EDEN PRAIRIE, MINN. -Best Buy is looking to get more bang out of its advertising and display bucks with a new software program that provides behavioral-based analyses and recommendations and forecasts of promoted products.
The “retail intelligence” software, developed by Minneapolis-based Net Perceptions, is being deployed throughout the retailers’ 400-plus stores in 41 states. Best Buy had implemented a comparable merchandising analysis program by Net Perceptions for its e-commerce website, www.BestBuy.com.
According to Best Buy marketing director Flora Delaney, the intelligence products “offer a level of insight into advertising and purchase behavior that we think could be woven into a customized solution for Best Buy. We think it represents a worthwhile competitive advantage.”
Delaney said the software, dubbed Advertising Advisor, will allow the No. 1 CE chain to pinpoint which products are top draws and how they perform in conjunction with other products and promotions. “We expect their solutions will allow us to make our internally developed merchandising forecast application even more efficient and effective,” she said.
According to Net Perceptions, the program allows merchants to replace the typical guesswork and intuition used in planning print advertising and promotions with objective, fact-based recommendations and predictions to make better-informed decisions for print advertising circulars and in-store product placement.
The result, said the company, whose clients also include Kmart and JCPenney, is promotion that consistently maximizes transactions, incremental traffic, revenue and margins while reducing expenses and avoiding costly over-promotion and margin erosion.
