In the consumer packaged goods (CPG) world, staying ahead of the curve is essential for success. Staying up-to-date on the latest trends, anticipating changes in the market, and having insights into your consumers' behavior are all key to a successful brand.
Helio, IRI, and SPINS are three platforms that offer CPG intelligence—each with pros and cons. So how do you decide which is right for your business?
Let's take a closer look at each platform to help you make an informed decision.
IRI and SPINS offer comprehensive market insights to help CPG brands make informed decisions. Find out how IRI and SPINS stack up against Helio as intelligence tools.
IRI leverages the power of big data to understand consumer behavior based on their purchase, media, social, and loyalty data. It combines all consumer information through predictive analytics to help CPG brands in retail, over–the–counter health care and media cull insights about their target buyers. It offers a "technologically-advanced, cloud-based visualization platform" called IRI Liquid Data® and highlights six key expertise areas:
Helio differs from IRI in that it gives customers near-real-time data from hundreds of data sources (5PB in total)—not only on consumers but also on the following:
Helio provides granular insights into the voice of your customers (200+ data sources, including consumer reviews in Helio), emerging trends and attributes (16M of them) in various time periods (historical data, LTM, L6M, L3M, monthly), and greater visibility into emerging competitors (2.5M+ brands in Helio).
Helio uses AI-driven algorithms to predict the future potential of a brand in the market (HGP Score) and offers other proprietary features such as key purchase criteria and company revenue estimates.
These forward-looking data help M&A/Corp Dev Leaders, Innovation and Strategy department, Consumer and Insights teams, and Brand Managers keep a pulse on emerging brands, trends, and innovations.
SPINS primarily caters to emerging wellness CPG brands and retailers. It focuses on point-of-sale (POS) and other key performance indicators (KPIs), such as SKUs for natural CPG brands. Its goal is to help these newer companies gain retail share and grow their revenues.
Their solutions focus mainly on the following:
Helio differs from SPINS as it offers a more universal view of the CPG landscape including category and brand performance across more than just retail – from direct-to-consumer sites, Amazon product launches and discontinuations, social media performance, consumer sentiment and key purchase criteria, and much more.
Helio is a comprehensive data platform and one of the best CPG platforms for competitive intelligence providing insights into the CPG industry.
Helio platform provides CPG leaders with category, trend, customer, and competitive intelligence—helping them identify brands with high growth potential, compare brands based on attributes, track key purchase criteria, search customer reviews, pull metrics like TAM and revenue for sourcing and diligence, and more.
Compared to IRI and SPINS, Helio provides in-depth product intelligence and an improved understanding of brands and trends—with a user-friendly interface as icing on the cake.
Take a look for yourself here – link to video.
With its data-driven approach, Helio provides forward-looking insights into the constantly-evolving consumer packaged goods (CPG) market.
Helio is purpose-built for CPG, providing more comprehensive insights and focusing on emerging brands and trends. It is the most comprehensive solution available today, with 1.5 million brands acquiring data on the hottest emerging brands, products and trends from 200+ data sources.
Beyond analyzing data, Helio’s HGP model (the “Helio Growth Predictor”) helps you understand a brand’s growth potential in the coming year.
Helio helps CPG brands make informed decisions quickly and accurately, giving you a competitive advantage in an ever-shifting marketplace.
Helio’s was built to help you discover emerging brands, trends and opportunities in the industry before they become mainstream, allowing you to stay ahead of the curve when making product innovation decisions, developing go-to-market strategies, executing on a multi-year innovation or M&A agenda, and more.
Unlike other CPG intelligence tools, Helio gives customers a complete view of the market by scouring more than 200 data sources to provide data on 1.5M brands—including eCommerce websites, retail stores, social media channels, and more. This allows Helio to quickly identify hot new CPG brands, emerging trends and supports you in making timely decisions based on fast, fresh insights.
Helio helps you identify areas of opportunity for innovation and growth that you might otherwise miss: the sorts of things that can guide your product assortment mix, channel strategy, and more.
It analyzes brands’ performance and customer sentiment to help you get in front of trends before they’ve peaked, ensuring your product development and go-to-market strategy remain ahead of the curve.
Additionally, by leveraging big data from hundreds of sources, including social media and eCommerce sites like Instagram and Amazon, Helio users can access critical consumer engagement metrics and consumer reviews to understand shoppers’ likes and dislikes—solutions unavailable through other platforms like IRI and SPINS.
In contrast to IRI and SPINS, which offer more generalized metrics such as a product ranks in retail, product velocities in retail and/or brand share in a given category or market share by geography, Helio provides more niche insights and granular data:
Helio helps you understand the total market size and evaluates brands against benchmarks and markers for future success so you can understand the market before you make your move.
Helio analyzes more than 16M brand attributes, aggregating those up into themes so you can see what’s emerging in your category or those categories which influence yours, helping you understand where there’s white space to inform your product development initiatives .
Helio constantly compares your brand’s performance to that of competitors, so you can instantly determine if a new entrant is a threat today or if it could be tomorrow helping you stay ahead of the curve so you can keep your customers and defend your shelf space.
Helio pulls in public data, data from countless partners, and even uses ground truth data from the market to train algorithms that give you insight into the performance of more than 1.5 million brands. By aggregating everything from point-of-sale records to customer reviews, Helio can help you see a complete picture of the CPG industry at any given moment, making it easy for CPG leaders to search for what they need.
Whether you’re looking for key purchase criteria in a specific category (for example, what’s important to customers when shopping for low-alcohol beverages?), trending ingredients, or the total market size for an established category or a category you build yourself, you can use our self-service tool to find what you need.
Helio stands apart from its competitors, such as IRI and SPINS, due to its comprehensive database of CPG information combined with its predictive analytics capabilities focused on discovering nascent market trends before they become mainstream.
By helping CPG brands capitalize on opportunities at the earliest possible stage of growth, Helio enables you to gain a strategic advantage over IRI and SPINS for continued success in an increasingly competitive landscape.
To learn more, schedule a demo today.