Yesterday we announced the acquisition of Grupo Meiko to expand Premise’s footprint in the Latin American market and add further depth to our In-Store Insights capabilities for the world’s leading consumer brands.
Grupo Meiko is the most impressive retail measurement provider in the Latin American market—with data covering store-level insights across over 200,000 points of sale in the region every month.
This is a very big deal and I want to tell you why.
Measuring the Unmeasured
It’s astonishing to realize that 1 in 3 consumer transactions worldwide takes place in the smallest stores on earth—otherwise known as Traditional Trade. In fact, in many markets like Mexico the probability of purchasing a soft drink or bag of chips within a mom-and-pop shop can be north of 60%, compared to 10-15% in an organized grocery store. And there aren’t a handful of stores to choose from… there are literally millions upon millions… and that’s just in Mexico alone.
Mom-and-pop shops are both the largest channel of trade worldwide and the noisiest.
Precisely because of how fragmented, voluminous, and disorganized these retail outlets can be—especially when compared to your local Walmart or Safeway—legacy providers of market research struggle to deliver insight about how a brand is performing with the timeliness and precision manufacturers need in order to take action.
Resulting losses of potential sales rank in the billions.
Enter Premise. Rather than employing traditional methods, we connect the brand directly with trained local gig workers we call ‘contributors’ already present across the entirety of that market. Thousands of contributors visit hundreds of thousands of nearby local stores, capturing data through our mobile app as they visit, and deliver rigorously validated results back to the brand. The result is rich insight with incredible coverage and store-level visibility so the brand can act… confidently and now. This actionability is how you move markets.
Grupo Meiko is a leader in delivering precisely this level of visibility—store by store, market by market—on retail performance for the brands we love. By merging this methodological sophistication with our global local network, we are able to deliver on the true value proposition: as Meiko itself says, “making the invisible, visible.”
And with it, customers win.
Expanding in Latin America
In merging with the exceptional talent of the over 100 high-caliber employees Meiko has assembled in Bogotá, we believe this represents just the right escalation in Premise’s regional ambitions at just the right time.
Not only is Colombia centrally located in the region, it represents the third largest market measured both by population and GDP (only after Brazil and Mexico). Bogotá in particular is a great place to be. The capital city is a hotspot for universities, boasting two of the top 10 universities in LATAM, and is a regional hub for major global companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Other on-demand marketplaces have also built up their presence in Bogota. The highly successful on-demand delivery service Rappi was founded just down the street from us and continues to serve as its global headquarters as the company expands to be the on-demand delivery provider of choice for the region, not to mention Uber and DiDi who also call Bogotá home.
Zooming out to Latin America as a whole, impressive growth in consumer activity across the region inspires confidence among global manufacturers. Over the past decade as wages have risen and connectivity has increased, the emergence of a broader middle class has yielded exceptional growth in broad-based consumption. It’s a key battleground for growth among the world’s top brands.
Despite the opportunity, consumer companies face real headwinds particularly amid market uncertainty. As consumers experience and prepare for potential recession, which brands win the regional growth opportunity will depend significantly on their ability to track and optimize execution with a high degree of granularity. They need to know what is working, what is not, and precisely where so that they may learn, adapt, and change.
Reliable, precise, and timely data that Meiko and Premise deliver together provides these brands exactly what they need to win the market.
No more black box, no more delay.
Toward A Global Future
For too long the legacy market research industry has struggled to provide insight that has the coverage, precision, and timeliness needed to understand their markets in a way that allows them to act. Locked in small and poorly representative panels, a lack of transparency about the which outlets are comprised in those panels, and 30-60 day waiting periods between what happens in the real world and when the data is available and analyzed, all means brands lack the actionability they need to grow in the greatest and most important channel of trade on earth.
Global brands deserve better. All brands deserve better.
No matter where on the planet you are, if you are buying a consumer product, the retailers from which you buy it and the manufacturers that made it, deserve the insight they need to make sure you can get it. Our work with Meiko holds a global promise that precise, timely visibility at retail can be delivered in a way and at a time that moves the needle for each of them.
The acquisition of Grupo Meiko represents our conviction that this possibility will become a reality not only in Latin America, but in each of the 138 markets we currently serve around the world, advancing insight against the darkness in which so many companies have long suffered.