Retail measurement is a service that tells a brand how much of its product, and of its rivals' products, was sold across a whole country, and its share in every region, type of shop and pack size. The data comes from the sales that shops record at their tills, from regular counts at a sample of shops, and from household panels. Brands, retailers and investors buy it by subscription, usually as a monthly report.
In India, retail measurement has a special problem. Most groceries and household goods are still sold by kirana stores, small neighbourhood shops, and many of them do not bill on a computer. A supermarket's point of sale (POS) software records every item it sells, with its barcode, price and time. A kirana store may record nothing. So the measurement company combines two methods. Supermarket chains and other modern shops send it their sales records directly from their billing systems, often every day or every week. For kirana stores, it uses a retail audit. Field staff visit a sample of stores at regular intervals, count the stock on the shelves and look at the store's purchase bills. The sales in the period equal the opening stock, plus what the store bought, minus the closing stock. The method is explained in consumer panels and retail audits.
The company then matches everything to one list of products. The same 70 g packet of noodles may appear under a different name and code in every chain, and it is matched to one product record. Finally, statistics scale the sample up. If one audited store stands for 300 similar stores in its district, its sales are multiplied by 300.
Consider an instant noodles brand that launches a new masala flavour in Uttar Pradesh. After two months, the retail measurement report shows that the brand's share of noodle sales in the state rose from 18% to 21%. It also shows that the gain came mainly from towns with fewer than 1 lakh people, and from kirana stores rather than supermarkets. So the brand's sales team sends its distributors to more of those towns.
Brands use the same data in other tools. They feed it into marketing mix modelling, to estimate what their advertising added to sales. Retailers and brands use it in price and promotion optimisation, to test discounts. Newer data comes from shelf image recognition, where a photo of a shelf is used to count the products on it.
How is it different from market research data? Retail measurement counts what actually sold, product by product, every month. Market research data estimates the total size of a category, and it is mostly used for planning several years ahead.