Retail is highly competitive, and gaining insight into the competitor's behaviour can be vital to a brand's success. Traditional competitor analysis methods mostly rely on manual observations and incidental reports. This process can be time consuming and laborious, often subjective and limited in scope. It leaves the brands with an incomplete and often outdated view of customer behaviour and market positioning. However, the onset of image analysis using Generative AI is rapidly changing the way brands gather in-store competitor intel through mystery shopping programs.
The Changing Role of Mystery Shoppers
Traditionally, mystery shoppers would covertly visit retail stores and take down observations on product placement, pricing, and promotional activity. One of the biggest challenges was that their reports heavily relied on their observations and personal bias that would often lead to inaccuracies and inconsistencies. The role of a mystery shopper has somewhat changed in the past two decades. These shoppers now capture photos of product displays, facings, shelves, price tags, and promotions to gather information about the rival brands. The images collected through these operations serve as raw data sources for the brand teams. Brands are now able to follow the competitor's in-store strategy in real-time.
Shopper Images to Competitor Intelligence
In order to utilise the data in these mystery shopper images, Generative AI can prove to be advantageous. Advanced machine vision algorithms process these images to extract key information in a systemic format. Valuable insights into the brand information, product assortment, pricing changes, shelf positioning, and promotional activities are drawn and tabled for a deeper analysis of the competitor behaviour. This allows for faster and nuanced study of the raw mystery shopper images to get the relevant information of rival activity. The scale and accuracy achieved would be impossible for human auditors on their own.
Real-Time Insights for Strategic Decisions
Image analysis, powered by Generative AI, offers speeds previously unseen in the retail space. It can transform thousands of images into actionable insights in a fraction of the time required by human auditors. Brands previously waited for weeks for manual reports of mystery shopping operations which were often redundant by that time. With AI-powered image analysis, they now receive competitor intelligence in real-time by combining shopper images and AI dashboards. GenAI analyzes these images instantly to provide all the information needed such as price changes, product launches, shelf-space allocations, and promotional tactics. This timely information enables brands to adjust their own strategies accordingly.
Uncovering Trends and Patterns
The information extracted from shopper images often paints a bigger picture than what is visible. The large amount of images collected at a particular store or across multiple locations and different time periods can change a brand’s strategy. Instead of analysing these raw images in isolation, Generative AI views them as a collective to reveal emerging market patterns and broader trends for a complete overview of competitor behaviour. For instance, it can highlight any changes and patterns in a rival brand’s prime shelf-share distribution to a particular product which may signify an upward trend in the sales activity. It can also reveal if competitor promotional displays work better in driving customer engagement. This insight into competitor activities helps brands alter their own merchandising and strategies for business goals.
Deeper Business Insights
By combining image analysis and business data, GenAI can enable brands to pinpoint changes in competitor patterns. Combining organised data from shopper images and data sources such as sales figures, customer reviews, and quarterly goals, a brand can get valuable insight into competitor activity. AI may detect a spike in competitor’s sales after a batch of shopper images confirming new promotional campaigns and in-store displays of the said product. This multidimensional approach assists strategy modification and decision making when it comes to studying rival brands. This process used to be cumbersome and time consuming with only manual analysis to depend on. With the inclusion of Generative AI in mystery shopping, it has been simplified greatly.
The Future of Retail Strategy
AI-powered image analysis on raw photos captured by mystery shoppers is still new. As the technology advances, the applications with respect to competitor analysis will continue to expand. Embracing GenAI tools for competitive analysis will no longer be optional in the near future, but a necessity for staying ahead of the competition. It can find unlimited use-cases in customer journey mapping, automated compliance checks, detailed predictive analysis, streamlining regulatory adherence, and accurate demand forecasting. Brands need to embrace this technology not only to gain a competitive edge but also stay ahead as Retail as a whole evolves.
