Quid Announces the Launch of
Market-Based Merchandising,
an Outcome Engineering Solution

SANTA CLARA, Calif., Nov. 14, 2024 // Quid, a leading provider of AI-powered analytics, has announced the launch of its Market-Based Merchandising solution. With this solution, retailers achieve an uplift in revenue, improvements to assortment, and overall advancements in brand perception by identifying customer trends. This enables clients to achieve measurable business outcomes and unlock new growth by activating rapidly evolving consumer trends.  

With the Market-Based Merchandising Solution, Quid delivers actionable insights, predictions, and trend data directly to retail business units. This enables stakeholders to quickly understand, prioritize, and respond to consumer trends, creating more opportunities to delight customers with trending products. Furthermore, the solution helps align inventory with anticipated demand, preventing stockouts and improving overall customer experience and perception. 

Through deployments with multiple retail clients over the past 18 months, Quid has validated that this solution enables businesses to sell more products and optimize inventories through its impact assessment.  

The core challenge that Market-Based Merchandising aims to address is the speed in which retailers can respond to the rapidly evolving nature of consumer trends in the digital age. As internet conversations, social media and market data accelerate the evolution of consumer trends, retailers are struggling to meet increased customer demand, compete with speed-driven models like social commerce, and make strategic decisions without full context.    

Where historical trendspotting depended on social listening platforms, Quid’s market-based merchandising solution uses artificial intelligence, advanced analytics and predictive algorithms to search for trend conditions as they emerge across a myriad of data sources, including news, digital traffic and a retailer’s own internal data. This extends the critical window of opportunity for retailers to capitalize on an emerging trend and directly impact business performance—a feat not possible with legacy tools. Early indication of trends provides retailers with the time needed to enhance product visibility in line with trend growth, which in turn drives sales performance, optimizes operational decision-making, and elevates brand perception.  

Quid’s Market-Based Merchandising provides an end-to-end service comprised of six components to identify and respond to consumer trends:  

1. Trend Sensing: Quid’s Predictive analytics scans social data and classifies emerging trends based on their near-term predicted performance, enabling retailers to quickly identify new trends early and at scale. Quid’s trend-sensing capabilities are highly scalable and can be focused on anything from large consumer missions to uncovering individual products. 
   
   
2. Trend Ranking: A fully configurable ranking system that provides a comprehensive view of trends by continuously tracking trends over time and scoring their performance according to key metrics that assess durability and potential value.
   
   
3. Context Analysis: Advanced AI and statistical analysis that summarizes the “why” and underlying context behind consumer trends, equipping stakeholders with the insights necessary to position relevant products strategically.  
    
4. Trend Activation: A process that integrates trend insights directly into a retailer's marketing, website, social media, and merchandising activities, facilitating rapid activation and response.  
    
5. Impact Measurement: Automated tracking and measurement tools that quantify the business impact and growth resulting from the Market-Based Merchandising solution. 
    
6. AI Assistance: At the core of this offering is Quid's market-leading AI, which is trained and tailored to each client's unique data and operating environment. This custom-built AI acts as an intelligent assistant, distilling data into contextualized, actionable insights that empower retailers to drive tangible business outcomes. 

These components foster shared goals and operational transparency, essential for achieving cross-functional business objectives. Retailers often operate in siloed environments, which can hinder collaboration and responsiveness to real-time customer preferences. Quid’s Market-Based Merchandising insight desk serves as a crucial connection point, enabling a unified view of customer behavior and the development of shared processes for trend activation across various business verticals. Furthermore, Quid can integrate with existing in-house systems such as web content management platforms, e-commerce solutions, product catalogs, and campaign management tools. 

Partnering with Quid means having a dedicated ally to drive value creation. Quid’s analytical and model engineering teams bring diverse industry experience and advanced data science capabilities to address the most pressing business challenges. With a focus on delivering actionable insights that facilitate measurable growth, whether tackling international issues or hyper-local missions. 

The merchandising insight desks are staffed by: 

• Software Engineers: Create and maintain tools and infrastructure to process billions of data points.  

• Data Engineers: Download, enrich and create historic and real time updated clean data sets.  

• Model Engineers: Experts who model world onto the data in context of the customer.  

• Analytical Engineers: Who extract insights and add context to the insights ensuring effective activation on consumer trends. 

The emergence of the trillion-dollar social media industry has reshaped marketing and advertising, significantly influencing retail. Social media catalyzes consumer trends and creates efficient transaction channels. However, social alone doesn’t encompass the entire landscape. Quid recognizes the expanding influence of various factors and integrates thousands of data sources—spanning owned, earned, and paid media—into the analysis. This holistic approach is essential for retailers to swiftly adapt their infrastructure to meet evolving consumer demands, a necessity for maintaining competitiveness in the coming years. Without market-based insights, retailers risk missing out on up to fifty percent of potential incremental revenue opportunities. 

In a retail landscape increasingly shaped by the speed and unpredictability of digital trends, Quid's Market-Based Merchandising solution represents a significant step forward in empowering retailers to stay ahead of the curve, meet evolving customer demands, and unlock new avenues for growth. By bridging the gap between data insights and real-world business impact, Quid aims to position its clients for sustained competitive advantage in the years to come.