Nielsen Homescan Total ShopperView Captures Largest Panel Ever to Track Non-Bar-coded Items

The Nielsen Company today unveiled Homescan® Total ShopperView, the industry’s largest panel ever created to capture non-bar-coded items. Homescan Total ShopperView is designed to facilitate the most comprehensive view available of total retail shopper and trip behavior. Based on input from 45,000+ panelists reporting on 15 critical non-bar-coded retail sectors, Homescan Total ShopperView covers perishables such as meat, bakery, vegetables, coffee, film processing and floral.

“Homescan Total ShopperView serves as an analytical lens on the whole store, providing new insights into retailer share, shopper loyalty, penetration and spending in a competitive context,” said Tim Kregor, president, Homescan & Spectra North America, a service of The Nielsen Company. “Homescan Total ShopperView will enable retailers to better deploy non-bar-coded areas of the store to achieve strategic objectives such as optimizing adjacencies for perimeter departments, differentiating store formats from competitors and leveraging consumer packaged goods to increase basket size.”

Retailers receive the broadest view of total retail shopper and trip behavior available in the industry with an integrated single-source panel. Homescan Total ShopperView demographically profiles the heaviest consumers of these products and services to develop the right advertising and in-store merchandising to maximize sales in these highly profitable areas. Furthermore, by quantifying and tracking shopper penetration by department, retailers can now find out how important these perimeter departments are compared to their competition.

In addition, manufacturers can now better optimize category cross-merchandising across critical non-bar-coded departments. Homescan Total ShopperView allows manufacturers to directly link to purchase data providing deeper insight into how and why consumers purchase in these perimeter areas. Additionally, this product provides the opportunity for manufacturers to survey shoppers and their competitors’ shoppers on these products and services to uncover their likes and dislikes about the shopping experience.

New technology in the form of an in-home refrigerator magnet with barcodes for fifteen essential perimeter departments makes the Homescan Total ShopperView service both convenient for panel members and technically feasible. All non-UPC items are represented by barcodes on the magnet and can be easily scanned by the panelists.

The 15 non-bar-coded departments covered by the Total ShopperView service include perishables (random weight meat, bakery, fruits, vegetables, cheese, cold cuts and lunch meat, prepared foods), center store (random weight coffee, candy/nuts/seeds), Rx, film processing, apparel, floral, gas and take-out (both home delivery and pick-up). Total ShopperView custom reporting is available immediately beginning with data from the fourth quarter of 2006 for the total United States and nine Census regions, with retailer trade areas available on a custom basis.