Success Story: How Grupo Lala Increased its Share of Shelf Through Exhaustive Digital Shelf Control

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The Mexican leader in the dairy industry increases its brand visibility by 26% thanks to exhaustive Digital Shelf and Retail Media control, and manages to save 98% of resources in data analysis.

Grupo Lala is a Mexican company with over 70 years of experience in the food and beverage industry, specializing in the production and marketing of dairy products and their derivatives. Founded in 1950 in Torreón, Coahuila, the company has grown to become a sector leader, expanding its portfolio with categories such as milk, yoghurts, cheeses and nutritious drinks. With a strong presence in Mexico, the United States and Central America, Lala has consolidated its leadership through innovation, quality and an efficient distribution network that guarantees the freshness of its products.

Throughout its evolution, Grupo Lala has invested in modernizing its processes and expanding its market. This has included strategic acquisitions and the strengthening of its logistics infrastructure. In 2013, the company debuted on the Mexican Stock Exchange, marking a milestone in its growth and corporate development. Furthermore, it has implemented sustainability and digitalisation strategies to improve its competitiveness and operational efficiency, adapting to new consumption dynamics and the demands of the retail sector.

The challenge: achieving total visibility in Mexico and optimising daily control of retailers with real-time information on brand and competitiveness

Seeking to offer the best shopping experience (both in-store and online) to its customers throughout Mexico, Grupo Lala faced three significant challenges.

Challenge 1: Gaining direct visibility across all its distributors in the vast Mexican territory

Without the support of current technology, the company was investing many hours in carrying out the work manually. This approach was associated with a loss of focus for the sales team and excessive investment in market reports from large consultancies.

Challenge 2: Enabling its Category Managers and Sales Department to better control retailer actions in real time

Closely related to the previous challenge, to control the market, the departments relied on Nielsen’s Pricetrack. This tool offered them a view of stores with a 15-day delay and limited coverage to certain supermarket chains.

Challenge 3: Obtaining real-time information on its brand positioning

The group’s Marketing and E-commerce Department faced the third major challenge: having real-time information on its positioning, being able to analyse its brand share across different shelves, and using the data obtained to build comparative analyses between its products and those of its competitors.

As we explained in one of our articles, traditional market reports have certain limitations, such as their high cost or long response times, which don’t allow for a quick reaction to market changes. These were just the biggest challenges this Mexican group was facing.

If they didn’t manage to control the situation,they would continue to operate blindly in a vast and complex market. Its sales and marketing teams would have to devise strategies without a solid basis for executing effective action plans. In addition, investment in these initiatives would be excessive without any guarantee that it would actually allow it to stay ahead of the competition.

Aware of this problem and the potential of technology to transform it, Grupo Lala decided to seek the support of a specialized partner in real-time market monitoring and analysis with the highest level of detail.

The solution: accurate data, daily visibility on a single panel and market control with Share of Shelf and Retail Media

Several meetings were held with all the teams involved. In these meetings, the most effective strategies for achieving visibility with precise real-time data and controlling their market positioning were analysed and debated. After these meetings, Grupo Lala decided to work with flipflow in all areas requiring optimization.

Solutions for the Sales and Execution Department

One of the main objectives of implementing daily market analysis and its use in the Sales Department was to be able to estimate the accuracy of the data collected online at the store level. And also the limitations this might present. The first major test that Grupo Lala carried out with flipflow was an analysis that compiled data from 10 products in different stores in Mexico, both historically and in real time via Point of Sale Managers, and compared it with flipflow’s daily data.

The conclusions from the data provided by flipflow on its platform were as follows:

Accuracy of the data offered by flipflow on its platform, compared to the data they were using at the time provided by Nielsen’s Pricetrack tool, was 98%.
On the other hand, the accuracy of the availability data in the flipflow tool, compared to what the Point of Sale Managers saw in store, was 95%.

This data guaranteed that Grupo Lala’s Sales Department would find virtually no limitations if it started using the flipflow platform to gain daily visibility across all retailers through a single panel.

Solutions for Sales and Digital Departments

All the group’s departments that used Sell-in and Sell-out information on a day-to-day basis relied on multiple data cross-references to generate a monthly report comparing sales, prices, availability and investment in promotions. In addition, the company analysed information geographically in Nielsen Areas and also in its own internal areas. These analysis consumed many working hours, requiring reports to be adapted and filtered.

Working with flipflow, the following improvements were introduced:

Uploading proprietary Sell-in and Sell-out data to the flipflow platform to be able to cross-reference it with a single click.
Instant visibility of the data on a single panel and in their language.
Inclusion of promotion and offer data by chain and store for real-time control of deviations.
Structuring all market information by their areas, which is kept automatically updated.

Thanks to these improvements, these departments managed to obtain daily data at the retailer and store level on the performance of their products and brands. Using this information, they control:

Their prices and promotions, channel by channel and store by store, validating that their policies are being met in real time.
The availability of each product per store, to avoid losing sales due to stockouts.
Assortment gaps, so that their sales teams can act immediately and maximize sales and Sell-in.
Competitiveness in their categories by region versus their main competitors in each store.

Solutions for the Marketing Department

The Marketing Department was the first to cleverly leverage the advantages of flipflow’s product as a technology partner. Using it to monitor brand visibility and presence by keyword in the web search results of different retailers they achieved all these improvements:

Monitoring their brand and product positioning by keyword at the store level.
Reviewing and comparing their Share of Shelf against the competition in each retailer.
Comparing their Paid Share of Shelf with that of their competitors, inferring conclusions about competitor advertising investments.
Evaluating the quality of their content in each retailer and being able to enrich it, thus improving their omnichannel image.
Cross-referencing their negotiated Retail Media campaigns with their distributors to confirm that their guidelines are being correctly applied on a daily basis.
Analyzing on which shelves their products and those of the competition are presented, drawing conclusions about consumer behaviour based on Digital Shelf analysis.

The implemented solution, thanks to the use of flipflow’s intelligent platform, impacted the direct work of the company’s teams. They all saw their strategies improved to achieve total market visibility and control their positioning on the Digital Shelf. And this translated into excellent results.

The results: increased Share of Shelf, reduced operating costs and total control in real time

Since Grupo Lala forged its alliance with flipflow, it has experienced notable improvements in many areas of its business:

Market control and coverage in real time

On the one hand, it has managed to obtain real-time information, having data from the last 24 hours for all its products across all the retailers where it has a presence, something that was simply impossible to achieve with the tool they were using previously.

They have also achieved greater coverage of their business, as flipflow offers them visibility in retailers such as Sams, Uber Eats, Rappi, Amazon and cash & carry chains, while Nielsen Pricetrack doesn’t provide this data. This detailed information allows them to negotiate better conditions and increase margins. And, in addition, with this visibility, they obtain a complete overview of their competitors in the same stores and retailers to take action quickly and effectively.

Reduction in time, resources and operating costs

On the other hand, the savings in time and resources achieved by Grupo Lala using the flipflow platform are also significant. The execution time for cross-referencing information has been reduced by 98%. For example, the data analysts in the Sales Department previously spent about 4 hours a day cross-referencing all the information they had (both proprietary and that obtained from the Nielsen tool they were using) to produce their reports. With flipflow, they can obtain these reports in just 2 minutes.

The time invested by Category Managers in understanding the competitive situation and the performance of their products has also been drastically reduced. They have gone from having to wait for reports for several days to being able to view them on a single panel on the same day. This means that unavailable products or new competitor launches can be quickly detected, allowing for a much more agile response.

Costs associated with conducting store checks have been reduced by 65%, allowing these funds, which were previously allocated to price checks, to be invested in other areas with returns.

Increased Share of Shelf and sales growth

Finally, it is worth highlighting the 26% increase in brand visibility (significantly displacing not only private label brands but also retailer brands), thanks to the use of the flipflow platform to conduct exhaustive control of the Digital Shelf and Retail Media in the categories in which they compete within the market, and for all the keywords in their sector. This improvement results in a greater market share in digital channels but also impacts the physical world due to consumer behaviour.

These advancements and the results obtained led to a 9% increase in Grupo Lala’s sales. Those results confirmed that adopting flipflow’s market analytics tool was the right move. Today, the platform has become a key solution globally for the company.

Do you want to achieve the same excellent results as Grupo Lala, with greater visibility in your market, total price control and better positioning on the Digital Shelf? Discover how our solutions can help you optimize costs, strengthen your brand image and maximize your ROI.

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