In the competitive landscape of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), particularly within the Spirits industry, maintaining visibility across all retail environments is crucial. Achieving this requires robust capabilities to capture and analyse data on-premise (bars, restaurants) and off-premise (retail stores).

Unfortunately, limited visibility into sales execution often hampers strategic decision-making and efficient retail execution. Neurolabs’ ZIA technology addresses this challenge by providing comprehensive on-premise and off-premise visibility, ensuring that brands can optimise their retail strategies effectively.

In this article, we’ll explore how our technology, ZIA, can help your CPG thrive in a highly competitive and quickly changing industry.

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What is ZIA?

ZIA is a comprehensive enterprise IR platform that provides CPG brands with detailed inventory and promotional activity insights to enhance their retail execution strategies.

Leveraging a new generation of Image Recognition, Synthetic Image Recognition, ZIA enables brands to start capturing visibility in less than 2 weeks and maintain their catalogue accurately with minimal effort.

Some key advantages of ZIA include:

• Rapid Product Onboarding: Quickly creates digital twins (3D models) from existing files or using the ZIA app, enabling new products to be onboarded in under 30 seconds per SKU with over 96% accuracy.
• Advanced Training Models: ZIA utilises an extensive dataset of over 2 billion product images and 72 million shelf images, ensuring consistent and accurate catalogue updates.
• Improved Insights: Offers in-depth insights into product placement, competitor strategies, and consumer interactions, aiding in data-driven decision-making.
• Seamless Integration: Easily integrates with existing Sales Force Automation solutions, ensuring quick compatibility across diverse regions and industry demands.
• Time and Resource Efficiency: Reduces the time and resources spent on competitor analysis, allowing brands to operate with agility and precision.
• Market Adaptation: Enables brands to respond to market changes swiftly, ensuring they remain competitive and relevant.
• Retail Execution: Ensures that retail execution strategies align with the latest data, helping maintain optimal shelf placement, stock levels, and promotional displays.

ZIA's comprehensive suite of features equips CPG brands with the tools needed to excel in the competitive retail landscape. By combining cutting-edge image recognition, synthetic data, and extensive datasets, ZIA facilitates rapid product onboarding, advanced training models, and improved insights.

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The Advantages of Synthetic Data for Spirtits CPGs

Synthetic data, a simulated alternative to real-world data, is a cornerstone for training machine learning models and conducting simulations. ZIA utilises synthetic data to help CPGs utilise image recognition to the best of their abilities.

Neurolabs can create incredibly detailed 3D replicas of scenes by integrating synthetic data with real data. We have developed a method for procedurally synthesising dense retail environments at scale, generating extensive variations in scene elements such as shelf structures, product assortments, and room layouts.

This approach allows us to create complex, annotation-rich synthetic datasets for solving various computer vision tasks.

Learn More About Our Synthetic Data Approach

There are many reasons why a synthetic data approach can benefit spirits and alcohol CPGs, including:

• Enhanced Accuracy in Challenging Environments: Many sales venues for spirits and alcohol, such as bars and restaurants, have dim lighting and complex layouts that can make data collection challenging. Using synthetic data to create highly detailed 3D replicas of these scenes ensures that IR systems can accurately capture and analyse product information even in low-light conditions, leading to more reliable insights.

• Comprehensive Data Collection: CPGs can better understand how their products are displayed and interacted with in various retail environments by combining synthetic and real data. This dual approach ensures the data is extensive and detailed, capturing various scenarios and variations.

• Improved Sales Strategies: With more accurate and detailed data, CPGs can identify trends and patterns in sales performance, enabling them to refine their sales strategies. They can better understand which product placements, promotional strategies, and packaging designs are most effective in retail settings.

• Enhanced Speed of Execution: Synthetic data generation can be automated, significantly speeding up large datasets. This allows for creating annotated images in a fraction of the time it would take to collect and label real-world data manually. Additionally, this reduces the costs of hiring third-party annotators.

In summary, Neurolabs' approach to using synthetic data provides CPGs selling spirits and alcohol with the tools to gather accurate, comprehensive, and actionable insights, leading to more effective marketing strategies and improved sales performance.

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Integration of On-Premise and Off-Premise Strategies

For a comprehensive retail execution strategy, it's essential to integrate activities across both on-premise and off-premise environments to ensure consistent branding and maximise sales opportunities. Here are some key ways they can be integrated:

• Unified Promotions: Coordinate promotional campaigns that target both on-premise and off-premise channels to reinforce brand messaging and drive consumer engagement.
• Cross-Channel Insights: Using data from both environments to understand consumer behaviour and preferences better, allowing for more targeted and effective strategies.
• Brand Consistency: Ensuring that branding and messaging are consistent across all channels to build a strong and recognisable brand presence.

ZIA offers the opportunity to gain visibility on both sides of the premises. Here are some of the capabilities which make this state-of-the-art technology an effective addition to your enterprise:

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Off-Premise Capabilities

For off-premise settings, ZIA offers a suite of capabilities designed to capture detailed information across various touchpoints:

• Shelf Capture: Ensures accurate monitoring of product placement and availability.
• Cooler Capture: Tracks product visibility and effectiveness of displays.
• Pricing and Promotion Capture: Provides insights into pricing strategies and promotional effectiveness.
• Promotional Displays: Tracks implementation of in-store displays.

These capabilities allow brands to maintain an up-to-date and accurate picture of their product's presence in retail stores, enabling more effective inventory management, promotional planning, and strategic decision-making.

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On-Premise Capabilities

On-premise environments present unique challenges due to their dynamic and varied nature. ZIA addresses these challenges by offering the following capabilities:

• Cocktail Menu Capture: Provides insights into product listings and positioning within drink menus.
• Back Bar Capture: Ensures accurate product placement and visibility monitoring in high-traffic areas.
• Tap Capture: Tracks the availability and promotion of tap products.

This comprehensive monitoring allows for more strategic planning and execution, ultimately enhancing product visibility and optimising sales performance in high-traffic venues.

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Category Level Insights

ZIA's advanced SKU recognition technology provides category-level insights critical for strategic positioning and adjacency planning. By accurately identifying and categorising products across the entire category, ZIA enables brands to:

• Optimise Product Adjacency: Ensure optimal placement of products to maximise visibility and sales.
• Enhance Strategic Positioning: Align product placement with strategic marketing objectives to improve brand performance.
• Gain Competitive Insights: Monitor competitor activity and adjust strategies to maintain a competitive edge.

These strategic insights can help your CPG to gain a unique edge in a quickly growing category.

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Stay Ahead of Competitors With Neurolabs,

In the fast-paced and competitive spirits CPG industry, comprehensive visibility across both on-premise and off-premise environments is essential for effective retail execution and strategic decision-making.

Neurolabs’ ZIA technology can capture detailed data in both settings, ensuring brands can maintain an up-to-date and accurate picture of their market performance. By leveraging ZIA’s advanced image recognition and synthetic data techniques, spirits CPG brands can optimise their retail strategies, enhance visibility, and gain valuable insights into their category and competitive landscape.

Ready to optimise your retail execution with comprehensive visibility? Contact Neurolabs today to learn more about how ZIA can transform your business operations and help you stay ahead of the competition.