Interested in Becoming a Brand Manager? Know Your Kantar Data!

Learning all about Kantar and its datasets is imperative for every professional wanting to be a brand manager in the CPG industry

As part of our 3-blog series to educate professionals wanting to become Brand Managers, we’ll be introducing you to some columns within the Kantar data that Brand Managers receive, and interact with, on a regular basis. 

The other two blogs in the series are:

For now, let’s look at some columns in the Kantar data and their brief explanations. We’ll be continuously updating this blog as well as the Nielsen blog over time, so be sure to bookmark and check them out once in a while!

 Let’s begin:

DATASETS THAT BRAND MANAGERS DEAL WITH – KANTAR DATA

  1. Households  

Households (HH) indicates the total number of households in the target market. This informs the Brand Manager of the total market potential that his/her brand can ideally target and reach

  1. Penetration 

Household Penetration is the number of households in which a brand is being used. Large brands such as Coca-Cola and Maggi rely heavily on increasing the HH penetration of their products. For this, they develop increasingly robust logistical networks, especially in high-potential countries like India where the majority of the population resides in rural areas. This data point also helps decide the allocation of billions of dollars of investment into advertising and promotions.

  1. Volume 

Vol, or Volume, is the total sales made. Volume could be sliced and analyzed, for example, in a particular time period or for a particular geography. This, of course, is one of the cornerstone data columns needed for progress – What are my sales figures? Which were my highest-selling areas? Which areas showed degrowth? are the fundamental questions that every Brand Manager starts with

EXPLORAZOR – FOR OBTAINING THE FUNDAMENTAL ANSWERS, FAST

Our data exploration tool, Explorazor, is built solely for Brand Managers to obtain answers from data at accelerated speeds. How? Brand Managers view a single, combined dataset on Explorazor, which they query using simple keywords, and obtain data pivots instantly. No switching between files at all.

You can view the 3 Types of Analysis Brand Managers can Perform Super-Easily on Explorazor.

BMs are also able to drill down and drill across to arrive at event root-cause, conduct ad-hoc analysis (independently, without support from Insights teams), and test out more hypotheses than ever before. There’s so much more to Explorazor as it plays its part in complementing Excel perfectly, so users do not have to leave Excel entirely, yet do away with some of Excel’s ‘rougher edges’, if we might call them that.

  1. Volume share

Volume share is the part of the market your brand has captured as against the total category share. This is a broad metric that lets a Brand Manager understand where s/he stands with respect to competition. Necessary remedial/preventive steps can then be taken to overtake the competition and increase the volume share, be it hiring more on-field forces or a from a completely different angle, say, increasing media spends to raise brand awareness in specific regions.

Explorazor again comes in handy when it allows Brand Managers to get all their queries answered at a single place, in addition to drill-down into a particular metric via simple clicks. 

  1. Avg Trip Size

The average trip size is understood as the average number of units bought by a consumer at one time/ in a single go. It is also understood as the average purchase weight per transaction. Since packet weights vary, a Brand Manager can potentially decide on a standardized purchase weight, which can be translated into how many packets of that particular weight were sold to a shopper during his/her visit.

With data on average trip size, a Brand Manager understands the distribution and stocking requirements of a particular store.

SIMPLIFYING DATA ANALYSIS – AND NOT JUST KANTAR

We hope these 5 points gave you a glimpse into the areas that Kantar data focuses on, and how Brand Managers can use these data points to elevate all aspects of their brand, like goodwill and sales. We want to further elaborate on how Explorazor can help Brand Managers achieve all of this in an extremely simplified manner.  

Explorazor holds all the datasets that a Brand Manager works on, and showcases them as a single integrated, standardized dataset on its interface. This includes all the separate Kantar columns we discussed, Nielsen data columns, IQVIA (in case of pharma), primary sales, secondary sales, market research, etc. 

Brand Managers pose queries, and data pivots are generated instantly. This speeds up the data analysis process, allowing Brand Managers to spend more time on strategizing and contemplation instead of conducting the manual labor of standardizing columns and querying multiple data sheets for a single insight. The data pivot on Explorazor can also be customized to produce visually appealing charts and graphs, and exported as CSV as needed.

We are on a quest to help Brand Managers ease their day-to-day data exploration process, relieve them of unwanted manual work and over-dependence on BI/Insights teams, enable them to conduct ad-hoc analysis and hypothesis testing at speed, and ultimately help them arrive at quality, target-smashing decisions.


Also understand how Explorazor differs from Power BI.

Take an Interactive Product Tour of Explorazor!