DemandTec, a pioneer in retail price and promotion optimization technology, today launched Unify by DemandTec, the industry’s first autonomous unified merchandising platform for retailers. The cloud-native platform unifies disparate data and fragmented merchandising systems to understand shopper behaviours holistically, driving actionable insights and prescriptive recommendations, resulting in profitable revenue growth.
Unify by DemandTec includes four initial applications, available together as a platform or separately: 1) DemandTec Autonomous Pricing, 2) DemandTec Autonomous Promotions, 3) DemandTec Autonomous Markdowns, and 4) DemandTec Autonomous Collaboration. With Unify by DemandTec, retailers gain a 360-degree view of shopper demand across all channels to elevate AI-powered pricing, promotions, and markdowns and maximize profitable revenue growth. Retailers can also take advantage of direct integration with DemandTec’s Autonomous Collaboration trade network, featuring more than 700 brands, suppliers, and brokers already on the platform orchestrating trade deals.
Unified merchandising as a strategic advantage
“It’s a critical time for retailers, all around the world,” said Todd P. Michaud, President and CEO of DemandTec. “Inflation is creating more price and promotion sensitivity with shoppers, and this is on top of the already sporadic purchasing behaviors and supply chain issues brought on by the pandemic. We are launching Unify by DemandTec because we believe that using legacy tools to address the challenges of today and tomorrow won’t work. Successful retailers today require a complete view of the shopper across channels, powered by advanced AI and ML to win in the market.”
DemandTec launched its autonomous merchandising platform to assist retailers in accelerating their digital transformations and to support the expanding shopper-centric initiatives of retailers. Further, one of the biggest challenges facing retailers today is the lack of unification across retail pricing, promotions, and markdowns, that fails to accurately recognize the behaviors of the shopper, further impacting profitability.
With AI-powered data science, machine learning and autonomous technologies, DemandTec is tearing down data and merchandising siloes, providing retailers with a complete view of consumer demand across channels, categories, and the merchandising lifecycle. Retailers using Unify by DemandTec can now manage end-to-end merchandising in a smarter, faster, simpler way, with a heightened understanding of consumer behavior driving improved predictive accuracy, averaging above 95%.
“Merchandising today is tough. Profitable revenue growth is becoming nearly impossible to achieve without consolidating the growing number of data sources, disparate systems, strategies, and — let’s not forget — the people and processes,” said Steve Rowen, Managing Partner at RSR Research. “With next generation systems like Unify by DemandTec, retailers can be better equipped to compete in the modern retail economy.”
Unify by DemandTec is the first of its kind
Here is how it is different:
It’s Unified: Retailers can unite their disparate data sources and teams, and create AI-powered, unified merchandising strategies, optimized across the entire product lifecycle, including pricing, promotions, and markdowns – across in store and digital sales channels.
- A unified, more accurate view of the shopper delivers improved forecasts by leveraging AI, predictive and prescriptive analytics to identify cannibalization and cross-category halo effects
- The intuitive user experience is modern, and easy to learn, to accelerate adoption across an organization.
It’s Collaborative: The platform accelerates and streamlines trade collaboration between retailers and their brand partners. As a result, retailers and their suppliers can run personalized promotions and invest trade funds more efficiently, with accurate accounting. DemandTec’s collaboration capabilities are designed to reduce ineffective promotions, grow customer engagement, and increase revenue and profitability.
It’s Autonomous: With AI-powered autonomous decisioning, the platform increases user productivity across categories, channels, and geographies. Autonomy improves efficiency, enabling increased focus on goals and objectives, delivering the rapid response required in an era of constant change.
It’s Open: Powered by the latest innovations around AI, data science and machine learning, Unify by DemandTec is the only platform to enable retailers to add their own insights, algorithms, and modelling techniques, with open APIs.
- DemandTec’s demand insights such as forecasting intelligence can also be exported to downstream systems.
“DemandTec is proud of its history as a demand intelligence leader, surfacing shopper demand signals and patterns hidden in retailer data,” said Kevin Sterneckert, Chief Strategy Officer of DemandTec and former Gartner Research analyst. “Our goal is to help retailers uncover pricing, promotion and markdown opportunities, to maximize profitable revenue growth while strategically addressing inflation. The result is their ability to better compete and win in the fast-moving world of modern retail.”
Michaud added, “In the same way that DemandTec transformed retail pricing more than twenty years ago, we are again leapfrogging the market with Unify by DemandTec. It’s all about providing our customers with future-ready capabilities that can generate sustainable revenue growth, despite any customer, competitor or supplier challenges they face.”
Unified merchandising for retailers of all sizes
Unified merchandising is no longer just for larger retailers. To further level the playing field, DemandTec is also releasing a version of Unify by DemandTec for small and medium-sized retailers. This version offers lower price points and rapid implementation approaches.
For more information about the Unify by DemandTec platform, visit https://www.demandtec.com/unify-platform-demo-request/. To schedule a meeting with DemandTec at NRF 2022, please visit the team at booth #4165, or request a meeting time https://events.bizzabo.com/374076.
