Competitive Intelligence Platform Launched at Cardenas Markets

A new price-oriented competitive intelligence platform is now available for retailers to deploy in 45 markets across the U.S. and Canada following a successful six-month pilot at Cardenas Markets, a Southern California-based Hispanic supermarket chain.

MissionControl from Engage3 is an end-to-end competitive shop management platform that enables the planning, scheduling, execution, reporting and modification of online and in-store competitive data collection. Members schedule and assign price shops to store associates or 3rd party vendors, and monitor real-time progress across all active projects.

“The problem with traditional price checks is that there’s significant lag time between ordering the price check, receiving the data, then being able to execute against that data,” said Steve Vallance, VP of purchasing at Cardenas Markets. “Not to mention the inconsistencies that arise when you send your own staff to do price checks with pen and paper or Excel on their phones.”

The cloud-based SaaS platform delivers real-time competitive data and insights, enabling retailers like Cardenas to make strategic pricing decisions that drive the bottom line. It was launched today at Revionics’ Sixth Annual Customer Forum in Austin, Texas.

Vallance said the platform has “significantly enhanced our competitive visibility across all of our markets by reducing the time it takes to understand and respond to our competitors’ pricing, thereby enabling us to maintain our intended price image. It’s also helping us understand our competitors’ private label strategies, which can be invaluable.”

Ken Ouimet,Engage3’s founder, said, “It’s been shown that inaccurate pricing data has a direct impact to a retailer’s bottom line, in some cases the cost to a retailer might be over 40 basis points of sales in profit. We leverage mobile technology, big data, and our deep domain experience to remove dependencies that slow down the competitive shop process while managing increasingly complex price shop methodologies to improve accuracy, find rates, and item comparability.”