Accolade Wines and Asahi adopt technology to enhance their pricing capabilities ahead of Christmas

Christmas is coming. In retail's most wonderful time of the year, getting pricing strategies right become even more critical in the increasingly competitive race for profitable growth.

Accolades Wines and Asahi Premium Beverages - two of the major alcohol and beverages groups worldwide - have recently selected Invigor Group to provide competitive price monitoring and data insights for more than 39 brands in Australia.

Invigor provides price monitoring and competitive market intelligence to some of liquor's leading brands such as Treasury Wines, Pernod Ricard, Moet Hennessy as well as many other retailers and brands globally.

In the new digital era where Big Data, Technology and Commerce increasingly collide, top players are reassessing their market intelligence practices and deeply overhauling their pricing capabilities to be more responsive and improve strategic decision making.

Invigor Group Limited (ASX: IVO) is one of the companies that is taking pricing a step beyond, providing a wide range of pricing data and analytics solutions to retailers and brands globally. According to Gary Cohen, Invigor COO: "We have seen the impact of competitive price intelligence on our market-leading retail customers, some of which have experienced a 20% increase in gross margin as a result of correcting mispricing. Corrections are both downward to remain competitive and upward, such as not staying on promotion longer than necessary."

In addition to real-time price monitoring solutions, Invigor has amassed a unique historical data set of every brand and product in key competitive retail categories including Alcohol & Beverages, Consumer Electronics and White Goods. Combined with Invigor's data analytics solutions, Insights360, this historical data is being used by retailers and brands to understand drivers of sales, develop better pricing strategies and predict future demand within the context of their competitors. Allowing retailers to increase profit margin significantly.

Invigor Retail™ is a best in class market intelligence solution with the capacity to gather pricing, promotion and other product data and deliver this quickly to retailers to act on or develop effective policies to manage different prices and promotions across channels and touch points such as in-store point of sale, online, mobile and through sales associates. Price optimization for a better pricing decision or the ability to respond quickly to competitor's price changes are some of the main features that this solution provides.
Invigor Management comments:

"Retailers are under increasing pressure to manage effective pricing strategies that grow topline without damaging long term P&L or margin", said Gary Cohen, Invigor CEO. "There is often money left on the table every time retailer or brand misprices. Why would anyone manage this internally or even manually anymore, when technology is available to deliver it on a more timely, affordable and accurate basis at scale? In Australia, we can see a change in mindset prior to Amazon's launch; the sooner retailers and brands start leveraging data to make better decisions, the better chance they have at succeeding and becoming more profitable.

"Competitive price monitoring and accurate pricing and promotion data is the foundation of many retailers' pricing strategy." added Mr. Cohen. "Using historical and competitive pricing and promotion data helps winners to devise market-aware strategies and forward-looking models to underpin future pricing strategies, position the brand and drive uplift in margin due to mispricing."

"The next natural step of this are personalized or dynamic pricing. Imagine a world where you walk into a store or visit an e-commerce site and where prices or promotions are changed based on multiple factors such as who you are, time of day, stock levels and competitive prices right now. Effectively what the travel industry have been doing for years."