Skip to Main Content

Virtual Market

Virtual Market is useful whenever you are considering pack and price strategy. This includes changes to in-market products or optimizing an innovation prior to launch.

Woman on a laptop doing online grocery shopping

What is a Virtual Market study?

Pack and price optimization is one of the most important levers of success in Consumer Packaged Goods. What pack size do you offer? What pack configuration? What is your optimal regular price? What is your optimal sale price? How often should you be on sale? All of these variables need to be optimized in context with your strategy: are you trying to maximize volume, units, revenue or profitability?

We believe that these pack and price questions can only be answered with research that tests your offerings in a competitive context. To address this need, Dig Insights developed a proprietary tech solution; Virtual Market looks like online grocery shopping. Over several choice screens, respondents see your products and competitive products. Across those screens, we experiment with product availability / pack size / pack configuration / regular price / depth of discount. Unlike a conventional conjoint, each product has an independent set of prices and discounts. This gives us total control over the experiment and the data modelling.

The benefits of doing a Virtual Market

1

Forecasting

Our Virtual Market solution produces a simulator that forecasts units, dollars and profitability. And none of it is reliant on attitudinal reactions to pricing.

2

Flexibility

Our solution is more flexible than a standard conjoint, which has hard limits on the range of products and prices that you can explore.

3

Guidance

Virtual Market can provide guidance on changes to an in-market product or potential innovation as well as on how to maximize overall performance of a portfolio.

How a Virtual Market works

Timeline

  • 1

    Understand competitive context

    Across the respondents, we explore thousands of possible in-market scenarios to get to grips with the competitive landscape.

  • 2

    Build a base case

    We then build a base case that represents the current market. This is calibrated to in-market unit volumes.

  • 3

    Experiment

    What happens if you add a new SKU or multiple SKUs? What happens is you remove SKUs? What happens if you change your pack size or your price?

  • 4

    Optimization

    We can run optimization analysis that looks at every possible scenario and represents a strategy that maximizes your volume, units, revenue or profitability.

  • 5

    Reporting

    All results are reported as forecasts of units, dollars and profitability. So you have research results that are loved by finance, sales, procurement, and retailers.