BREAKING NEWS: GFK Still Wants To Charge CE Vendors, Despite Losing Biggest Source Of Information

German research house GFK, still wants to continue charging their customers tens of thousands of dollars for tracking research despite losing the two biggest sources for consumer electronics and appliance data, Harvey Norman, and JB HI Fi, they are also tipped to soon lose The Good Guys.

A GFK statement from GfK Australia has confirmed that Harvey Norman plans to step out of the GfK Australia Point of Sale Tracking service as we exclusively tipped yesterday. Read the original story here.

At this stage, the service will be available until September 6, 2017 according to GfK managing director, Catherine Eddy who had initially failed to respond to our request for information. She has also admitted that GFK has now been forced to use “online players as their “Australian experts for electrical retailing insights”.

Investigations by ChannelNews reveal that up to 75% of the goods that are currently tracked by GFK will not be available via the ongoing service.
GFK have also not said whether they will suspend charging vendors and distributors who use their services due to the lack of credible sales data from Australia’s largest consumer electronics and appliance retailers.

She did say “GfK will apply its proprietary modelling methodology to all affected categories, on both a weekly and monthly frequency. The GfK service and market coverage will remain unchanged, and we will continue our ongoing engagement and recruitment of new, relevant, retailers to the measurement, in preparation for the enormous changes ahead for the Australian retailing environment.

“GfK has made a number of key recruitments to its Point of Sale Tracking service in the past two years, including online players. As the Australian experts for electrical retailing insights, we will also continue to source and develop internal and external market intelligence and data assets to support our unrivalled global industry expertise in providing the Australian electrical retailing industry with a robust and reliable market measurement.”

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David Richards

David Richards has been writing about technology for more than 30 years. A former Fleet Street journalist, he wrote the Award Winning Series on the Federated Ships Painters + Dockers Union for the Bulletin that led to a Royal Commission. He is also a Logie Winner for Outstanding Contribution To TV Journalism with a story called The Werribee Affair. In 1997, he built the largest Australian technology media company and prior to that the third largest PR company that became the foundation company for Ogilvy PR. Today he writes about technology and the impact on both business and consumers.