Intertek’s Product Line Review
As a retail buyer, you are looking to delight your with customers the best products at their respective price points, ensuring strong revenue growth in your categories. You also want to maximize gross margin by sourcing the lowest priced products at each performance level, and finally to build customer loyalty through the durability and quality of your products.
Intertek’s Performance process gives you objective, real world data driven insights to enhance your purchasing decisions, ensuring your categories outperform your retail competitors. Combining our unique Performance approach with Intertek’s global lab network and product expertise allows us to assess almost any class of consumer product, for leaf blowers to blenders, hearing aid batteries to marker pens.
How this helps the Buyer:
- Gives a granular understanding of how products really perform in actual use, allowing you to understand the strengths and weaknesses of products including competitors’ offerings.
- Provides options for product substitution to drive down costs whilst maintaining or enhancing the performance of your line up. Retail clients would typically save 7% of landed cost following an Intertek Performance PLR.
- Insight into how the product line up works for different consumer groups, allowing you to optimize your line up to meet differing consumer demographics.
Intertek Performance’s Product Line Review process:
- Understanding what consumers really value: discussions with the buyer team, independent research thorough focus groups or analysis of on-line comment allows Intertek understand the Critical to Quality (CTQ) factors, and conversely features to which consumers attach little value.
- Developing a testing program that accurately reflects real world usage: using our library of over 3,000 custom test methods, and Intertek’s global laboratory network and deep product expertise, Intertek Performance develops a customer test plan to simulate accurately real world usage.
- Weighting and analyzing test data to product performance score: test results are normalized and weighted, based on perceived consumer CTQ level. The price / performance score card is created, forming the basis of the analysis process.
- Analysis and insight: Intertek’s performance team review all data in the context of product usage and market, bringing analysis and insights together in concise, commercially focused report, that can;
- establish the optimum product for each price point,
- give quantitative support for price renegotiations with vendors leading to significant falls in landed cost,
- highlight products ideally focused for specific consumer groups, for example low noise / vibration power tools, which whilst having lower performance, may be ideally suited to older consumers, and,
- flag products were price is way out of line with performance, which can help identify products with aesthetics or unique features which consumers particularly value.
