Nielsen partners with Label Insight to boost CPG transparency

03-Dec-2016 - Last updated on 14-Dec-2016 at 15:18 GMT

A recent study shows that 73% of consumers are willing to pay more for a product with full transparent attributes. Pic: Insight Label

The challenge of managing consumer packaged goods data has prompted two shopper data firms, Nielsen and Label Insight, to form an alliance to help manufacturers and retailers to make faster and more informed data-decisions to grow sales.

With the new partnership, Nielsen’s market measurement and its Homescan Consumer Panel data will be combined with Label Insight’s cloud-based product attributes, said the release.

“This will bring an unmatched level of data granularity to CPG manufacturers and retailers, generating attributes, such as nutrients, derived ingredients properties and allergens, for 80% of US food, beverage and non-food retail sales."

Consumers demand transparent bakery products

President of US Buy at Nielsen, Chris Morley, said, “As consumer demand for product transparency continues to grow, it is increasingly important to offer consumers a detailed viewed of products and ingredients.”

According to a Label Insight’s Transparency ROI Study released this fall, 73% of consumers said they would be willing to pay more for a product that offers complete transparency in all attributes.

“When asked to indicate the importance of transparency for specific product categories, consumers answered that transparency is important across the board, with only an 8% variance from the highest ranked category (dairy) and the lowest ranked category, surprisingly baby food,” VP of marketing at Label Insight, Kira Karapetian, told BakeryandSnacks.

In addition, 94% of consumers said it is important for companies that sell bread and other bakery products to be transparent, while 89% said it is important for companies that sell snack products to be transparent, Karapetian added.

Adopting multiple systems

Despite the fact that consumers hope to see more transparency in the products they purchase, Karapetian explained the difficulty of managing product data makes “true transparency” challenging.

“[Data managing] requires data hygiene and a more granular understanding of product attributes than most brands have at their disposal,” she said.

“Brands often employ a number of systems - PIM, MDM, GDSN, all containing product data. Often the data in those systems is inconsistent and incomplete; it may contain ingredient and nutrient information in one system, while package size, weight and label information may be contained in another.”

On top of that, there is additional “off-package” data about products that is not captured or managed in any of these systems, she added.

Label Insight expects the new partnership to achieve the harmonization of all of these points of data across all systems, in order to assist brands maintain global accuracy, consistency and control throughout this “dynamic landscape,” Karapetian said.