WeatherIQ™ is a collaboration between the National Retail Federation and Planalytics that provides weekly weather impact outlooks for select product categories or retail segments compared with the prior year. NRF members can view additional metro-level insights along with year-over-year weather variance maps.
Weather volatility is the most impactful climate-related risk consumer businesses face. Planalytics is the leading provider of retail-specific weather analytics that help businesses understand, quantify and proactively manage weather-influenced changes in consumer purchasing.
How does Planalytics calculate retail weather impacts?
Planalytics pioneered the science of weather analytics for business. Today, some of the world’s largest retailers, restaurant chains and consumer product companies use these analytics in their daily operations.
Planalytics’ weather impact modeling technology leverages deep domain knowledge of the effects of everyday weather changes and extreme events on consumer demand, sales data from syndicated sources, machine learning and advanced statistical modeling to produce localized, product-specific weather-driven demand metrics. Planalytics has analyzed over 100,000 categories derived from 10 trillion sales transactions and forecasts over 5 billion data points daily.
Planalytics identifies weather-based sales relationships by combining multiple years of weather and sales data by location and time. The analysis process includes decomposing historical sales into trend, seasonal and residual components; incorporating price and promotion data to further isolate weather impacts; and additional proprietary modeling and validation techniques.
What is Weather-Driven Demand (WDD)?
Planalytics’ WDD metrics measure the impact of weather expressed as a percentage (or unit or dollar) change from last year (or normal), either favorable (positive) or unfavorable (negative). It is a numerical representation of the consumer need for a product caused by perceived changes in the weather at a time/location intersection. WDD isolates and quantifies the impact the weather alone has on demand.
WeatherIQ™ WDDs are shown as a percentage change compared with the same week the year prior, providing a “weather comp” perspective that helps companies understand and prepare for upcoming weather-driven sales volatility.
How do companies use Weather-Driven Demand analytics?
Use the links below to explore some typical WDD use cases for retailers and consumer brands:
Reporting and analysis to more accurately evaluate sales and the performance of campaigns or promotions, and to improve planning and operational decisions.
Replenishment and forecasting to stay ahead of changing sales patterns, resulting in better availability, increased sales, reduced waste and lower inventory costs.
Digital marketing to optimize campaigns and personalize engagement to improve click-throughs, sales, return on advertising spending and more.
Planning and allocation to reduce planning errors and better align inventories with shifts in demand, increase sales and minimize margin-eroding markdowns.
Where can I get more information?
Climate-Proofing Retail, a white paper co-authored by NRF and Planalytics, discusses the challenge of weather-based sales volatility in retail and the benefits companies can capture by proactively addressing it.
Weekly WeatherIQ™ insights provide a sampling of WDD impacts for industry-level products at select locations. Contact Planalytics to learn more about the company-specific analytics Planalytics clients incorporate into their processes and existing technologies.