The Sports Tracking Europe joint venture between NPD Group and GfK has launched a new point-of-sale market research service in France and Germany to monitor sales of many different categories of sports apparel and equipment in the stores. The data are being supplied to clients on a monthly basis, along with comparative data from 2011 and 2012 that had been collected, but not yet processed, in order to track down consumption trends.
This service complements the point-of-sale data on branded athletic footwear already supplied by NPD for the U.S. and by Sports Tracking Europe for France, Germany, Spain and Italy, as well as the market data on skis collected by GfK for Germany and Austria. It also complements the extensive consumer panels that NPD is conducting on the sporting goods market in 12 countries, accounting for two-thirds of global consumption of sporting goods.
The new service should allow clients to analyze the performance of a larger number of sports products and brands at a more detailed level in general sporting goods stores, department stores and e-commerce. A similar point-of-sale panel has been conducted in Germany for the outdoor sports market since last July. Depending on the acceptance of the new service, these services may be extended to other countries in the future (for more information on this project, contact Renaud.Vaschalde@npd.com).
It should be interesting to check out this sort of data right now, in view of the difficult economic situation in Europe. The latest figures from Eurostat show that retail sales of all non-foot products excluding fuel were off by 1.2 percent in October in the Eurzone area as compared to September, and off by 3.5 percent as compared to October 2011.
The decline in total retail sales was particularly acute for the month of October in Germany – down by 2.8 percent from September and by 3.8 percent from October of last year. Across the European Union, total retail sales fell by 1.1 percent as compared to the previous month, with declines also in Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Spain and the U.K. Swiss retail sales were down, too, by a tiny 0.4 percent.
