Solve Data & Reporting Issues
Koala has been designed to provide quick and easy solutions for some of the biggest issues with analyzing the sales and retail data available to cosmetics manufacturers:
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Cleanse and harmonize a wide range of data setsColor cosmetics, especially premium and independent brands, are sold in a variety of retail channels that span everything from traditional department stores to mass merchandisers to ecommerce. Koala provides an intuitive, self-serve interface to combine data from syndicated providers like Nielsen, IRI, and NPD with retailer point-of-sale data, e-commerce data, shipping and warehouse data, and more. AI-backed matching tools can be used to quickly match products and brands across data sets, and Koala provides advanced BI structures that allow the creation of custom markets and time periods.
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Measure the impact of the shift from premium to mass-merchandizedYounger consumers are price-sensitive, and spending less in the cosmetics category. The common perception is that there is little quality differentiation between prestige and mass market brands, and dollars have been shifting from department stores to drug stores and mass merchandisers. Even category-focused powerhouse retailers Sephora and Ulta aren’t immune to this trend, although Ulta has invested heavily in attracting and holding younger shoppers. Additionally, major ecommerce players have entered the market with celebrity endorsements to drive share (notably Amazon with Lady Gaga’s color brand). Koala allows you to keep a close eye on the share being gained by these new market entrants, as well as key indicators such as pricing, distribution, and the effectiveness of promotions.
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Analyze customer sentiment over time for key product enhancementsRegular introduction of new, innovative products is a key driver of sales growth for both brands and the overall cosmetics category. Koala lets you analyze the impact of product enhancements – such as non-toxic formulations, new applicator technologies, and co-branding/endorsements – in the actual marketplace so you can measure their real-world impact on consumer purchase decisions. You can analyze the impact of your new product introductions in real time; and track the success or failure of new features introduced by your competitors.
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Use sales signals to determine the importance of product attributesAn almost unlimited set of external factors impact shopper buying patterns for color cosmetics. Rather than trying to guess how demand may be shifting and adjusting assortments, Koala can report on the relative sales growth or decline of various colors, patterns, and sizes; and identify key trends. The same technique can be applied to any available product attribute, such as packaging, shelf display, and more.
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Optimize pricing to take advantage of market positionsAlthough the cosmetics category is shifting from premium brands sold in department stores to ecommerce and mass merchandising, brand equity developed through advertising and a reputation for quality can still be leveraged to maximize margins. Shoppers are more likely to buy a mass market brand that’s a sibling of a premium brand, brand loyalty is strong, and there’s little threat from private label brands. Koala’s price optimization module uses past sales data to determine your real-world pricing power against your competitors for each SKU in every market, and includes a specialized AI engine to make data-backed pricing suggestions.
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Enrich Your Data with Custom Segments and Hierarchies
Koala Analytics quickly and easily ingests any attributes present in your raw data to help you organize it for your analytical needs. Koala provides an intuitive visual interface that lets analysts see your data relationships in real time. You can enrich your data with an unlimited number of custom item-level segmentations that fulfill your specific needs, such as packaging types, “green” formulations, color family, target demographics, and more.
Manual segmentation processes can be automated with Koala’s segmentation rules feature, so you can spend more time analyzing your data and less time managing it. Items can be automatically assigned to their correct segments using detailed rules specifically designed for retail and packaged goods data sets. Segmentation rules are automatically applied every time your data is updated, and the changes flow through to your reporting and analytics.
Koala’s segmentation hierarchy feature lets you combine any number of attributes, characteristics, and segmentations in any order to create rich drilldowns into your data. You can create hierarchies like consumer decision trees and purchase hierarchies for your general business, as well as multiple category definitions, market groupings, or ad hoc business analytics need.
Manual segmentation processes can be automated with Koala’s segmentation rules feature, so you can spend more time analyzing your data and less time managing it. Items can be automatically assigned to their correct segments using detailed rules specifically designed for retail and packaged goods data sets. Segmentation rules are automatically applied every time your data is updated, and the changes flow through to your reporting and analytics.
Koala’s segmentation hierarchy feature lets you combine any number of attributes, characteristics, and segmentations in any order to create rich drilldowns into your data. You can create hierarchies like consumer decision trees and purchase hierarchies for your general business, as well as multiple category definitions, market groupings, or ad hoc business analytics need.
Transform Disparate Data Sets Into Insights
Koala provides an intuitive, self-serve solution for combining disparate data sources. Data can be stored and accumulated in the platform, and enriched with a variety of tools including a best-in-class segmentation engine. Analysts can explore their data using an unlimited number of dynamic views. Data, insights, and advanced visualizations can be shared and tracked throughout your entire organization.
Discover & Visualize Important Insights in Your Data
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Koala provides web-delivered reports with advanced visualization capabilities. Analysts can use built-in automated reporting, or use the intuitive report building interface to create custom reports and dashboards. Reports are dynamic – with a single click of a mouse, the view can be shifted to show a different geography, brand, or time period. And reports automatically update when new data is available, or when analysts enrich the underlying data.
Koala reports can be viewed on mobile devices, and analysts can work with their reports on tablets and smartphones. |
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The automated reporting suite included with Koala provides analysts with a set of selling stories that cover most common business needs so they can hit the ground running. Analysts can create dynamic presentations for sales teams with just a few clicks.
These automatically generated reports can be completely customized to fit your design and layout requirements, and automatically update when new data is available. These reports will save your analyst team tons of time, and free them to spend time on higher-value analytical tasks. |
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Optimize Pricing
Understanding how pricing impacts revenues and profitability in the retail environment is one of the most important issues faced by cosmetics manufacturers. Analysts and sales managers need to understand how shoppers’ willingness to purchase changes at different price levels, and how those changes impact profitability.
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Koala’s price optimization module uses proven methods combined with a purpose-built AI learning engine to provide data-driven statistics that guide and support pricing decisions. Like all of Koala, the pricing tool has been designed to be intuitive and automatically provide optimized pricing suggestions so it can start providing actionable insights on the first day. It can use a variety of data, including commonly available syndicated and point-of-sale data sets.
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Integrate Enhanced Data with Visualization Tools
Koala tightly integrates with Microsoft Office and most popular 3rd party data visualization and exploration tools. Combining the Koala platform with these tools gives them access to large disparate data sets and CPG-specific data enhancements.
Any Koala report can be exported directly to Excel or PowerPoint. Slide decks consisting of multiple reports can be exported in a single operation, allowing quick and easy generation of sales presentations. If your organization already uses Excel dashboards and reporting, you can plug them into Koala and get access to the advantages of cloud-backed data without having to change the deliverables your users are accustomed to seeing.
You can connect tools such as PowerBI, Tableau, and Spotfire directly to your Koala data cloud without needing to purchase and install any additional add-ins. Koala’s open data platform supports most data and visualization software, including your internally developed applications. If you already have dashboards, reporting, or analytics created in one of these tools, you can protect that investment while gaining access to improved data handling and other advanced features.
Any Koala report can be exported directly to Excel or PowerPoint. Slide decks consisting of multiple reports can be exported in a single operation, allowing quick and easy generation of sales presentations. If your organization already uses Excel dashboards and reporting, you can plug them into Koala and get access to the advantages of cloud-backed data without having to change the deliverables your users are accustomed to seeing.
You can connect tools such as PowerBI, Tableau, and Spotfire directly to your Koala data cloud without needing to purchase and install any additional add-ins. Koala’s open data platform supports most data and visualization software, including your internally developed applications. If you already have dashboards, reporting, or analytics created in one of these tools, you can protect that investment while gaining access to improved data handling and other advanced features.