So a man walks into his local supermarket after a long working day, race-walking between to isles, to hold a grab of his favorite ice-cold soft drink, only to find out that it’s out of stock. Frustrated, this man ends up with 3 options:
1- to come back another time
2- to go to another store
3- to just pick another brand, cause at this point anything would do
You can guess which option has this man chosen. You’d be right if you guessed that he just picked another brand, just like the 39% of consumers that come across their favorite brand’s empty shelves would.
Now, even if that man decided not to go for another brand, the other situations are almost certainly unfavorable to the beverage manufacturer. Cause according to professor Thomas Breen “Brands are missing out on up to a 16% of potential extra revenue due to the lack of their On-Shelf-Availability”.
There are many ways to monitor your OSA (On-Shelf-Availability), and one of the best-proven methods is retail auditing, by having auditors checking your products’ OSA on a daily basis which will allow you to take immediate action in case of a shortage. Big brands have been known to put this technique to use. But as time went by, new tools and have been introduced to the market, take ScoreCarts’ AI image recognition model as an example.
Just by taking a picture of a shelf, an AI will instantly scan, recognize, count & categorize everything captured, and displays it into a dashboard, which will allow you to keep track of your OSA with real-time generated data, and there are many benefits that this invention brings to the table, such as eliminating human errors, cuts time & resource consumption, and on top of that, instant ROI, since all you need is one person to take a picture, and AI will do the rest.