COVID-19 business diagnostic & forecast
COVID-19 has had a profound impact on sales and consumer behavior across virtually every product and service category. The near and long-term implications for many businesses are unclear.
We have expanded our diagnostic and forecasting solutions to help clients understand what is going on in the market, make calculated adjustments to business plans and prepare for the most likely future scenarios. We isolate and quantify the factors driving business performance and with that understanding in hand, help business owners address key strategic questions.
We start by first ideating and then collecting and analyzing a wide range of potential business performance drivers. These inputs are used to understand the dynamics at play and to provide strong inputs to our regression-based models.
The range and quality of inputs is critical to obtaining a robust output and we include a wide swath of socioeconomic, retail and health data, consumer/shopping behavioral information and government response. To model the COVID-19 input we incorporate well-known facts/figures (e.g. case counts, government mandates) as well as expected future changes in behavior across consumer “virus response” stages.
We use a structured approach to understand the impact of various drivers on a category or brand’s specific performance. Utilizing a supervised machine learning algorithm, we first look for statistically significant variables. Then, we explore the direction of each variable’s impact, account for any interaction between variables and finally, size the relative impact of each.
Using this approach, we project scenarios for how consumers are likely to shift their virus response behavior over the near/mid-term horizon and build a forecast for category sales reflecting the impact of COVID-19.
The outputs are delivered in a user-friendly interactive data tool, providing a way for clients to dynamically assess impact of environmental changes on business performance as they continue to unfold.
Client benefits: By understanding the drivers of categories and brands as COVID-19 continues to unfold, our clients are able to adjust business plans, capitalize on potential growth opportunities and mitigate key business risks in such uncertain times. A deeper understanding of the individual category drivers are leveraged to build better portfolio and brand strategies that accelerate growth within the context of what we know to quantitatively drive business performance amid a shifting pandemic environment.