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28.03.2023

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How To Improve Market Presence and Price Positioning For a Brand. MSI and Pricer24 Case Study

The Client

MSI is a Taiwanese technology brand that produces computer components and gaming peripherals for gamers. MSI products are represented in all major retail chains and online consumer electronics stores in the Ukrainian market.

Pricer24 has been cooperating with the Ukrainian representative office of MSI since 2021. In this article, MSI’s category management specialists tell how Pricer24 helped them automate the analysis of market presence and price positioning across dozens of partner websites.

The Tasks

1. To ensure that all the items are available with all partners’ websites

The niche where MSI is operating is quite saturated, and the business environment is competitive. The market is filled with brands that have long and firmly established leadership positions. We aim to win a better slice of this pie, so the availability and market presence of our assortment on partner sites is critically important for us.

Each MSI product must be available on the partner store’s digital shelf exactly when the customer wants to buy it. Otherwise, we will face lost sales and customers gone.

Analyzing the shelf presence of goods and reducing the number of Out-of-stock and Out-of-shelf items requires regular data collection and daily monitoring, which equals at least 50 working hours per manager per month.

2. To defend the brands’ price positioning

Another factor we as MSI closely monitor is price positioning. Maintaining demand from vendor partners for a brand that aims to gain market share is essential.

If we, as a vendor, do not monitor the pricing policy of online retailers, sooner or later, price wars will begin. Dumping will kill the margins of goods, and it will become unprofitable for retailers to sell them.

Therefore, maintaining a coherent price positioning is another critical area of responsibility for our managers. But this process has to be regular, and it takes a lot of category managers’ time: 2-3 hours a day if they manually collect data on all the products and all the partners. Our goal is to automate it.

3. To see the growth areas in advance to maintain positive sales dynamics

In addition, like any other business, we sometimes faced changes in sales dynamics. The reasons may have been:

a drop in the availability of our goods on the partners’ digital shelves;
a dumping policy on our goods by sellers.

To understand the reasons for the drop in sales, we needed to track their dynamics, analyze the market, and have historical data on availability and prices.

We realized we needed to see the cause before we had the consequences, like falling sales. We rejected the manual information collection from partner stores and marketplaces immediately. Since we have hundreds of SKUs, it would take so much time that the report would be outdated as soon as it is ready.

That is, the moment we received the sales report, it was impossible to analyze historical data. Therefore, we needed to automate data collection for two main goals:

day-to-day market monitoring regarding the assortment presence in all key e-stores;
analyzing the price positioning of our brand on partner websites.

We started looking for a solution and found Pricer24.

The Solution

Data collection

We handed over our catalogue of more than 500 SKUs to the Pricer24 team and a list of partner sites for monitoring – 20 online stores altogether. After matching the products, the service started collecting relevant data seven times a day. The following indicators were to be monitored:

availability status of our products in partner online stores;
prices for our products;
the number of MSI products on each of the 20 trading platforms on our list.

Reports and analytics

In Pricer24, we monitor assortment availability in partner stores provided by distributors, the overall price positioning of our products on the market, and the absence of dumping. Managers regularly use Assortment Analysis, Price Comparison, and Price History reports.

The first two show the current situation, and we can detect deviations in advance

✓ before our product is underrepresented and competitors take our market share;

✓ before the prices of our products become so low that it is unprofitable for partners to sell them.The last one, Price History, allows analyzing how the price of a product has changed and who was the first to lower it.

Assortment analysis report

Now our managers can quickly track the availability of MSI products throughout the vendor network. That is, in case of availability lowering, the manager: a) will see it in time; b) will be able to take immediate action.

Price comparison report

Thanks to this report, we monitor the brand’s price positioning on an ongoing basis. In case of violations, we think of ways to improve the conditions with our partners to prevent dumping and price wars and maintain MSI’s holistic price positioning in the market.

The Results

Thanks to the daily data collection, which takes place without the involvement of our employees, MSI category managers can get all the necessary information about the brand’s market presence and prices for each product across the entire network of partners in a few clicks.
Now, we can identify problems before they have consequences, and the time to make decisions reduces by several days.
We save at least 50 working hours for each manager every month. This allows us to focus on tactics and strategy, and Pricer24 takes care of all the monkey work.

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