Compete and Cannondale to Offer New insights into Shopping Behavior from First Click to In-Store Purchase

BOSTON and WILTON, Conn., Nov. 9 /PRNewswire/ -- Compete, a Kantar Media company, and Cannondale Associates, a marketing and sales management consulting firm, today announced a partnership that gives marketers new insight into consumers' shopping behavior as they move from researching goods online to in-store purchase. For the first time, marketers can see which digital marketing campaigns are actually delivering results. Specifically, Compete and Cannondale are providing marketers with insight into the impact of online activities and media consumption (including search, ad exposure, sites visited, etc) on in-store purchase behavior and brand loyalty.

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091109/NE07098LOGO-a )

(Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20091109/NE07098LOGO-b )

The partnership provides a new capability that combines industry-best data from two Kantar companies: behavioral data from Compete's panel of two million U.S.-based Internet users with Cannondale's ShopperGenetics® database, which offers basket-level frequent shopper card data from over 80 million U.S. households. When these national sources are combined, a picture emerges that lets marketers fine-tune strategies and tactics and measure marketing ROI as shoppers move from consideration online to purchase in-store.

Together, Compete and Cannondale allow marketers to harness deep insights into multi-source, nationwide online and in-store retail purchase behavior. Marketers will uncover the "what" and "how" of consumers' buying habits, including brand loyalty, migration between products and trading up or down. By combining Compete's breadth of online behavioral data with Cannondale's in-store purchase behavior findings, marketers can make end-to-end connections to demonstrate the real ROI of online strategies and more precisely quantify and analyze consumer purchase behavior. Compete and Cannondale are presently conducting seminal research in a $5 billion consumer products category quantifying the impact of online digital behavior on offline brand purchase, loyalty and engagement.

"Consumer recall and brand awareness measures can tell us a lot, but, as digital ad budgets grow, marketers need a more comprehensive view of the consumer behavior," said Eric Salama, CEO of Kantar. "Within Kantar, we have companies that specialize in observing customers as they go through discrete stages of searching, product comparison and shopping. What this partnership does is extend our analysis across the entire consumer lifecycle to deliver a more complete - and insightful - picture of campaign performance and effectiveness."

For more information about Compete, please visit: www.competeinc.com. For more about Cannondale Associates, please visit their Web site: http://www.cannondaleassoc.com/index-2.html.

About Compete
Compete, a Kantar Media company, helps the world's top brands improve their marketing based on the online behavior of millions of consumers. Leading marketers such as Carlson Hotels Worldwide, Hyundai Motor America, Upromise, Chrysler, and Verizon Wireless rely on Compete's services to create effective online experiences and highly profitable advertising campaigns. Compete's online behavior database -- the largest in the industry -- makes the Web as ingrained in marketing as it is in people's lives.

Compete was founded in 2000 and is located in Boston, MA, with offices throughout the U.S. For more information about us, please visit http://www.competeinc.com/, or to join the conversation visit http://www.compete.com/.

About Cannondale
Cannondale Associates is a leading sales and marketing management consulting firm with offices in Wilton, CT and Evanston, IL and is part of Kantar and WPP. Cannondale is internationally recognized for its distinctive shopper, consumer, customer and retail marketing disciplines. Cannondale's ShopperGenetics® database - the largest frequent shopper card database in the industry - enables marketers to develop more effective aisle, department, category and brand strategies and tactics. For more information, please visit: http://www.cannondaleassoc.com/ .

About Kantar
Kantar is one of the world's largest insight, information and consultancy networks. By uniting the diverse talents of its 13 specialist companies, the group aims to become the pre-eminent provider of compelling and inspirational insights for the global business community. Its 26,500 employees work across 95 countries and across the whole spectrum of research and consultancy disciplines, enabling the group to offer clients business insights at each and every point of the consumer cycle. The group's services are employed by over half of the Fortune Top 500 companies.

For further information, please visit us at www.kantar.com