May 1, 2023

by Kerry Farrell, Head of Sales and Customer Success for Eversight by Instacart

Tenure With Current Company: Kerry has been with Eversight for over 7 years, including through an acquisition by Instacart which occurred in September 2022.

Years of Industry Experience: 23 years

Give us a brief history of your company, when and how did you get started and what is your high-level mission statement?

Eversight by Instacart was founded in 2013 with a clear vision for transforming how retailers and manufacturers optimize price and promotions. Today, Eversight is the recognized leader in AI-powered pricing and promotions transforming the $3.4 trillion spent in consumer goods retail. Global brands and retailers rely on Eversight’s solutions to optimize pricing in response to market conditions and to deliver higher ROI on promotional spend. Eversight’s solutions are driving strong margin and sales volume improvements for leading companies such as Coca-Cola, Frito-Lay, The Hershey Company, and Raley’s. Eversight was acquired by Instacart in 2022.

What would you like CMA and SIMA members to know about your brand/company?

Eversight by Instacart has grown into a highly-valued, strategic technology partner to brands and retailers. Eversight helps brands and retailers be more agile and consumer-centric with their pricing and promotions strategies.

Eversight brings CPG brands and retailers technologies tailor-made for the Consumer Goods Retailing industry, enabling brands and retailers to unlock the optimal promotions and pricing that propel their business and create more compelling savings opportunities for consumers. Through Eversight’s AI-powered, experimentation-based platform, CPG brands and retailers can continuously test customized pricing and promotions directly with their consumers. This automates processes that have traditionally been highly manual and time-consuming – and it does so at scale. Brands and retailers are now able to more effectively find the precise pricing and promotions strategies that can help them grow, while also surfacing the best deals for consumers.

What are some common questions you hear, and how would you think about those questions if you were a manufacturer?

When it comes to consumer goods and grocery retail, every dollar matters. With higher inflation and the average cost of groceries going up, CPG brands and retailers are asking how they should best price and promote to keep consumers with their brands, and for retailers, in their stores and ecommerce channels. In addition, products are at price points the industry has never seen and understanding how to communicate value and how to attract consumers is really important. In this environment, brands and retailers can’t rely on historical data to help them determine the right way to price or promote, so experimentation is key.

When regular testing to gauge real-time changes in consumer behavior is embraced, it enables CPG brands and retailers to adopt dynamic promotional strategies that can successfully carry their consumers, and their businesses, through circumstances that could not have been predicted – such as the recent market disruption brought on by inflation changing how consumers shop, the frequency of their trips, and the size of their cart.

Eversight by Instacart’s software creates insights that enable CPG brands and retailers’ strategies to reach new heights and performance based on the objectives they set out to achieve, while delivering a positive shopping experience for consumers. For example, a CPG brand partner was looking to improve an in-store promotion’s performance and wanted to make it more effective, but was concerned about the risks that come with trialing new offers in-store. With the help of Eversight, the brand was able to quickly experiment with different offer structures via low-risk digital micro testing and uncover a better performing promotion, resulting in 10% incremental unit sales growth. The CPG went on to replace more than 100 weeks of the old promotion with the new better-performing offer. Because Eversight runs experiments in real-time to create new data on consumer shopping behavior, the software is able to effectively predict what promotion or price will work best for the goal set out by the CPG brand or retailer.

What do you think should be top of mind for professionals in the category management and consumer insights disciplines going forward?

They should be focused on the consumer. The consumer is interacting with promotions and prices every day, and as market shifts and unpredictable moments happen in their lives, the CPG brands and retailers they shop need to be keeping pace with those changes. Eversight by Instacart’s technology enables pricing, merchandising, consumer marketing, trade, and revenue growth management (RGM) teams to be proactive when making promotion and pricing decisions amidst continued disruption and inflationary pressures in concert with those shifts in consumer behavior. Because Eversight’s technology allows teams to be proactive rather than reactive, category management and consumer insights teams should be looking to their RGM and learning from them where they can innovate within a category and where the opportunities to expand are.

How are you thinking about the next 3-5 years in retail?

The consumer goods retail industry is ever-evolving, evidenced in recent years by the explosion in omnichannel. I see the industry continuing to evolve to more specifically meet the consumer’s requirements to modernize and create a shopping experience that is catered to their needs. We’re seeing broad recognition that a forward-looking experimentation-based approach to optimizing prices and promotions makes infinitely more sense than backward-looking historical methods. Promotions are no longer limited to circular flyers or physical shelves. Promotions and prices exist in a myriad of places simultaneously, and so do the consumers who interact with them. Eversight by Instacart’s technology can be scaled across online and offline, in turn, making buying groceries more affordable for consumers while also driving more value for CPG brands and retailer’s businesses.