The Client
The client is a global leader in in-flight food and merchandise retail, serving diverse customer segments across multiple flight routes.
The Challenges
- Limited competitor visibility: Competitor menus and promotions were not tracked systematically, so relative price position was incomplete.
- Weak support for Gross Margin decisions: Analysts received Gross Margin–optimized price suggestions but lacked market context to judge whether to accept, raise, or hold them.
- Manual and inconsistent comparisons: Competitor checks depended on ad-hoc review, making matching slow, uneven, and hard to trust.
- Promotion blind spots: Competitor promotional campaigns were not captured alongside item prices, limiting deal and catalogue quality.
- Risk of under-pricing: Without competitor ranges, analysts could leave money on the table even when the market supported a higher price.
The Objective
- Give pricing analysts accurate, timely competitor price and promotion visibility so they can validate and refine Gross Margin–recommended prices.
- Improve margins, strengthen sales, and publish more competitive catalogues.
- Support analysts in arriving at optimal price-point recommendations that combine algorithmic pricing with competitive price movements.
The Solution
JK Tech built Competitor Pricing Intelligence into the Price Recommendation Solution as advisory decision support for the pricing analyst.
- Every month, an External data sourcing agent extracts competitor item and promotion details from business-provided URLs.
- The engine pulls relevant client data and compares items and promotions using description-based intelligent matching, returning a confidence score for each match.
- Pricing information for each client item is shown against all matched competitors, with the same approach applied to promotions — positioned as lower, at-par, or higher, but never auto-overriding the recommendation.
- Analysts retain final control: for example, if the Gross Margin model suggests €10.00 for a sandwich combo while matched competitors sit around €14.50, the analyst can raise the price by €0.50 — improving margin while staying aligned with the overall sales uplift expectation.
Business Process Diagram:
The Benefits
- One week of analyst effort saved per cycle, previously spent reviewing fragmented competitor data sources.
- Trusted matching quality through intelligent description matching with confidence scores.
- Attributed Gross Margin uplift: Price Recommendation increased overall Gross Margin by 4.32% in the EU region, with 20% of that uplift attributed to Competitor Pricing.
- Clear competitive visibility — item prices and promotional campaigns in one structured monthly view.
- Smarter decision-making — competitor context helps analysts fine-tune recommendations instead of accepting them blindly.
- Better margins with controlled risk — prices can be raised modestly where the market supports it, while respecting sales expectations.
- More accurate, market-aligned catalogue prices and stronger promotional deals.
- Faster monthly insight — automated sourcing and comparison replace fragmented, manual checks.
