Retail & e-commerce
KVI Potential Score
Scores a category's items against the criteria that make a KVI.
The problem
Collapsing KVI selection into the best-seller list is the commonest error, and the most understandable: the second list is one query away, the first takes judgement. The two sets only partly overlap. An exclusive best-seller can be compared nowhere and therefore carries no weight in how customers perceive prices, whatever its rate of sale, while a rarely bought traffic-driver stocked at every competitor carries a great deal.
The price competitiveness budget then spreads across items the customer never checks, while the ones they do check drift unmonitored. Correcting it comes down to scoring, explicitly and one category at a time, the properties that make a price memorable and comparable across retailers, with no heavy tooling involved.
KVI Potential Score
How to read the result
Input
- Item list for the category being assessed, each with its sales rank, used only for the final comparison
- Purchase frequency and price recall
- Comparability: the exact item exists at the competitors tracked
- Visibility in aisle, in leaflet and on the first page of results
- Relative weight of the four criteria and comparability threshold
How to read the result
- A ranking holds inside a category; aggregated, it reproduces the rotation bias
- The break in slope down the ranking shows where to cut
- Below the comparability threshold an item is screened out, whatever it scores on the other three criteria
- Below the score floor of 40 out of 100 an item is never selected; the break in slope is sought above it. Tied scores and duplicate sales ranks are flagged, as they weaken the cut and the comparison with sales
Limits
- Price recall and visibility scores stay team judgements. They record what the organisation believes about the customer, not what the customer checks.
- Comparability is assessed against the competitor panel entered. A pure player missing from that panel shifts the list across every category it trades.
- An item is scored in isolation, without its place in the range. An opening price point and its own-brand equivalent both surface when one reference point is enough.
- The selection carries no date. A new line bedding in, an item reaching end of life, and the list has moved well before an annual review comes round.
The score measures KVI potential, not how sensitive the customer actually is to price. The output is a proposal. Buyers alone know real substitutability inside their own category. An unreadable entry leaves the last valid value in place with a message, and any value brought back to a limit is flagged. Numbers are read according to the language of the page: comma or point in French, point in English, comma in German and Spanish.
In the glossary
A first thirty-minute conversation
The tool gives the order of magnitude. The decision that follows can be discussed in thirty minutes.