PlaceIQ Brings Its Location Data to IRI’s Platform for CPG Brands

Building on an ongoing relationship, PlaceIQ and market research company IRI have announced a new partnership that brings insights on location and shoppers’ behavior to the consumer packaged goods sector.

PlaceIQ CEO Duncan McCall describes this collaboration as another example of location data being used horizontally to give different industries new perspectives on their customers. His company anonymously gathers information on consumer behavior such as when they visit a store as opposed to simply being nearby a location, as well as patterns that may emerge from their actions. Under the new agreement, PlaceIQ’s location data will be available to IRI’s clientele, which includes the bulk of the Fortune 100’s CPG and health and beauty brands.

This integration makes use of both IRI’s and PlaceIQ’s expertise to create new understandings of consumers and their habits that can be identified through location data. IRI provides insight on “consumer propensities for purchase, as well as actual purchase patterns,” says Nadya Kohl, PlaceIQ’s executive vice-president of business development.

The agreement also furthers the relationship between these two companies, which earlier saw PlaceIQ resell IRI data as part of its managed media offering that connected purchase propensities to location, she says. “We worked together to provide our advertisers with place visit rates and purchase reporting,” Kohl says.

Such information is useful to CPG brands, she says, and through the new partnership IRI customers gain access to movement data from PlaceIQ for nuanced segmentation of consumers. For example, the data could show a brand when customers regularly visit their stores even if they do not make a purchase and use that as a measure of brand loyalty.

McCall says this horizontal use of location provides brands with household-level purchase data that can help them understand behaviors. The anonymized PlaceIQ data comes from more than one-quarter of a billion shopper loyalty cards, he says. When tied to location, this can reveal to CPG brands how shopping behavior intersects with other aspects of people’s lives such as where they work, their interests, and hobbies.

This integration of PlaceIQ data into IRI’s platform can be used for more than planning, measuring, and targeting campaigns, Kohl says. The insights brands gain may be used to make supply chain decisions, choose the placement of stores, and other loyalty-based applications, she says.

It is no secret that PlaceIQ has been especially active of late establishing more partnerships and making its data available through new products. McCall says this is all part of his company’s strategy to scale up by spreading its location data around horizontally letting a broad ecosystem make use of PlaceIQ. That way, he says, his company can touch such segments as TV, out-of-home, mobile, print, and display by finding partners who are already work with clients in each vertical.

There is more in the works from PlaceIQ on this strategic front, though McCall would not go into specifics for now. “You’ll see more from us in terms of partnering with some of the most successful companies in their respective domains,” he says.

Joao-Pierre Ruth is a Street Fight contributor.