How artificial intelligence and image recognition let companies process data better

Artificial intelligence attracts a lot of attention and even more questions, so it is worth bringing the subject down to earth and asking: how do artificial intelligence solutions actually work in the world of trade marketing? And do those solutions deliver value? 

Artificial intelligence does not just observe: it also understands, it perceives, and it proposes creative solutions that drive the productivity and efficiency of companies and their employees. 

For instance, artificial intelligence helps track certain performance indicators, or KPIs, through image recognition technology, which does not merely make it easier to gather all kinds of information — it improves how that is done, in several ways.

 

Improving product availability and assortment on the shelf thanks to image recognition technology

 

Let's start with on-shelf availability, that is, whether products are there on the shelf for shoppers. Where a merchandiser, with limited human eyesight, has to check long lists of products that are not always the same, that depend on the type of location and the point of sale, and that change over time with new launches and shifts in strategy, artificial intelligence does it quickly and unambiguously. That improves availability and product assortment for shoppers. Securing that availability builds shopper loyalty and helps lock in a larger share of the market over the long term. 

 

Measuring the whole spectrum of shelf arrangement

Next, the visibility and visual impact of products are crucial for companies, and they are measured through shelf arrangement KPIs. Image recognition technology can measure the entire spectrum of that complex standard. One of them, product sequence — the order in which products appear on the shelf — matters enormously, because it affects sales. That order can trigger impulse purchases, for example. But it is also about guiding shoppers toward complementary purchases. In other words, it is about influencing shoppers through visual merchandising. Artificial intelligence, through image recognition technology, calculates the compliance rate for that standard from a single photo and reports it both to the merchandiser in the field and to the company's sales and trade marketing teams.

Another shelf arrangement KPI is eye level product placement, that is, having products at the shopper's eye level, so they spot them more easily and therefore buy them. That is easier said than done, though, because eye level depends on each store and on each product. Products for children, such as candy, have to sit lower than products for adults. Artificial intelligence adapts easily to all these variables and to the precision each one requires.

 

Detecting prices and price compliance thanks to image recognition technology

 

Monitoring price compliance is another possibility image recognition technology opens up, done by detecting prices from a photo. It is worth stressing that there are many reasons a displayed price may be wrong: a price change the store never updated, promotions not reflected in the price, a product out of place, among many others. But the shopper only experiences the annoyance of finding a different price, which makes for a poor shopping experience. 

That can create friction between shopper and brand, which can hit sales hard. This is why monitoring price compliance matters so much. When field staff take on this task, they have to consider a great many figures across many products at once, which is obviously exhausting work. For artificial intelligence, that painstaking task happens fast and without any fatigue at all. On top of that, image recognition technology does the job with no subjectivity whatsoever, since it is simply trained to recognize product codes from images.

GDW understands the challenges consumer goods companies face and how artificial intelligence has become a crucial piece of managing field staff in trade marketing. That is why GDW built its own image recognition tool, so companies can get more out of the information they process, generating insight instantly, letting employees act in that very moment, saving time and, with it, cutting costs.