NPD's Current Analysis West Adds Marketing Effectiveness Tracking Tool

SAN DIEGO — Current Analysis West, an NPD Group company, last month launched a Web-based market-tracking tool called Fusion that allows consumer technology companies to gauge their return on investment (ROI) for marketing programs.

The service simultaneously tracks key marketing activities such as promotions, price changes and shelf-share shifts within an easy-to-use online interface, and shows their impact on market share. The result, said Current Analysis West, is a quantitative measure of the impact of marketing programs on the sales of companies' products.

"The concept behind Fusion is that marketing professionals have long sought to synthesize multiple causal data sets with market share results in order to quantitatively measure the ROI of marketing programs, but the time required to manually pull these data sets together proved costly," said Patrik Schmidle, operations and product management VP at Current Analysis West. "Fusion automates this process and seamlessly integrates these data sets in an easy-to-use interface."

Fusion's features include:

• automatic weekly updates that measure performance in near real time;
• visual summaries that show the current market landscape via graphs;
• ability to drill down detail to a model (SKU) level;
• retailer-specific views showing shelf share by brand and retailer;
• segmentation that provides the capability to view share within specific categories, such as 4-inch by 6-inch photo printers or ultra-compact digital cameras; and
• no software installation required.

As a result, explained Current Analysis West, Fusion quantitatively measures the impact of marketing programs, reduces the time needed to pinpoint why market share increased or decreased, and increases the speed with which companies can identify and respond to competitors' actions.

Categories currently available include computing and storage, including notebooks, desktops and hard drives; consumer electronics, including HDTVs and digital cameras; and printing and supplies, including all-in-one printers and inkjet cartridges.

For more information, visit www.currentanalysiswest.com/fusion.