A leading management consulting firm, Bureau of Market & Social Research Ltd (MSR), and a consumer retail company, KudiGo, have formalised their close ties through a new partnership. The two companies based in Ghana are partnering to provide trade and market analytics to blue chip companies, powered by Kudigo’s Storefront retail solution.
KudiGo offers a mobile-based integrated retail, accounting, payments and analytics engine for informal consumer retailers in Africa. Over the last few years, KudiGo has signed on thousands of retail outlets in Ghana and Nigeria onto their platform. The company’s solution, compared to alternatives on the market, enables users to obtain seamless oversight over their businesses, adopt efficient book-keeping practices and become financial inclusive.
“Our solution utilises big data functionalities to create end-to-end linkages within the trade value chains in ways that many retailers have not experienced before.’’
Kingsley Abrokwa, Chief Enabler of KudiGo
The opportunities to harvest trade and market data to create growth for all players signed on to the solution and many others yet to come on board are many. According to Isaac Gwumah, the CEO of MSR,
“… the consumer marketplace in Africa is constantly growing and evolving. As businesses are trying to keep up and look for new ways to engage their customers, they look to consumer, trade and market analytics for insights that can inform their business decisions. MSR is bringing thirteen years of dominance in the market research and analytics sector to bear on this partnership.”
MSR, a boutique research and consulting firm based in Ghana, is recognised as a leader in consumer and market insights.
A key analytics output of the partnership will be shopper segmentation analyses for FMCGs. Groups of shoppers at retail outlets signed on by KudiGo, and who behave in similar ways, will be clustered together to facilitate brand targeting strategies. Using transactional basket-level data, shoppers can be grouped by price sensitivity, brand preferences and response to promotions. Additionally, MSR will carry out category development data mining. This involves growth and decline of product categories and segments. The data analyses will also help with supply chain optimization that includes planning, managing, and forecasting the flow of goods from suppliers etc using tracking data.
Josiah Tindana, Head of Special Projects at MSR, believes that perhaps the two greatest benefits to end-users will be promotional analytics and channel management strategy. Promotional analytics will help FMCGs track and understand shoppers’ response to promotions, enabling optimisation for profit, market share, product penetration using the recorded sales data. Importantly too, there will be opportunities for FMCGs to assess which geographical areas they need to increase their presence in and where they need to reduce their effort. Linked to this opportunity is also data to make decisions on which channels need to receive incentives and other support.
The partnership officially kicks off from February 2022.