What are the New Year's resolutions for your brand?

Happy New Year everyone!

2019 might indeed start happy for many electronic retailers and TV manufacturers. Christmas business is over and our point of sales data reveals that 1.25 million TV sets were sold in Germany in the weeks before and after Christmas (including Black Friday) – 13% more than in 2017! 

A ray of light after last year’s hard times for the TV category due to the long, hot summer and the very disappointing World Cup for German soccer fans. But not enough to turn around the negative trend in 2018: TV sales dropped by almost 3% compared to 2017.

The start of a new year is generally an opportune time to reflect on your brand’s performance over the past – even if you are among the winners of 2018. It is the perfect chance to evaluate setbacks and think about future opportunities to make your brand more successful in 2019. So what are the New Year’s resolutions for your brand?

One step towards pulling the right levers in 2019 is to completely understand the four key phases of the consumer journey: purchase trigger, search, moment of purchase and early usage.

Across past year’s series of blog posts, I have explored how the new GfK Consumer Journey Module in our Consumer Insights Engine provides powerful insights on customer behavior for brands in the technology and consumer durables sectors.

The Consumer Journey module is the first and only solution for manufacturers and retailers in these industries to combine the most comprehensive collection of point of sales data* with:

• Mobile-first survey data
• Online consumer behavior data
• AI-enabled consumer review data

With our advanced analytics platform, you can increase your return on investment across marketing, sales, product and category management by:

• Understanding who your customers are.
• Stimulating demand with your messaging.
• Optimizing visibility with your marketing channel mix.
• Becoming the chosen brand in your market.
• Providing the optimal customer product experience.

If you would like more insight into each of the steps in the customer journey, please look at the previous posts in this series:

• Which consumer needs trigger the start of the purchase cycle? 
• Getting insight into which touchpoints drive the best ROI for your brand
• Understand the moment of purchase
• The importance of understanding early usage in the consumer journey