#73 - Miranda Ballard - NielsenIQ [Head of SMB West Europe & Global]

0:00Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to the founders. Today I'm joined by the brilliant Miranda Ballard who is the head of small and medium businesses for West Urban Global at Nielsen IQ. Now Nielsen, look after all things data. From a challenging brand perspective, data is so important to know how you compete with those big brands out there and even the smaller brands and where you sit on shelf amongst them. Data is so valuable and it's what helped happen with its great listings last year. And me and Miranda dig into the ins and outs, the best learnings, how you can use it, how to make it more affordable.

0:29This incredible new AI software of testing product before it's even launched in new markets. But how did Miranda get into this? What was her background? From performing arts to launching her own business, the lessons and learnings of closing that business and going into administration, falling into sales. It felt like a parallel universe where I've gone through a similar process myself, but it was really, really cathartic, really enjoyable. We both came off beaming and I hope you get to enjoy some of that energy listening to this podcast. So without further ado, let's get on with the episode. We all know that brand is important, right?

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1:41Hello and welcome back to Young Founders. Today I'm joined by the wonderful Miranda Ballard. So Miranda, can you let everyone know where you work and what your role is there? Yes, thank you for having me. I'm Miranda. I run SMB at Nielsen IQ. So what that means is in 77 countries out of the 80 something that the company has a data office there. I run the team dedicated to selling a light version of our data products to small or medium sized businesses. So depending on the size of the country, there's a cutoff if they're SMB. And then we have a range of products designed to be usable and affordable for small businesses.

2:17And my teams find those small businesses, explain what data is and hope that they'll come and buy from us and we'll grow with them. Amazing, fascinating. And for anyone that when you're saying about data and small businesses, like a lot of the people I interview are these challenger brands, why would they want to get involved with Nielsen and the data that your teams are selling? What is it about Nielsen that you offer to brands and why is it important? I think the main thing we sell is competitor data. If I were just going to summarize it, what is the data? You're able to see what your peers and competitors sold last month.

2:52So when you put in your own orders with a supermarket, you can see what they're buying from you and you can get some raw data back, but you can't see what the other, the rest of the category sold, how often they're on promo, how many units per store per week did they sell, what price should you be, what's the impact. And what you're really buying, if I were to sort of say, what do you get out of it? It's the confidence to take your brand and your positioning to a retailer buyer to pitch for shelf space, to investors to raise funding, to any stakeholders, what our benchmark data, because we collect, imagine every beep in every till in 150 ,000 stores in the UK.

3:32We buy that raw data, more transactions a day than Visa, MasterCard and Amex put together. But imagine it's a lorry load dump of receipts from thousands and thousands of customers every day. What our company does is sort that into rows and columns so that you could look at the total soft drinks category for the UK rather than a million separate receipts and have to pick it out yourself. So it's competitor intelligence to give you confidence in how your brand is different to everybody else on the shelf and then therefore how to grow and be a big client of ours in the future. Amazing. Yeah, I think one of those things that even just quantifying it like that it kind of helps to explain why data can be so expensive because it's always one of those things of like category data is absolute gold we use it we want retail listings off the back of it we're packed yeah last year was the first year of me kind of doing it and understanding actually how powerful data can be properly once you get the real source data and go wow look at where we sit in this category but um for the average brand who's going wow can i justify this how do i do it like when you're when you're working with small and smaller businesses, what kind of packages is there or opportunities for brands to go, you know what, we don't need everything that the same of Unilever or Pepsi are having, like what can we have that we can do?

4:47Totally. I overuse the analogy, but if you imagine Unilever have a Range Rover Sport, this is a Fiat Uno or even a bicycle. So they're going to get you there. It's not going to be as comfy because Coke, Pepsi, Unilever, et cetera, they will have custom data sets so they could view it from any way. If you want to see six pack of drinks with on-pack promotion that mentioned the Euros football, bing, it's there. You can see, you know, item level and you can look at a brand and a skew. But if you're wanting to look at a certain segmentation or look at a collection of brands, you've kind of got to flex the platform to do.

5:28Thanks to technology, there's an awful lot more you can do today than you could even five years ago. But you don't have the professional analysts that we have here that are designated to the large clients. You don't have an operations liaison to change. So for them, it's just very, very granular. But that said, for them, they're also trying to allocate retail media spend and work out third party. What they also need to do with it is more. So that's where we took a step back six years ago and said, okay, well, what's enough? Like what's enough to go to a buyer? What can tell you the bottom 10 SKUs, which is, if I only sold one thing to small businesses like my own, it's not the top 10 SKUs.

6:10If I, for chocolate brand, I'm going to see Nestle, Mondelez, Mars, you know, that's great. And it's good to see. But the bottom 10 SKUs is where I'm going to go to my buyer and say, take that one off and put me on. And so that we don't actually need all the rest of it. If you could afford it, you'd have it. But really, and where we can get the best return, if you're selling 20 quid per store per week, you only need to increase your distribution. You know, sometimes when you look over the year, sometimes it's 30, 50 stores to pay back on the investment in the data. And sometimes just finding out, you know, this tail of SKUs at the bottom of a category underperforming, and it might be like the seasonal flavor eight pack when there's already a six pack, The retailer will know, okay, that's a trailing skew.

6:53But you coming in saying, come on, you know, I can see their rate of sale. They're only selling five packs per store per week. I'm going to do six. That alone, you should give me that eight centimeters. So it's just, let's start with that. And then what we see is our small customers get bigger, is we don't have to have an awkward conversation with them when they get to the cutoff, whether it's, say, 20 million or 50 million. They might have started with us at 10 grand or even pre-listing. It's not an awkward conversation to say, sorry, you don't qualify for this subsidized rate card or this light product range.

7:25They need more than it anyway. They've already started the conversation. We need this. I need some service. I need some analytics. I need some customization. So they sort of fledge. Well, sometimes our big clients come and buy them out, which is also really exciting when that happens. We're like, goodbye. But when they get there themselves, they've already flexed, you know, hit the walls of our product range. They need much, much more. So it's not an awkward conversation when we get there. They've already been a little fledgling bird. Yeah, I think that's what every brand's obviously trying to grow to understand, okay, where is the opportunities?

7:57Actually, does it make sense if we go into more stores or do we need a tighter range? All these things are so valid. But what do you think often where smaller brands get things wrong with data, either buying the wrong data or not looking in the right places? If you think about the core of a small business, what is the key data takeaways that they're like? This is what you need to know. obviously like you said the bottom skews yes super important if you're going they can't expand the shelf spaces i mean a cardo's a bit a bit extra but it's still not unlimited um so it's for those designated retails like a tesco or saint's wheels or waitress where it's like the freezers are tiny like waitress in particular very small freezers we're we're still trying to get in there watch this space 2026 let's keep going um but they're like very very competitive So you have to know your value in that slot.

8:44So aside from that, what are the key things you're like, this is your challenger brand Bible of, get this right? Yes. My favorite fact, the one that I just love because it's the only leveler, whether you're Coca-Cola, Red Bull, hip hop, and the one that isn't is rate of sale because it's how many packs per store per week. So you need to know before going in what that number is, You know, I was in fresh meat for my company and we didn't know to even ask our retailer buyer, how many packs should it be? Like we just didn't know what to ask. And if we'd known that, we would have run the numbers back to say, well, we're going to need 30 ,000 stores to even get to what we're saying we're going to turn.

9:31So first of all, for your due diligence, like is there enough rate of sale for you to actually make a business out of this? And also, what is a private label rate of sale? Again, talking fresh meat here, like it's 90 % private label. And some packs of sausages that you imagine would be hundreds of packs per store per week were 25. So if I could have got, well, hang on, work it backwards. Am I going to be doing more than 10 packs per store per week and I do three deliveries? So it's a very, it's a cruel fact, actually. It's really net. Sometimes it can really put people off from doing the business at all, which is terrible in a sales demo when I'm trying to sell the data and they're like, I just shouldn't do this.

10:13I'm like, okay, this isn't going well at all. But it's real. It's a real, real number to know. And then once you're in the store and then you're pitching because, as my buyer told, you know, I can't extend the shelves overnight, Miranda. But because they can't, as you said, you're trying to get that eight, 10 centimeters. And the only way to say that it's more is that you're going to contribute more to the category. So if you've got any other data that says, well, in this retailer, we're selling 20 packs per store per week. And I can see that your category average is this. And then this skew is this.

10:48At least let's start there. And it's hard for anybody to say, so if I stopped you, I would make more money. You know, so rate of sale is the leveler. That's the real number because it's also, as I said, regardless of what size the brand is, it's the only way to compare two people head to head. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think as we kind of touched on, Nielsen are capturing data from millions of transactions. But aside from the actual physical, this product's been sold at this space. one thing I think when I learned about Nielsen and like the 360 and all these other things is like you can know almost the inside leg measurement of this person of this is where they live this is what else they buy like from the consumer behavior kind of perspective for you has there ever been anything in the time you've been at Nielsen or working with data that you've gone oh wow I didn't actually know my thoughts would have been that's it but the data says something completely different it's like a proper aha moment have you had any of those yes and it's so often as you said with the consumer data because the what, like the how much through the till isn't attached to a person, but the who.

11:55So when we have 50 ,000 people scanning their shopping every single day, and we know because they've agreed to contractually do that with us, we know everything about them. So the bit that was really mind-blowing, especially for fast growing startups, challenger brands, small, medium, is first time purchase, second time purchase, third time purchase. So I know, having done it myself, it's hard, but easier to get a first listing because there's a novelty aspect. The retailers, it's good for them, it's good for business, but they are, especially in the UK, even more so than other countries, now I'm getting to know them, extremely supportive of startup brands.

12:34It's differentiation for them, which is they wouldn't do it if it wasn't good business. But what I really saw from the data that was a little bit of a sort of, well, it was a little cathartic actually, because my business failed in the end. But when I saw the data that you could see, did they buy it once? Great. Unless they buy it a second time, you're going to run out of people really fast because we think of a big 60 million population, but they go to the same retailer and they live in one region. And our data even shows that if there's a bit of river and the bridge is there, they'll actually go to that retailer and they'll keep going there.

13:10So if they buy you, if they don't buy you a second time, they've gone, gone, they're not going to buy you. So it puts a lot of pressure on it being a good product to begin with, which is always a cliche, but our data really shows it. The difference between when you, and we track first time purchase, second, third, fourth, because after that, you've had a consumer buy something four times, it's in the basket, it's digital or physical. So I think frequency of purchase and repeat purchase is gold, if you can see that as well. The problem with the panel shopper is we extrapolate data. So you have to have a certain number of people buying it to be able to get that read.

13:47And if you're very small, we can't pick you up. We haven't got enough people. But what you can do is benchmark yourself against robust, as we call it, so big enough brands in the category. So again, this is where you can kind of make do with the data. Not perfect, but good enough. And you can see what that repeat purchase looks like. And then you can do some surveying yourself to try and get a hold of that benchmark. Go out to customers that buy from you if you sell D to C or customers that you know, or put a poll out on social media, just something to say, hey, how many people bought my product once and then went back and bought it again?

14:21Because what you'll find with the established brands every time is repeat purchase. It just became something they bought and bought and bought because rate of sales, going back to my rate of sale fact, every single time it surprises me how low it is because there's tens of thousands of stores in the UK and people go to their same one. And how many times do we need to buy ketchup? It's just they sell a lot of ketchup because it's in 99.5 % of stores and it's got a high penetration. So yeah, I think the repeat purchase is really the difference that I see now getting to be on this side and getting to see the difference between those ones that you know, only 1 % pass a million retail sales in a year and less than 0.1 % pass 50 million a year.

15:04It's really, really hard to grow organically. And the one thing that they all have in common is repeat purchase. Yeah, absolutely. It's one of the things that I've always worked with challenger brands where I've been like, please buy my product, please buy my product to the buyer. And with Pact, it's like, okay, the retailers are going, yes, we want it now. And then I'm like, okay, now it's because it's the customer. Please buy my product. So I'm watching rate sale every week. Like, okay, you need to be marketing. You need to be doing this but it's the first thing i do monday morning log on check my numbers how are we selling it's just yeah it's that constant fear of okay we need to be hitting the hurdle rate are we doing it yes promotion's great yeah but i think that's fascinating thinking actually if you can trace back and go well we were on promotion that's clearly how we won that customer so that promotion's works really well and i think that's one thing with ocado in particular they're very again very data rich like so much access you can do um and we can see what's worked what hasn't worked and doubled down with that.

15:54But I think, is there any real difference? If you look across Western Europe and all these 77 countries you're looking at, what are some of the biggest challenges for small brands? And are they very regional or country specific? Or is there a consistence like this is hitting everyone, whether that's war, recession, pricing, whatever it is? Yes. Something that I noticed straight away, even that little bit of water between the UK and France means it's not as easy or maybe not as culturally obvious to start selling in other markets really quickly. On the mainland, so to speak, so West Europe without UK and Ireland, where all the countries are joined together, roads are cheaper than water.

16:36Distributors cross borders because why would they stop at the edge of Belgium? They go straight into the French retailers and straight into the Netherlands retailers. And Belgium has both languages is already on the pack because the country has both. So you don't speak to a startup in any of the mainland markets without them immediately saying, and do you have the Dutch data or do you have the German data? Because next we'll be speaking to. So they look at it more, and maybe that's a little dated because I have my company between 2008 and 2017. So maybe this is just a little bit more, you know, bigger world or got to a certain stage.

17:12But I did notice that difference quite quickly that of course I'll go into another market and they're starting to put other languages on their packaging on the first print run so that they don't limit themselves. What that does is means that there's actually more startups per year in countries outside of the UK and Ireland because it de-risks it a little bit. If I get a no from Sainsbury's and a no from Tesco, I'm thinking, whoa, my company's getting a lot smaller in valuation here just based on where I said I was going to sell. But if you get a no in Belgium from Intermarche and Delhaize, okay, I'm going over the border for Albert Heine.

17:48I'm going to Carrefour and the clerk. Like it's immediate. That's fine. I'll go. And the distributors are going right across border. So it's what I speak back to my friends in the UK. I'm always saying, I don't need to, but the fast growing ones are already looking way over the water, even the 20 miles worth of water. but I'm always saying, hey, as quickly as you can to de-risk it, just be open to the idea, be coming to events here, be attending events and getting a feel for it, building up your networking and your retailer contacts across the borders. And then it's great because we have data in all of the markets, we have the same SMB offering, but not just for a sales pitch, as quickly as you can be looking cross-border, you just de-risk the pressure on the UK retailers.

18:31yeah fascinating i think that's i see i think there's obviously certain products travel better than others i always joked i would never go back into a chilled brand and i went frozen instead yeah yeah frozen supply chain it's actually better because obviously shelf life's better and all of that but it's still very expensive to ship and do all these other things versus ambient so um yeah i think ambient brands i'm always in envy of oh my gosh i was too we had a nine-day shelf life Mitch what were what were the volumes that we needed to try and make my I mean I think that was it day one starting working here and I was like well you know it's reassuring because it was never going to go to work but I think that's where I am and I'm not just saying it because I'm chatting to you I am such a fan of Frozen because the lovely chap William Kendall who was green and black chocolate and worked with a load of brands I remember him saying to me you can't brand a commodity now he was right that I couldn't succeed at branding a commodity because we did beef burgers and meatballs and meatloaf.

19:26But what we did bring was wonderful differentiation to a very private label, uneventful category. And that really helped us get in because we weren't pitching up against 20 other burger brands. People sensibly weren't going into it. Now, maybe that should have been our first red flag. So I would have always thought, or when we lost the company, I was angry with myself that we didn't know shelf life is just impossibly hard if you don't have the volumes to be able to afford to have a fresh company. But since then, I've changed from that being my like, you know, what's the one wording having not succeeded yourself and now sitting amongst all this data and it used to be never launch a fresh or shorter life product or something difficult like Frozen.

20:13But I don't believe that anymore because I do think that the opportunity that you have to actually launch and make a noise and be different and have less competition for a reason, if you can make a success, you know, like you guys, look at your growth. PACT is just, it's hitting that frequency of purchase that, that whereas, you know, something with a very long life, you see it in the rate of sales so that all the pressure is on distribution or you've got to get thousands of stores to get to that. And there are more, there is more competition because the barrier to entry is lower. That's when it's amazing when you see long life products still crushing it, you know, what an achievement.

20:54So I sort of take back my sort of panic ridden fear of anything under, you know, difficult in a supply chain. And I think frozen is the sweet spot between how quickly you consume it, because it's also not a chutney or something that stays on an ambient shelf for a while, your product, crustamolica, you know, are things eaten in a sitting and so you have got that frequency of need and hopefully frequency of purchase and frozen you know we can see it in these cool data trends and reports it always it often has a tussle with fresh but uh i think you're in the in the right place that's yeah good yeah i mean i'm all all 2025 this is coming out jan feb time uh in 20 to 6 if you're listening we'll be well into it now um hopefully we just had an amazing january but for for 2025 i just kept saying it's the year of frozen year of frozen and then seeing all the reviews the reports of the frozen data it's just you've seen people suddenly go oh actually it isn't just commodity isn't just basic it's not just my chips and ice cream and and low quality pizza actually you can have a very expensive great quality pizza or incredible produce and i think that's been the big switch which i'm very confident it's going to continue just to grow i mean waitress launching waygu burgers and airport was like yeah frozen's had a big boom and blah blah so yeah it's very exciting but one thing where we kind of met um was at the future food competition um and your fantastic presentation with the amateur dramatics on stage it was it was brilliant thank you i was fascinated by the kind of software and this new ai tool that you were demoing live on stage so for those who weren't there or haven't seen your linkedin post about that that presentation um can you just go into that because it's essentially we've been talking about launching overseas and all of that.

22:38And obviously, there's a cost associated doing any of this. However, you can test it before you do it. Yeah, isn't it crazy? Honestly, I have no idea how the clever people here just even build this stuff. But for a saleswoman and a data lover and an ex-food founder, it's just magic. Essentially, because for decades and at a huge cost, we have been paying these people to scan their shopping and fill out surveys, we're allowed to keep hold of that data. That's the agreement. So it's completely protected data internally, but we own it. And then what they, about two years ago, the first time I saw it demo, it's not a new concept.

23:19I've heard of other consumer info services companies playing with this. I saw them show that they had created an AI persona. So they had enough data on a human over decades to create an AI copy of them. And you can ask them questions like a survey. So rather than ask them and spam their inbox, hey, you know, would you mind just filling out this survey? We want to know whether you like this product. You know, we've seen that you're a shopper in the pet food aisle and this is my client and they've got this new innovation in dog food and I want to know what you think so So they can iterate on their packaging or they can like, how much would you pay for it?

23:56And all this concept testing that's been around for decades. And it was traditionally done with a survey, pen and paper, when we were little and digital and it got faster with apps. But now within two minutes and the price coming down from 10 grand to 500 quid, you can go out to the AI persona and ask, would you buy this? Is it interesting? Is it different? Therefore, or is it incremental? What don't you like about it? What wouldn't attract you to it? Do you think you'd only buy it seasonally? And it comes back immediately because you're asking an AI. So I think between maybe we needed to wait for the world in our little bubble, our world, to be ready to talk to AI.

24:37So I think maybe Gen AI and that coming naturally into our lives with ChatGPT, but that also enabled the technology, enabled us to speed up the development of these AI personae. And slowly, it takes a while to build each category, but slowly across 20 countries, we've got categories now with existing AI copies of real people answering questions. Now, as long as we keep feeding in the new data on top, because otherwise that data goes off as if it goes stale, you've got to get the latest trends. Otherwise, the AI stops being any value. But they're doing that anyway. That's our consumer panel read, like us and Kantar.

25:13That's another the company that plays really strong in this side of our business. We've got to keep topping that up to stay fresh, but you just keep feeding a model with answers and behavior. And so in terms of for, I mean, you can imagine from my side of the business getting to see this, how much more accessible it is for small businesses to try a concept in their own market or test another market. So the two are really, really valuable. But for 500 quid, wouldn't you want to know if, yeah, they probably wouldn't buy this because they buy this brand and it doesn't seem different enough. And then you go, no, it's totally different.

25:48I need to up that messaging on the packaging. Or even if you use BrandBank or whichever listing platform, I need to just update the content a bit to show how it's different for a small amount of investment that used to be thousands and take weeks to do properly. It's so exciting because I see our large customers, a lot of it we build for them first because there are real partners and the retailers and then I get the benefit of kind of looking around the business like what you got over there and then they show it to me I'm like oh gimme please can we how do we make it lighter and more affordable and get to take it out to our customers but it's a it's a it's I think it's me 26 I think the product I'm most excited to take to market for our small businesses to just get them access the overused phrase democratizing data but it's kind of true let's let's try and make it accessible for other companies to have a go at using the same tools with really nice clear output yeah i've been nerding out on this since i've seen it it's been so cool yeah i mean well you basically in front of our eyes launched fuel 10k in another country and it was just saying this is what people are saying and this is the views and this is where there could be improvement on the pack or how it sits and it's like you've just done that through all the data that you've captured for me that was just like wow i left that whole conversation just in my head I was like this is fascinating and it's correct and I think that well fortunately for us we haven't made something that means coca-cola spend less they use it more so rather than just you know double down on two big npd projects that quarter they'll they'll do 50 because it's easier to get through you know to try and get 50 down to 20 down to two they're de-risking because gen ai or just generally technology is meaning that means they're able to test more as well.

27:33So it just, there's not the pressure on the one thing working. And I think that's great because there's only so, even with every single bit of data you could buy from us, the Range Rover Sport, it still can't tell you whether something will definitely work. So for me, it's about de-risking what you're doing and having that small amount of investment first before you put anything else in. Or if you're raising money, you go to your angel investors, like, okay, we think this is a great product. And here with the NIQ logo at the bottom that the retailers and the markets recognize, we've also concept tested it.

28:05We're not saying we're just going to stop here and launch it. But look, it's a first bit just to give us all confidence that we're going in the right direction. Yeah, this is fascinating. And I would now have to go right the way back and understand how on earth you ended up getting into the world of data, being as passionate about it as you are from an arts degree. So going from when you were younger, what did you think you want to do when you grew up and how did you get to where you are today? Because obviously you've touched on your business a few times, which I'd love to dig into. Yeah. But yeah, what was it you were like, when I'm older, I want to do this?

28:39Always performing is a nice word for showing off. So that was where I ended up doing a drama degree in music and dance and stuff. So I naturally fell into sales because it's performing. I worked in my 20s for five years for a broadcaster called Sir David Frost. I don't know if you remember him as a television presenter. That was a cool world to be in. But at the age of 27, my husband and I decided to quit our jobs and move back to the family farm, his family farm in Worcestershire, but where I'm from as well. And it was so 2008, you'll remember, we were all googly eyed at Innocent and Green and Black and Tyrrell's and there was this amazing food movement.