Bangalore, India – Indian FMCG companies are always challenged to drive effective in-store retail execution. This involves maintaining optimal shelf stock, positioning their promotional materials effectively, and offering attractive prices to consumers across categories. All these ingredients are what goes into making an effective and winning retail execution. Understanding ground-level “retail truth” becomes critical and important to business leaders who need to make effective decisions quickly.

Consumers buy what they see and like on the retail shelves. Anytime there is an out-of-stock scenario, it is a lost opportunity for the FMCG brands. Studies have shown, the out-of-stock and overstocking problem costs the global FMCG ecosystem over $1T every year and yet, there was no better solution or technology breakthrough that enabled leaders to get front-row seats to witness their retail execution in every region and every store.

Traditional manual shelf audits solve half the problem. While there is monthly or quarterly data to go on, the process is time-consuming, tiring, and expensive in the long run. The data gathered by merchandisers or auditors, is never entirely accurate owing to human errors. But this can change. Image Recognition technology is serving FMCG companies as well as retailers to digitize store audits and let their on-field auditors better manage their time and undertake important fixes and corrections immediately. Their timely actions at the store have a great impact on in-store brand visibility, on-shelf stock availability and effectiveness of promotions & set planograms. This in turn increases in-store sales and yields better ROI for the trade spends.

“Image Recognition solutions solve this complex problem on three fronts; Deliver 97% accurate on-shelf insights like On-Shelf-Availability (OSA), Share of Shelf (SOS), recommend real-time actions to the field force and send intelligent alerts to the right stakeholders. The biggest upside to this is accelerated decision making, improved productivity and increased per-store sales, which is the ultimate goal.”, explains Anand Prabhu Subramanian, Co-founder and CEO at Infilect Inc. Infilect is a leader in Retail Image Recognition empowering top FMCG brands in India and the world with real-time retail execution data, enabling leaders to track competition brands and take decisions to improve their sales. Their flagship Image Recognition solution, InfiViz, digitises store audits and gives access to real-time retail execution data, making it an essential tool for FMCG leaders that drives sales intelligence.

Image Recognition can answer important questions for FMCG sales and marketing leaders. These can range from; how to improve the visibility of their stock and what actions to execute with each of the retailers, how to know the effectiveness of their trade promotions and how they are being implemented inside stores.

“Imagine if you were able to know the state of every store in real-time. This can simply change how and when you make important decisions. Field-force optimization, accurate inventory planning, on-shelf assortment planning, improvement in trade promotion compliance, and improvement in offline sales are a few. At Infilect, we build platforms that can be used enterprise-wide and are easily integrable with the enterprise sales Cloud. This means, all the relevant data is available to the entire sales and marketing teams in real time. This helps the key stakeholders to take reliable decisions that directly impact sales growth. This is why the use of Image Recognition AI will be the game changer for FMCG sales in 2023”, said Anand.

As per, the Analytics Magazine research report ‘The state of AI in 2022’, the Indian retail & FMCG sector accounted for 40% of AI adoption in 2022 and the rate is growing steadily as many brands are opening up to innovation that accelerates business growth. “There is no doubt that Image Recognition will be the biggest revolution in transforming physical stores.” concluded Anand. For a long time, the fundamental problem of addressing poor retail execution was inadequately solved. But now new age technologies like Image Recognition and AI have the potential to solve this problem once and for all and create a path to completely disrupting physical retailing.

About Infilect:

Infilect Inc. builds Image Recognition and Artificial Intelligence solutions for worldwide FMCG manufacturers and retailers. Purpose-built for FMCG, our platforms empower sales and marketing leaders with real-time and accurate on-shelf metrics and in-store retail execution insights to simplify retail decision-making, improve in-store brand visibility and boost per-store sales, at scale. Infilect’s solutions are fast to set up, priced affordably, built to delight, yet powerful enough to deliver critical business outcomes. With global offices in Bangalore – India, and Delaware – the US, Infilect’s solutions are deployed in 18+ countries across 400K stores while processing 25 Million in-store images per month. For more information visit www.infilect.com

~ Brand Connect Initiative ~