure and geographic trading areas. The resulting data will provide Wal-Mart, Sam’s Club and their vendor partners with an extensive cross-category view of purchasing activity across all consumer segments and demographics.

The service will also give Wal-Mart’s and Sam’s Club’s selected suppliers access to what NPD described as the only consumer data that reflects Wal-Mart’s department structure and geographies, as well as the Wal-Mart consumer segments.

The service will provide information on consumer purchasing across a broad spectrum of industries including consumer technology, entertainment (music, film and video games) and wireless handsets. Other categories include the automotive aftermarket, fashion (apparel and footwear), foodservice, home (home textiles, small appliances, home improvement, lawn and garden) and toys.

“Winning with the brand-aspirational consumer is critical for Wal-Mart,” said Paul Cantrell, Wal-Mart global team leader for The NPD Group “We are pleased to be introducing this new service that can help Wal-Mart and its category advisors work together to achieve this objective. We truly believe that this will go a long way to establishing a common language for collaboration between Wal-Mart and its select vendors.”

The new consumer-tracking service for Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club is derived from NPD’s panel of more than 3 million consumers who report what they purchased, where it was purchased and for what price, among other information.