Yesterday I received a question to benchmark pens sold in newsagencies now.
The problem is because of a lack of an industry wide category analysis system, trying to match the relevant product lines is difficult because a computer needs a formula to find an item. So in this case, how does the computer decide that a product ABC item is a pen and product CDE is not!
What I did do is search though the description and hope that all items that are pens are so labelled in the product description.
When I did this, I could see immediately to a newsagent a problem is that the top ten sellers in this category make up only 18.45% of the sales. Clearly to adequately service this category, you need a wide range of products.
Now what we have to decide is what is a better product? Say product ABC above sells 20 and makes the newsagent $30.00 a week and item CDE sells 5 a week and makes the newsagent $42.00 profit. To overcome that, we have modified a system that network used for magazines in their benchmarking project with us. The exact details of how this score is determined is confidential.
Having said all of this, at the moment in newsagencies the top three selling pens are
By score
PEN BIC 4 COLOUR
PEN ARTLINE 200 0.4 BLACK
PEN 60C ASSTD STEAD/KILO
By quantity
PEN 60C ASSTD STEAD/KILO
PEN BIC CRYSTAL MEDIUM BALL PENS BLUE
PEN ARTLINE 200 0.4 BLACK
By turnover
PEN BIC 4 COLOUR
PEN ARTLINE 200 0.4 BLACK
PEN PAPERMATE ROLLERBALL BLACK 0.7
