A long time ago in a supermarket chain not so far away
March 9, 2021
By: Peter

Settle down, children, I have a story for you.   

Have you ever wondered how the porridge you eat for breakfast got as far as our kitchen table?    

Heroic teams known as ‘FMCG businesses’ work hard every day to manufacture foods and drinks and toothpastes and treats, and millions of other things, so that we can live a happy life.     But making things isn’t enough.  They have to get them to the places we call shops and that’s a space planning adventure.

These businesses all have enemies – called competitors – who want to replace the products you love, with others that you might or might not love.   But that’s not all.  It’s an eternal battle to keep the right amount of porridge in a shop.   It’s actually known as the Goldilocks problem – the shops need to have just enough porridge; too much is almost as bad as too little.   But none at all, well that’s enough to make daddy bear sound like a Wookiee.

Competitors aren’t the only enemies of these companies.   At least competitors mostly operate in plain sight.   No, the most dangerous enemies are invisible.   You can’t see, smell, touch, or hear them.    Some call them data.  Others say information, or knowledge.   But let me tell you a secret:  they are shape-shifters, essentially all the same, so let’s just call them data.   

However, you need to be on your guard at all times.   Because data can be your worst enemy – but it can also be your best friend.  

There is an ancient curse in the business universe, known as ‘Darth by PowerPoint’.   And yet something called Excel can be deadlier, with its exploding pivots and malign lookups.   FMCG teams which put all their shop data into Excel soon discover that data is their enemy.   Even those who go beyond Excel can be caught out, with slow and very expensive outsourced alternatives.

How’s that porridge?   More honey?   No, you needn’t lose sleep over data.   Because bad data can be Conkered.     Many wise FMCG teams have discovered how to do this, and their products are always waiting for us in the shops.  What’s more, the people who run the shops love them because they are so collaborative, so helpful with insights.   In fact those shop owners smile when they hear that the sales force will be with them.

Recent Posts

All quiet on the development front

All quiet on the development front

Yes, we’ve been a little invisible for a couple of quarters, sorry. We've been heads-down, hard at work on two brand new Conker products. After months of design, coding, and testing, we are proud to announce the launch of AI-driven image recognition - and an iPad app...

What is Cloud Computing?

What is Cloud Computing?

Introduction To The Cloud Cloud computing has been around for over a decade, but only recently has it become recognised as an important technology. What is cloud computing? This question is difficult to answer because the definition of cloud computing keeps evolving....

From Paper to Pixel

From Paper to Pixel

After his National Service my father’s first job was salesman at Commercial Plastics Ltd, up in the north east of England. Commercial Plastics went on to be acquired by Unilever, back in the days when companies in-sourced. I’ve still got some of his sales materials,...