Case Study
When 2020’s coronavirus pandemic affected the sales of Britvic products, they knew that smart and innovative solutions were needed to solve its in-store problems.
With Logobrand’s help, Britvic utilised real-time data to turn sales around and pull it out of a lockdown-triggered slump.
Who are Britvic?
Britvic, now a multination corporation, started out with simple beginnings. Since its launch as the British Vitamins Products Company in Chelmsford in the mid-19th Century, the business has changed hands various times over the years but has continued to produce and sell some of the world’s most popular soft drinks.
As well as producing their own range of products, the organisation has acquired many household names such as Robinson’s, Tango and J2O. It also licenses PepsiCo products in the UK and Ireland. Britvic plc operates in, and export to, more than 50 countries globally and take pride in their dedication to their supply chain and manufacturing processes.
What challenge was Britvic facing?
When the coronavirus pandemic hit, businesses were impacted globally. The UK entered a national lockdown and supermarkets were experiencing a change in the ways that customers were using their stores.
With more people working from home, Food-to-Go chillers situated at the front of grocery stores were adversely affected, with soft drinks sales falling by over 60% compared to the same period of the previous year. As the lockdown continued, these numbers remained consistently low,
Thankfully, sales of larger volume, take-home drinks stayed buoyant.
Once the country started to re-open, sales did not recover as quickly anticipated and action was necessary. Product availability was identified as a key issue – if an item wasn’t on sale in the chiller, customers would simply buy something else.
Britvic set about ensuring their products were always on the shelf, ready for customers to buy. That’s where Logobrand came in.
What solution did Logobrand offer?
Logobrand’s usual methodolgy of identifying possible issues using daily EPOS data wasn’t going to work here. The pandemic had brought new problems and new problems needed new solutions.
To get started, Logobrand and Britvic got around a ‘virtual’ table to brain-storm the problem. The solution we came up with was simple yet a completely new approach to utilising real-time data to target specific SKUs in specific stores.
Stores were selected flexibly from daily analysis of store sales data with an exclusive new algorithm that analysed the following three criteria:
- Availability Gap
- Stock Inventory
- Poor Rate of Sale
The IC-I-FIX campaign started on the June 24, 2020 and initially ran to the end of September 2020. However, it was so successful that Britvic have decided to extend the campaign through to Christmas and potentially beyond that into the spring and summer of 2021.
The Results
By integrating technology with in-store issues, together Logobrand and Britvic achieved some impressive results.
-26%
Average reduction in gaps across all retailers
- 59% of all product interventions resulted in a reduction of zero sales days
- 59% of all product interventions resulted in a reduction of zero sales days
- The incremental sales accumulated over a three-week period covered the cost of the store visit. Beyond this was clear profit for Britvic!
Sales across a higher number of distribution points have also been achieved by the changes with 6% more distribution points recording a sale in the initial trial period.
Reducing gaps has consistently and significantly improved availability. In June 2020, entry availability was ‘very poor’ at 67% but just one month later this has increased to 76%.
Due to lack of stock availability, in June only 71% availability could be achieved on exit which had risen to 79% in August.
What’s next for Logobrand and Britvic?
Britvic and Logobrand’s relationship extends back over 10 years, but IC I-FIX is another demonstration of the consistently creative and innovative solutions to particular challenges conceived by the teams’ collaboration. IC I-FIX was a solution to recover from the impact of the pandemic on sales in the immediate consumption category, so is the campaign over?
No, it’s not! Due to the campaign’s success, it was extended beyond its initial end date of September 2020 through the festive period and potentially beyond!
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