Instantly Product Watch Crowdsources The Competition

Business today moves at the speed of the Internet – customers can near-instantly shop online and purchase products, while companies can advertise, promote and communicate with their customers at lightening speed. It’s a tough environment to get ahead of the competition, but one company is now offering insight into market competitors at a pace that keeps up with the hectic business world.

Instantly announced Tuesday (Feb. 10) the launch of Instantly Product Watch, a crowdsourced online database that offers real-time insight into the competition. When companies launch a new product, they can visit Instantly Product Watch and access insight from a continually updated data feed about their new rivals.

According to Instantly CEO Alan Gould, the service is crucial in an age when shopper habits can change in an instant. “Instantly Product Watch provides an unprecedented level of insights for marketers and brand specialists who need to know how their products and competitors’ products are performing in the real world as soon as they hit shelves,” Gould said. “We are not in a world where successful brand managers are acting more like campaign managers — having to detect and react to changes in consumer preference before it is too late. For the first time, marketers will know exactly what consumers are seeing in the store aisle, at the exact time they are seeing it.”

At present, Instantly obtains its data from shoppers in grocery stores on a daily basis; based on customer feedback on new items available to purchase, data is streamlined into Instantly Product Watch where businesses can assess one or several of these data sets.

Crucial to understanding consumer habits, Instantly allows merchants to track this data over time across regions; that data includes store location, price, product images, as well as real-time customer feedback. The company says Instantly Product Watch is its next step toward launching the world’s first platform for marketers to track consumer habits around a product from research to development to consumption.

Instantly Vice President of Product Innovation & Business Development Justin Wheeler says altogether, the resource offers a significant move toward progressing the ability for marketers to effectively do their jobs. “As part of our recent rebrand,” he said, “we’re boosting our resolve to fix the biggest problems marketers face by proving them answers to questions before they’ve asked them.” “Our real-time approach will help solve a significant blind spot of marketing where marketers typically wait weeks or months to see sales data come back from store registers to assess product performance. By leveraging tens of thousands of shoppers each day, we are giving brands more time to make the right shifts in strategy to stay on top.”