How RB Leverages Agile, Always-On Tools To Predict What’s to Come

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The past year caught everyone off guard, even the most high-profile of brands. But Suzy helped this health, hygiene, and home products manufacturer navigate its way through the darkest of times.

Throughout 2020, people were faced with extraordinary concerns about health and safety. Though such “real life” issues took precedent above all else, corporate leaders were faced with unprecedented business decisions as well. 

Even multi-faceted, international giants like RB were caught off guard and could not rest on their laurels. As a manufacturer of health, hygiene, and home products, RB had to be ready to serve consumers, while wading through unknown waters where currents were changing course seemingly faster than ever. 

“Some of the biggest pressures that we had was: ‘How would we keep everyone updated on these latest insight changes on a weekly basis?’” said Nathaniel Noertker, Team Lead of Shopper Outperformance at RB, in a recent conversation with Madhu Iyengar, Director of Enterprise Partnerships at Suzy. “What do we release to the organization to help keep them updated within this rapidly changing environment?”

This job would require real-time, always-on insights. They deduced that speed would be crucial to keeping up in the initial stages of the pandemic, and a third-party vendor, aligned internally, must be able to respond quickly to market changes.

So Noertker and his team turned to Suzy. 

Because they’d begun taking steps toward addressing the potential ramifications of a pandemic spread starting in February, when it came to uncovering insights, Noertker and his Shopper Outperformance team already knew what questions they needed to ask consumers. There were questions like: “What are you feeling?” and “What are you going through, right in this moment?”

Noertker told Iyengar that the Suzy approach to insights was markedly faster than more familiar methods that were also “a little more traditional in nature.” So confident with Suzy, RB’s team got really adventurous. 

Based on consumer insights garnered from Suzy, they set their collective mind toward predicting sales across the final three quarters of 2020 in four different categories. 

“Insights people definitely don’t like to make forecasts, but you have to draw a line in the sand and help the business understand where you’re going,” Noertker said. “What we fielded was a lot of questions around our categories to understand why [consumers] bought what they bought, what their planned usage was, how much stock did they think they would have on hand.”

Their initial insights were generated within just a couple of days, on March 20, barely a week after the first lockdowns began. Noertker revealed four learnings he and his team garnered from their customized Suzy study:

In what he labeled “Category A,” they found that at the beginning of the pandemic people were stocking up to cover six months’ worth of product use. They believed this would lead to reduced sales as the “new normal” emerged across the next three quarters of the fiscal year. 

In Category B, consumers were purchasing more, but only stocking up for a single month. Therefore, it was forecasted by Noertker’s team that sales would likely go up.

People were stocking up in Category C, but still using the same amount, so they figured sales would decline or stay about even going forward.

Finally, in Category D, they found that consumers were still purchasing the products, but that there was less consumer engagement during a pandemic. The prediction there? Sales could decline.

We know now how accurate the RB forecasting turned out to be, which was astoundingly precise. 

“We were thrilled to go back and do the postmortem on this,” Noertker says. “The things that we learned held true, which was fascinating and fantastic for us to see. It gave us a lot of comfort in what we were doing.”

Category A saw sales drops between 20 and 40 percent across the four quarters. On the other hand, Category B enjoyed a more than triple-digit sales percentage boost in the second quarter, with sales continuing to remain higher throughout the second half of 2020. Categories C and D saw 5- and 10-percent drops in quarter two, and continued but less-drastic dips the rest of the year.

But whether the sales were up or down in those categories across the remainder of 2020, RB was able to make adjustments and strategize, using their Suzy insights study continuously as a reference point, when so much else in the world remained up in the air.

If 2020 taught us anything, it’s that the future is always uncertain. However, with Suzy on their side, the insights leaders at RB have proven they can come pretty close to predicting what’s to come, even in the wake of incredible, quick-paced change.