Price Image KVI Score
Collapsing KVI selection into the best-seller list is the commonest error, and the most understandable: the second list is one query away, the first takes judgement. The two sets only partly overlap. An exclusive best-seller can be compared nowhere and therefore carries no weight in price image, whatever its rate of sale, while a rarely bought traffic-driver stocked at every competitor carries a great deal.
The price competitiveness budget then spreads across items the customer never checks, while the ones they do check drift unmonitored. Correcting it comes down to scoring, explicitly and one category at a time, the properties that make a price memorable and comparable across retailers, with no heavy tooling involved.
Price Image KVI Score
How to read the result
What you enter
- Item list for the category being assessed
- Purchase frequency and price recall
- Comparability: the exact item exists at the competitors tracked
- Visibility in aisle, in leaflet and on the first page of results
- Relative weight of the four criteria
How to read the result
- A ranking holds inside a category; aggregated, it reproduces the rotation bias
- The break in slope down the ranking shows where to cut
- Strong on three criteria and zero on comparability: the item is not a KVI
- At the end of the ranking: the list to put to buyers for validation
What the result does not tell you
- Price recall and visibility scores stay team judgements. They record what the organisation believes about the customer, not what the customer checks.
- Comparability is assessed against the competitor panel entered. A pure player missing from that panel shifts the list across every category it trades.
- An item is scored in isolation, without its place in the range. An opening price point and its own-brand equivalent both surface when one reference point is enough.
- The selection carries no date. A new line bedding in, an item reaching end of life, and the list has moved well before an annual review comes round.
The output is a proposal. Buyers alone know real substitutability inside their own category.
A first thirty-minute conversation
Thirty minutes are enough to frame a retention, expansion or pricing issue, and see whether there is work to do together.