How To Execute Trade Checks - A Marketing Research Application

Trade Check is an activity performed by market researchers in order to gain insight on the actual performance of the brand they are researching on. The trade check could potentially exposed the deficiencies or strengths of each brand. It will give a bird's eyeview of the competitive landscape among product categories.


These two questions are normally asked after the activity because with all the data that you'll be getting, it's hard to formulate recommendations if we don't know what we're actually looking for.


I. Recording

1. Assign one student on one supermarket.
2. The student should act like a regular customer as
3. The assigned student should record the following data in the store where he/she is assigned to prior to Phase II :
• number of units per brand per flavor per size
• Store price per unit per brand per flavor per size
• Sketch location of each brand on the display shelf

II. Store monitoring

1. Stand in the selling area for 15-30minutes.
2. Record the actual products bought/taken out from the display shelf.

 III. Reporting/summarizing

1. Volume of the entire category on display (Pack size x number of units = expressed in a common measure like liters, grams, etc.)
• Per store
• All stores
2. Value of the entire category on display (Store price x number of units = expressed in pesos)
• Per store
• All stores
3. Volume share of each brand on display (Pack sizes of the brand x number of units of the brand divided by the results in Item # 1 and expressed as %)
4. Value share of each brand on display (Store price of each pack size of the brand x number of units of the brand divided by the results in Item # 2 and expressed as %)
5. Comparative analysis of store prices (Store price of each pack size of the brand divided by the corresponding pack size = price index)
6. Consumer offtake/Sales share of each brand per store = market share (Sales of each brand divided by total sales of the category)

So there you have it. Just follow the steps above in each supermarket or trade you're going to check and you'll have your data in no time.

I'll create another post on how to analyze the data generated by the trade check.

Nicco Joselito Lopez-Tan is currently pursuing post-graduate studies at the De La Salle Univeristy - Taft Manila, taking up Master of Marketing Communications.