Ignite USA LLC of Chicago has a lot of experience when it comes to designing, marketing and selling hydration and thermal bottles. Its Contigo brand is carried globally by book stores, coffee shops, supermarkets, clubs and mass retailers. But when the company decided to take its Avex brand to the sporting goods channel, it had a lot to learn.
So Avex joined Outdoor Industry Association® (OIA), and the company’s Senior Marketing Manager Theresa Irwin began taking advantage of free access to OIA VantagePoint, which tracks weekly point-of-sale data from more than 10,000 retail doors and websites, including nearly 450 outdoor specialty locations. The VantagePoint tool was custom designed for OIA members by The SportsOneSource Group, which tracks retail sales through SportScanInfo.
“Through the research, I was able to locate seven sub-markets under hydration, which included the water bottle market,” said Irwin. “From there, I was able to see there were an additional eight sub-markets within water bottles. This has been incredibly helpful in developing products. For example, now that we know that aluminum water bottles make up only two percent of the total water bottle business in the outdoor market, our focus would most likely not be in that category. Instead we would probably focus on a larger area, like hard plastic water bottles that make up 59 percent.”
OIA VantagePoint webinar series kicks off Thursday
What is also important to understand is that OIA VantagePoint is designed from the ground up to give all OIA members – big and small – access to the kind of data that large corporations have long used as a competitive advantage. The trick is taking the time to learn how to use the tool to improve the insight into your business.
To help with that, Paul Gagner, president of Sports & Outdoor at The SportsOneSource Group, is presenting three 60-minute webinars via OIA’s Outdoor University® in the coming weeks. The first webinar, which takes place tomorrow from 2:00-3:00 pm MDT, caters to product line managers, marketing managers and product planners. The second, on April 3, focuses on how sales managers, marketing managers and reps can use OIA VantagePoint to become category experts. In the final webinar, on April 5, Gagner will discuss how retail buyers, marketing managers and general merchandise managers can use the tool to get the most out of their open-to-buy budgets.
Throughout the webinars, Gagner will reference how real companies are using OIA VantagePoint, what questions to ask, and how to identify opportunities that companies may miss.
By translating the product codes used by hundreds of different retailers into a standard code system, for instance, OIA VantagePoint makes it possible to track sales of a product across multiple channels – something individual vendors struggle to achieve on their own.
This unrivaled transparency has led to some significant revelations for outdoor specialty retail executives. At Cabela’s, for instance, executives have a better understanding of product opportunity in the market because they have a better understanding of the size of each product market across different types of retailers, said Bruce Tillotson, manager of customer analytics for the retailer.
“It’s the only tool that has sufficient data to infer what's happening across the entire marketplace,” said Tillotson. “You may think you are a big fish, but because there are so many fish, you are in all reality not so big.”
