Introduction
Shopper Intelligence helps retailers and suppliers understand the why behind purchase decisions. Their programs benchmark shopper satisfaction, category roles, decision hierarchies, promotional response, and path to purchase. They run across 100+ categories per market, covering the major retailers in each one.
They have been doing this for 18 years. Every quarter they run online surveys in 13 countries, most of which operate as local franchises. They ask people who bought in a category that week why they chose what they chose. Each wave must land on time and line up with the last one, because the value of a tracker is in the comparison.
The challenge
Shopper Intelligence had run the whole program through the same provider since day one. By year 13 that setup was no longer keeping pace with the business. Data quality had begun to drift, with samples in several countries skewing steadily older and becoming less representative.
This was enough for them to start looking for a new provider. Someone who could stand behind the quality of the data, take on the full service rather than a slice of it, and work alongside them as they opened new markets.
Changing provider carried its own risk, because what a tracking business sells is comparability. A new provider could shift the trend line, and a shifted trend line is hard to explain to clients who have been reading it for a decade. So, the question was less about who was better, and more about who Shopper Intelligence could trust enough to move without losing that history.
Earning the switch
At the time, Walr was still the new kids on the block. With more than a decade of Shopper Intelligence trend data on the line the evaluation was thorough by design. It looked into Walr’s data quality, scope and range. Then the question that mattered most in a program this wide: could Walr reach the right people in difficult, small markets?
Colin Holmes, Shopper Intelligence’s Global Operations Director, does not undersell how far it went.
“We went through all the obsessive checking that the data quality was something we could trust, that you had the scope and the range.”
Every question came back answered and evidenced, so Shopper Intelligence could confirm it for themselves rather than take anyone’s word for it. Before long Walr was running their biggest country, Australia.
The move
Australia was first as it was the biggest market, and getting it right made the rest of the network easier to convince.
“Once some of the other countries saw the initial countries go, then it became easier to do.”
Market after market followed, dominoing across the network until early 2026, when their US business came across making Shopper Intelligence exclusively Walr.
When asked what really made the difference, Colin pointed straight at communication.
“One of the biggest changes was the communication. There was loads of communication. No assumptions being made, lots of checking with us. Sometimes we just throw a little spanner in the works and ask for something else, and it was just swallowed up and dealt with. Nothing was too big of an issue.”
That openness took some getting used to and then became what reassured them. Nothing is handled in a silo and there is always a human on the other end. Everyone is involved and can see what is happening and has the record to match. As Colin describes it, a safety net.
Setting up for success
Processing down from two weeks to three days
Manual data management is largely a thing of the past. Files used to arrive by email or get uploaded to SharePoint and moved by hand. Now an API connection pulls the data out of Walr and straight into Crunch, the analysis tool Shopper Intelligence runs on. Walr programs every wave into Decipher, the survey platform they chose to stay on, so the team works in the tools they already know at both ends. That removed a couple of days of file wrangling from every cycle and brought the full processing run from around two weeks to around three days.
Data solid enough to build on
Samples come back more representative, and fraudulent or rogue respondents are caught before they ever reach Shopper Intelligence. Knowing the data is more robust has made the team bolder, and they now innovate more with what they already collect.
Coverage that turns into sales
Smaller markets used to be a risk worth avoiding. Now they are worth quoting for.
“We’ve been able to be much more confident about expanding into smaller countries. Occasionally we’ll dip into a smaller country and get some data, and that’s enabled us to make some really good sales. With others we may not have had the confidence we’d be able to get the data from that country.”
Room to ask
Colin measures a good quarter two ways: the cycle runs without hiccups, and when they want to try something different, it’s easy to do. Both hold true now. The crazy questions get a proper hearing, nothing comes back as too much trouble, and the team has the confidence to keep asking bigger ones.
What’s next
Shopper Intelligence runs as a franchise network, and franchises innovate locally. The model calls for one syndicated questionnaire in every country. In practice, each has drifted into its own version. Aligning them has been on Colin’s list for a while. The ambition is one script, one processing unit, and markets that compare by design. Colin is counting on Walr’s tools to make that achievable.
“It’s one of those big nightmare jobs nobody looks forward to. But I now have confidence that when I get started, it’s going to be much easier than it would have been.”
Walr in three words.
Innovative. Trustworthy. Collaborative.
