Native
Delivering Actionable Retail Insights for Global Brands

Global brands are under chronic pressure, particularly in a time of COVID-19, to ensure their products are available, visible, and accessible at Points of Sale. In emerging markets, the challenge of delivering actionable, store-level visibility is a challenge, given the fragmentation of the trade with high volumes of smaller format retailers. Historical methods of collecting and analyzing retail panels simply don’t provide the store-level actionability brands increasingly expect, and the cost of getting coverage across a brand’s full market has been too high. Enter Native. This New York-based technology company has devised a simple yet genius way to get store-level data through an Uber-like network of locals dynamically tasked to capture data from stores in their city, delivering highly validated results to the brand in near real time. “Native aims to be the fastest, most affordable, and most well-validated source of locally collected data available in the world. We are currently working across 50 countries, particularly in high growth and emerging markets, with some of the world’s top brands,” says Matt McNabb, CEO and co-founder of the company.

Native offers an interactive platform that serves the organizations as well as the data collectors. Brands that need high frequency reads on their products in market can craft questions on the platform that they want to be answered and can request collectors to add photos or short interviews as well, to capture all the necessary information for improvement. The clients can be as specific as they want to be by including notes or guidelines or even sample size of the people being surveyed. They can track who is collecting the data and the exact time the information is collected, verified, and delivered. Retailers can filter, or color code every store, market, field, or interview delivered and aggregate their data and categorize it by market, region, or country. Verified data rolls into real-time maps and dashboards for the clients to analyze in any language they want. Actionable retail insights on out of stocks, pricing, and promotions are delivered at store-level across the brand’s market as rolling data feet.

As beneficial as the solution is for major brands, it also opens advantageous new opportunities for the collectors by providing high quality supplemental income for those who might need it most. It allows locals to open another revenue channel for
themselves. A driver or a food delivering individual traveling throughout the city can easily stop and places and capture the data about a particular spot. Native trains every collector on how to use the platform and on the type of data they would be collecting. Push notifications alert collectors when a client in the nearby area needs information, and they compete to capture the data. Once the information is captured, the collector earns money after a rapid verification process.

One such instance that exemplifies the ingenuity of Native’s solution is when a large food and beverage company wanted faster analysis done on the promotions faster analysis done on how in-store promotions were being received by consumers, and how well they were being executed at Points of Sale. Typically, leading market research providers would deliver insights on how well a promotion performed weeks or months after a its completion, helping with a retrospective analysis of its impact. But partnering with Native however, these customers can receive visibility on a promotion’s performance concurrent with its roll-out, enabling it to course correct in real time and influences how marketing spend translates into hard sales.

Native’s high velocity data collection method has helped many such clients gain the insight they needed into their business while empowering locals in the community to make revenue through an alternate route -helping some of those most in need. Catering today the world’s largest and most influential global brands, Native’s grand ambition is to deliver a revolution in how these insights get delivered. “We believe we can democratize research, making retail analytics accessible to even the smallest microbrewery or emerging consumer brands the world over,” concludes McNabb.