Retail store audits are essential for understanding both what to do and what to avoid for your brand. If all your competitors are saying the same thing, we need to know what it is. Do they all look the same? What is their value proposition? Why are consumers choosing their product? The only path to impactful retail execution is by designing a distinctive and different package to stand out, and that begins with understanding your competition.

Our approach involves a comprehensive analysis of how your current packaging performs against shelf competitors and identifies opportunities in key retail channels. Whether it’s for a new brand or brand innovation, we benchmark your packaging design against competitors, evaluating consumer perceptions across various category attributes. 

The retail audit can be performed in tandem with baseline brand testing, providing valuable insights into your brand’s strengths and weaknesses and uncovering new threats and opportunities. This data-driven method ensures a detailed understanding of packaging effectiveness, aiding in the development of strategies to enhance brand performance and consumer appeal.

We collaborate with leading CPG industry market research and data providers to gather insights on competitor performance, trend forecasting, and shopper behavior. The collected data is analyzed to identify patterns and trends, helping us assess the effectiveness of packaging in capturing consumer attention and influencing purchasing decisions. This multi-faceted approach provides a detailed and accurate assessment of packaging visibility and purchase drivers in competitive categories.

The frequency of conducting a retail audit should align with your brand’s objectives, market dynamics, and the rate of change in the retail environment. Typically, an annual audit is advisable to stay current with market trends, consumer preferences, and competitive movements. 

For industries experiencing rapid change or high seasonality, more frequent audits, such as bi-annually or quarterly, may be necessary to maintain a current understanding of the market and respond effectively to emerging trends and challenges. The key is to balance the need for up-to-date market insights with the resources available for conducting these audits, ensuring each audit provides valuable, actionable information without overburdening the process.

The cost of our retail auditing services varies based on the project’s scope and complexity. SmashBrand’s proprietary PathToPerformance™ roadmap takes brands from conception to retail-ready, integrating brand strategy, design, and testing. A brand development project starts at $25,000.00, but we are open to discussing unconventional opportunities for promising partnerships.

A retail audit focuses on analyzing your brand’s performance within a retail setting, examining factors like product placement, pricing, promotional effectiveness, and shopper engagement with packaging and displays. It provides insights into how well your brand executes its retail strategy and consumer interactions in-store. 

In contrast, a competitive audit is broader, evaluating competitors’ overall positioning, strategies, and market performance. While a retail audit is introspective, assessing your brand’s in-store effectiveness, a competitive audit offers a comprehensive understanding of the competitive landscape and how your brand compares.

The duration of a retail audit typically ranges from a few weeks to a month, depending on the scope, market complexity, and specific objectives. The process involves thorough data collection, analysis, and reporting, all of which influence the overall timeline.

In addition to retail audit services, we offer a comprehensive range of brand development services designed to enhance your brand’s market presence and share. These services include trend assessment, competitive and retail audits, packaging baseline tests, strategy development, consumer targeting, and brand positioning. Each service is tailored to meet your brand’s unique needs and objectives, leveraging our expertise in market insights and consumer behavior analysis. For a detailed list of all the services we provide, please refer to the footer of our website for a complete overview of our offerings.

A retail audit helps understand the shopper’s journey and experience in-store by analyzing how consumers interact with products and navigate the retail space. It provides insights into factors like product visibility, brand blocking, white space, and the effectiveness of in-store presentations. This detailed analysis identifies what influences consumer decisions at the point of purchase, enabling the optimization of retail packaging to capture greater market share.