Grocery Chain Tapped A.I. Provider to Support Merchandising Decisions Involving Promotions and Pricing
January 22, 2018, TORONTO ON – Daisy Intelligence Corporation, an artificial intelligence software-as-a-service company, announced today that Harps Food Stores, Inc., based in Springdale, Arkansas, has successfully implemented the company’s AI (artificial intelligence) platform to improve and optimize decision-making around pricing and promotions.
Harps launched the partnership with Daisy Intelligence in early 2017, when Daisy Intelligence began working with the 87-store grocery chain to analyze years of collected transactional information to provide specific, actionable product and marketing recommendations to optimize Harp’s chain-wide pricing and promotional efforts. To put it simply, Harp’s chose Daisy Intelligence solution to analyze data to "review which products should be featured in its frequent circulars."
"We use Daisy Intelligence solution to analyze customer transactions and track the relationship between every item in every customer’s basket," said David Ganoung, Vice-President of Marketing at Harps. "Daisy’s ability to provide us with the associated sales on every item within the individual transactions helps us to promote the items most pertinent to our customers."
According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, "Why the Weekly Circular Refuses to Die (Link Paywall)," (January 11, 2018) David Ganoung, Vice-President of Marketing at Harps spoke to the importance of getting the pricing and promotions right. "Our print circular is our largest advertising expense and you want to be as efficient as you can," he commented for the piece.
"Daisy’s AI enables us to analyze Harp’s transactional data on a giant scale, and as a result, this significant improvement in promotional effectiveness supports our ability to meet the needs of our shoppers by keeping our prices competitive and enhancing our profitability," said Mr. Ganoung.
“The modern retail sector is as competitive as ever, and within retail, the grocery category’s notoriously thin margins leave very little room for mistakes and bad decisions when it comes to promotions and pricing,” said Gary Saarenvirta, CEO of Daisy Intelligence. "At the same time, as we know from direct experience with our wide-ranging customer base, AI is driving a revolution in the way merchandising decisions are made, and this is dramatically impacting client profitability."
