IRI®, a global leader in innovative solutions and services for consumer, retail and media companies, and SPINS®, a provider of wellness-focused data technology for the natural, organic and specialty products industries, announced they have significantly expanded their joint offering, tripling the number of SPINS health and wellness attributes available in IRI’s Liquid Data® technology platform. This expanded IRI-SPINS offering provides retailers and brands with extensive access to label and ingredient insights, enabling a deep understanding of product dynamics and shopper behavior in wellness both in store and online.
 
In addition to enhancing IRI market measurement and shopper marketing solutions in the Liquid Data platform, this joint solution will also integrate SPINS’ wellness attributes into other IRI applications, such as digital audience activation, advanced analytics solutions and market structure studies. Retailers and brands will be able to obtain insight into a wide range of health and wellness product certifications and ingredients to understand attributes that consumers are seeking and avoiding, such as gluten-free, grass-fed, fair trade, antibiotic- or hormone-free, artificial colors and preservatives, types of sweeteners, allergens and sensitivities, and more.
 
“Shoppers are increasingly looking to retailers as stewards of transparency when it comes to how products are made and the impact those products may have on their health,” said Steve Ramsey, executive vice president and general manager of strategic accounts for IRI. “With this expanded offering, IRI and SPINS are equipping retailers and their brand partners with the tools to pinpoint the behaviors of natural and wellness shoppers and to activate in-store and digitally to win with these shoppers.”
 
Early pilots of this enhanced solution have delivered significant incremental value. The benefits lauded by participating retailers and brands include:
 
• Increased Shopper Understanding: By leveraging the extensive consumer insights that come from more than 30 million households, retailers gain precision understanding of natural shopper engagement within their own stores and where else these shoppers are buying natural products. This new solution unlocks unique consumer dynamics driven by health and lifestyle choices, such as paleo, vegan, the major 8 allergens and animal welfare, which drive innovation along with brand and category growth.

• More Effective Merchandising Strategies: The direct link that this solution drives between market measurement and consumer perception proved highly effective for building compelling assortment and pricing strategies to meet these health and lifestyle needs and build loyalty for both retailers and brands.

• Trends and Innovation Identification: Participating brands and retailers created attribute-rich corporate scorecards based on both shopper and market share metrics to support wellness goals within their own hierarchies. For example, enhancing their view of market share to see how they were growing share with shoppers of gluten-free, non-GMO and organic products.

• More Powerful Shopper Activation: These clients were able to shift more seamlessly from insights to activation by building shopper segmentation leveraging, SPINS Product Intelligence and then designing effective digital activation methods for each through IRI purchase-based audiences.

“SPINS is laser-focused on retail excellence, and we are pleased to expand our partnership with IRI in support of our mutual retailer partners and their brands,” said Tony Olson, chief executive officer of SPINS. “Our new solution provides retailers and brands with a roadmap and common language to navigate their shoppers’ increasingly personalized demands for natural and wellness products and to activate accelerated growth.”
 
SPINS’ Product Intelligence, regarded as the most comprehensive natural/organic and wellness coding, includes its industry-defining view of the natural products industry known as the NPI. The IRI Liquid Data platform is the largest and most unique big data platform of its kind, combining purchase behavior, media and causal factors. The platform includes built-in visualization, collaboration and authoring capabilities that can be further enriched with client data in a tailored, private cloud deployment.