The Pulse -- February 2005

A new era in Branding
New brand identification fasteners from Avery Dennison Retail Information Services give apparel brands and retailers an innovative new way to communicate and enhance brand identity by displaying highly visible printed brand names, retail names and logos on their products. In addition, the fasteners' distinctive appearance and proprietary molding process serves to verify product authenticity, identifying fakes and potentially deterring counterfeiting. Users of the new AVERY DENNISON System 1000 Brand Identification Fasteners include apparel brand owners, manufacturers and suppliers, and retailers. To date, one major sports apparel maker currently employs the fasteners as a means of authenticating its soccer jerseys.

Critical Mention Measures Brand Exposure
The Web-based television search engine and monitoring service, Critical Mention Inc., unveils a new version of its Critical TV Enterprise solution, allowing consumer goods companies such as Miller Brewing to instantly track television news coverage and be immediately notified when both their brand and their competitors are mentioned on television. Users can log in to read the text of a broadcast, view coverage and share clips immediately by sending a video email to a colleague or workgroup. Users can also post the clip to a video gallery, order a copy on CD or purchase a professionally written transcript of the coverage. The new version of Critical TV Enterprise offers enhancements including a redesigned interface, an enhanced search engine and detailed notification, all of which enable users to better monitor, search, view and share relevant television news clips.

P&G Sets up selling space
The Procter & Gamble Company is implementing additional JDA Portfolio space management software and using JDA Software Group's new strategic services to achieve verifiable sales improvements across categories. The combined JDA solution of Floor Planning by Intactix and Optimize on Demand will enable P&G to introduce innovative category management processes to optimize selling space for its strong portfolio of brands. "To grow sales and volume across our entire portfolio, it's becoming increasingly important that we work closely with our retail partners to better manage space allocation, including adjacencies, for our products on the store floor," says J. P. Brackman, P&G's global retail presence manager. "JDA's category management applications will help us to better understand how to maximize our available space as we continue to add new categories and meet the unique needs of our retail partners."

RFID-READY Suppliers to multiply at Metro group
Since launching the first phase of its supply chain RFID implementation in November 2004, the world's third largest retailer, Metro Group, is now poised to roll out RFID capabilities to additional locations beginning March 2005. With 20 of its suppliers shipping a number of RFID-tagged products to Metro, the company is already realizing significant improvements within its supply chain. "We are already seeing faster unloading and checking in for RFID shipments of around 15 to 20 minutes per truck, as well as early identification and elimination of weak spots in handling process," says Gerd Wolfram, director of IT strategy, buying and development services for the Metro Group subsidiary, MGI Metro Group Information Technology. Metro expects 100 suppliers to send RFID-tagged shipments by the end of 2005. And by next year, Metro's top 300 suppliers -- which provide merchandise accounting for 60 percent to 80 percent of the retailer's total revenue -- are anticipated to follow suit.

Wrigley Sticks to Consumer Insight
The world's largest manufacturer and marketer of gum, Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, taps ACNielsen U.S. and TDLinx as its new preferred providers of syndicated marketing information and consumer insights. Wrigley will take advantage of a wide range of ACNielsen services -- offering information on everything from product assortment and front-end trends to sales monitoring and promotion analysis across key distribution channels. Data from ACNielsen's TDLinx division will help drive retail execution and additional supply chain efficiencies by allowing for the integration of external ACNielsen sales data with internal Wrigley SAP shipment data. "We believe that ACNielsen has the information tools and people to best support our future direction," says Ralph Scozzafava, Wrigley vice president and managing director, North America/Pacific. "They proposed creative solutions to some of our key data challenges and offered a variety of programs and mechanisms to support our pursuit of even broader and deeper consumer and customer insights."