“It’s all about quantitative evidence,” says Adrian Weidmann, consultant and managing director of StoreStream Metrics [1]. “If you can’t measure, it means nothing.
[2]Weidman is a happy man these days. After years of working with or as a consultant with such big clients as PRN (now IZ•ON Media [3]), Lowe’s [4] and others, including co-authoring the book ‘Lighting Up The Aisle’ [5] with Laura Davis-Taylor (now at The Integer Group [6]), and especially being known as a specialist in retail knowledge, he finally has a product of his own to offer.
While StoreStream Metrics is the company name, he hasn’t differentiated a formal product name yet – but it does deal with measurement.
“This is huge for me,” says Weidmann. “I’ve been involved with Digital out-of-home since 1997, and spent from couple of years to as much as four years with each of my various clients, but each time, when the project was finished, I’d have to start over and reinvent myself. I have knowledge, integrity and credibility as a consultant and now I have an actual product to use as part of my services.”
StoreStream Metrics is a hybrid consultancy with Weidmann’s 17 years experience in designing, activating and measuring in-store media and shopper behavior, as well as designing responsive experiential retail environments. It combines data analytics and storytelling to activate and optimize in-store digital marketing and merchandising executions.
Weidmann worked with Dairy Queen [7] over the past 15 months on a pilot engagement designed to explore the efficacy of its in-store digital promotional content. Dairy Queen produces all its own creative content (backed by Stratacache [8] content management software), and it was curious to know what role in particular price plays in its promotional content. (Weidmann notes that, while creative content is by DQ, its franchisees can set their own prices.)
In order to conduct the analysis and present his recommendations based on quantitative evidence, Weidmann built what he calls a Content Efficacy Engine. This software engine along with a content design and publishing process provides quantitative evidence as to whether a company’s digital signage content is helping it “sell more stuff”. The success metric is the client’s Point-of-Sale transactional data.
“In the case of Dairy Queen, we discovered a number of content design features that have proven to be invaluable to Dairy Queen’s overall in-store content strategy,” says Weidmann. “Over the course of nine months, we analyzed over 14 million transactional records from 38 test locations.”
The result: price didn’t really play a role at all.
“We looked at it as franchise requests referencing regular priced items,” says Janna Ryder, DQ’s director of digital merchandising. “In testing, we found it (highlighting and differentiating price) didn’t make sense. We were surprised at the findings and it was good to find it out. It has saved us a lot of work. It was more the product design, the visual content and programming that were important. Since then we’ve already changed out content strategy to focus more on the product.” (Ryder discussed this at #dse2015 during a session, along with Disney [9], moderated by Weidmann but we unfortunately missed that particular session-Ed)
Weidmann says, “During the recent DSE, I spoke with a number of QSR and retail folks about this ‘product’ and it resonated with everyone. Being able to provide quantitative evidence – based upon transactional sales data that either validates or questions the efficacy of a particular digital signage application – is invaluable to secure additional funding to expand an implementation and/or optimize the content design.”
Obviously, to use the product, one must have access to transactional data. But the Content Efficacy Engine can be used to measure any products and brands in terms of their digital creative content, and this is regardless of the whatever content management software is used.
As Weidmann says, “In Dairy Queen’s case, we found that showing the price didn’t move the needle. In its case, it was price. In another’s, for example, it could be using a photo vs another graphic, or whether a product is seen solo as opposed to it being shown with human interaction.”
As for Weidmann himself, he says that this should help him as a consultant because he has something specific to offer in terms of a product, and he plans to carry it forward as part of his future work.