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TNS Buying Into In-Store Measurement with Sorensen Purchase

TNS is bolstering its global Retail and Shopper Insights practice, which conducts proprietary studies of specific stores and brands, and TNS Worldpanel, which measures certain benchmarks of consumer behavior, with its purchase of Sorensen Associates.

Sorensen’s products include PathTracker and video observation, writes MediaPost. Those products, along with attitudinal studies such as surveys and questionnaires, help pull together data surrounding consumers’ patterns of movement, shopping speed and purchasing speed. They will be integrated into TNS in order to offer more information and insight on shopper behavior to clients.
The integration of the companies positions TNS as a direct challenger to the recently created Nielsen In-Store.

Measurement of in-store media has become a hot topic as the in-store medium has increased its pace. As new products for in-store advertising become available constantly (this one, for example), even media agencies are beginning to offer their own in-store services. Mediaedge:cia, for example, acquired Retail Media Link, launching it as MEC Retail last spring.

In-store media pulled a total of $18.6 billion in 2005, according to the In-Store Marketing Institute. A Nielsen Media Research study last year showed that 68 percent of consumers surveyed said they would be swayed in their purchase decisions by in-store advertising.