Crisp partners with Weather Trends, empowering CPGs with actionable weather intelligence

Revolutionize your sales and supply chain planning with new weather-driven retail insights.

You might figure that sunscreen sales rise when UV levels do, or that hearty soups sell through when the weather is frightful – but did you know that just a 1ºF temperature increase can boost strawberry sales by 8%? These inextricable links between weather patterns and consumer behavior are why Weather Trends International compiles granular, historical weather data and forecasts from across the globe, recognizing weather as a critical variable in understanding business trends. 

Today, Crisp is proud to announce our partnership with Weather Trends, delivering their proprietary weather data alongside store-level retail data into the cloud and BI tools you use today. This integration unlocks powerful insights to optimize forecasting and supply planning, devise robust sales and marketing strategies, and drive weather-intelligent decision-making across the CPG enterprise. 

Why weather data?

Sales and supply chain analytics are made more potent when enriched with additional relevant data sources, and weather is a universal factor known to significantly influence shopper behavior and product demand. While CPG companies have long recognized the impact of weather on sales and leveraged trends for long-term planning, the ability to integrate granular weather data with real-time sales and inventory data represents a major intelligence upgrade.

Crisp’s new weather solution delivers historical and forecasted weather data directly alongside your data from 40+ retailers and distributors. Renowned by Fortune 500s for its quality and accuracy, Weather Trends 360 data encompasses various metrics, including temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind speed, and even health indices like allergy and flu trends. By analyzing this data at the zip code or regional level, teams can uncover powerful, actionable insights tailored to their specific markets and categories.

Renowned by Fortune 500s for its quality and accuracy, Weather Trends 360 data encompasses various metrics, including temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind speed, and even health indices like allergy and flu trends.

Historical data vs. forecasts

Crisp’s Weather Trends integration offers both historical and forecasted weather data to empower a holistic understanding of the weather’s impact on operations.

Historical data establishes a baseline understanding of the weather’s relationship to your unique business and sales trends. By analyzing past data, you can identify key patterns and correlations, pinpoint regional variations in demand, and determine the seasonality of specific products, revealing key ‘start’ and ‘end’ dates for peak performance by SKU. Historical data additionally provides insights into how weather events impacted your supply chain in the past, enabling you to gauge its influence on logistics and on-time deliveries.

Meanwhile, 14-day weather forecasts provide a window into expected conditions, enabling proactive decision-making. A sudden temperature spike, sustained rain event, or an impending snowstorm can all trigger action from your supply chain team to assess and adjust inventory levels, and then closely monitor real-time sales activity. By combining weather data with store-level insights, CPGs create a responsive feedback loop, ensuring products are available when and where consumers need them most, even in the face of unexpected weather events.

Insights across the enterprise

Various teams across a CPG organization benefit from the utilization of weather data.

Data science teams: These teams manage data repositories for large suppliers and can ensure the accessibility and use of weather data across different departments. Additionally, they can leverage the data to model deeper analytics, and even create alert systems for impactful weather events on the horizon.

Example: Data analysts at a company that supplies umbrellas are alerted of a major rainfall event approaching the Northeast USA. They share the report so demand planners can prepare accordingly. 

Category teams: While the impact of weather varies across product categories, nearly all retail categories exhibit some degree of weather correlation. By understanding these seasonal impacts and weather-driven demand fluctuations, category management teams can optimize product assortments, capitalizing on opportunities and mitigating risks.

Example: Heavy winds can bring wildfire smoke into populated areas of California during the Summer. Category teams will proactively stock up on air purifiers, face masks, and eye care products to meet the expected surge in demand.

Supply chain teams: Weather data is a game-changer for forecasting and demand planning. By understanding how weather patterns impact consumer purchasing behavior, supply chain teams can assess whether order quantities align with expected weather-driven sales lifts, fine-tune delivery timelines for maximum efficiency, and proactively adjust production schedules and inventory allocations in the face of severe weather events.

Example: After being alerted about sustained rainfall in the Northeast, the umbrella company promptly revises POs across the region, re-allocating shipments originally destined for drier DCs.

Commercial teams: Sales teams benefit from understanding weather patterns to position themselves as preeminent suppliers within their categories, and maximize execution of seasonal strategies. Since large CPG organizations own multiple brands, each reacting differently to weather conditions, Brand Managers can also utilize weather intelligence to tailor their approaches – promoting suncare products in sunny weather or products for chapped lips and dry skin during winter.

Example: Anticipating a colder-than-average holiday season, a beverage brand leverages weather data to unlock distribution and drive sales growth for a limited-edition peppermint mocha creamer. 

Weather-driven marketing

Brand Managers and marketing teams can leverage Crisp’s Weather Trends integration to enhance their seasonal strategies. By intersecting advertising investment with weather-driven impact, marketing becomes more targeted and effective.

This integration can ensure your brand and products are front and center when weather conditions favor sales. You can tailor messaging and promotions down to the zip code level, aligning with seasonal weather patterns or responding to sudden shifts. This precision targeting, combined with inventory data available through Crisp, can further ensure your marketing efforts are aligned where product is readily available to maximize the impact of ad spend.

Additionally, weather data helps isolate the impact of weather-driven sales lift from marketing campaigns. Understanding the baseline impact of weather allows for a more accurate measurement of marketing ROI. For example, if a campaign results in a 30% sales lift during a period when weather typically drives a 15% increase, you can attribute the remaining 15% to your marketing efforts, enabling continuous optimization and a deeper understanding of your business dynamics.

A new horizon

Due to its universal impact and widespread analytics applications, weather data is an ideal add-on resource in Crisp’s data infrastructure. By continuing to develop integrated analytics directly within the Crisp platform, we’re committed to offering new ways to make these weather insights even more accessible and actionable. To learn more about how you can leverage Crisp’s Weather Trends integration today, contact our team.