The Marketing Insight Center:
Reports

For greater precision, the class of opportunity and exposure reports was further subdivided into a display opportunity or exposure, a feature opportunity or exposure, a display and feature opportunity or exposure, and finally, neither an opportunity nor an exposure (meaning that the differences between the retailer's support of manufacturer and the competition is negligible, or that the brand covered by the report contributes only a small amount to the retailer's overall volume). The classes of "Opportunities" and "Exposures" and each of their subdivisions are represented by a folder. Figure 7 shows that at the top level of the LDD-MARKET Insight Center there is a folder labeled "Opportunities" and a folder labeled "Exposures". The Opportunities folder contains four folders: "DisplayOpp", "FeatureOpp", "DisplayAndFeatureOpp" and "NeitherOpp". Viewing the contents of the DisplayAndFeatureOpp folder reveals a list of folders that are reports.

Figure 7

In Figure 8, the contents of the report labeled "Report40" are shown. The report is about the 48 oz. size items made by Procter & Gamble and carried in chain 281. A text item, "Text40," is the body of the text of the report, and a spreadsheet, "Data40," contains both the supporting data and bar charts. Notice that we can reach these insight items in several ways: by browsing the Retailers folder, by browsing the "48.00" folder, or by browsing the Opportunities and Exposures reports folders. The movement from insight items in one folder to insight items in another folder is made possible by the forward and backward links.

Figure 8

One possible mental model of the system is that of a tree in which hierarchical "contains" links originate at the top level folders and descend downward through the remaining folders. From many of these folders are paths (via the semantic links) which branch to insight items represented by the other top level folders.

Figure 9 shows some of the upper level structure of the LDD-MARKET Insight Center in the form of a tree-like, node-link representation. The only links represented are the forward "contains" links. The single links stretching off the bottom of the diagram are connected to a node labeled LDD-MARKET that represents the Insight Center itself. The heavy blotch of links leaving the lower right corner of the node labeled "Items" are one hundred links to one hundred corresponding item nodes.

Figure 9

Figure 10 shows in node-link form the various links from the 87481 item folder to other items in the Insight Center. There are links from the item folder to various qualities of the item, such as the "mildness" node, which has a link to the "Segments" node, which in turn has a link to the "LDD" node. The diagram shows that 87481 is 22 oz. Ivory, an item carried in five chains in the Quad Cities market.

Figure 10

A node-link representation of all forward links coming from the Report40 folder is given in Figure 11. The diagram is somewhat cluttered in order to accommodate all of the nodes on one screen. Normally, the nodes and links take up approximately four screens. Keep in mind that this is one report out of 80 such reports. If all nodes and links are shown in this fashion, they would be visually overwhelming. An overload of insights is prevented by filtering out unwanted links from the diagram.

Figure 11