Patty Altman, President of Global Solutions at Circana chats about the in-store experiences driving customer behaviors in this salestech interview:
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Hi Patty, our readers would love to get to know you, tell us about yourself?
I am the president of Circana’s global solutions, where I lead a global team helping clients drive growth through consumer insights, receipt panels, e-commerce, analytics, and more. During my 25 years in market research, I’ve worked across market measurement, innovation, e-commerce tracking, brand equity, and advertising testing, with a passion for consumer panels—especially receipt panels.
My experience spans industries like CPG, retail, foodservice, health, general merchandise, and financial services, and I’ve held leadership roles at The NPD Group, Ipsos, and IRI. At my core, I’m driven by a curiosity to understand consumers and help businesses grow. It’s been an exciting journey, and I’m always eager for what’s next!
Tell us the highlights of Circana’s AI-powered self-serve tool and how it benefits in-store strategies?
To succeed in today’s market, brands and retailers rely on fast decision making, accurate measurement, seamless data access and integration, access to benchmark guidance and actionable insights.
Circana’s Liquid Testing is a powerful, self-serve experimentation tool designed to measure sales impact at brand and SKU levels, as well as the overall category within a retailer to support holistic decision making. It enables continuous evaluation of in-store activities, while accurately accounting for external factors – so you can isolate and understand the true effect of your test changes.
It is fast, integrated, and trusted, using the foundation of the best data available in the industry.
Clients can run hundreds of tests with unmatched speed with setup and analysis in minutes.
Clients can unlock consistent and comparable test results against actionable KPIs, with flexibility to report against our standard category definitions or a client’s custom hierarchy in Circana’s system.
Clients can confidently pinpoint the true sales impact; Circana uses advanced A/B methodologies, leveraging more than 40 years of testing expertise.
How in your view should in-store strategies transform given modern customer needs and expectations?
In an environment where shoppers demand brands and retailers to deliver on their ever-evolving shopping habits, in-store testing is a strategic imperative for driving product success.
Physical stores are more pivotal than before in the shopping journey. It isn’t just a place for final purchase, but it has transformed into a fulfilment center, a showroom, and a social destination.
To not just keep up, but stay ahead, brands and retailers need a way to understand how the changes they make in the store affect the bottom line and everything in between. They need a tool that will allow for flexible and ongoing testing so they feel confident in the decisions their teams will execute against
In an environment where margins are shrinking and competition is increasing from every angle, acting with conviction and confidence is your edge.
Can you talk about some leading brands and how they’ve transformed their in-store experiences with modern technology?
Leading brands are elevating the retail customer experience by designing every in‑store touchpoint with intention—and validating those choices through rigorous in‑store testing. By piloting new layouts, signage, technologies, and engagement strategies directly within the retail environment, these brands gain real‑time insight into shopper behavior and continuously refine what works.
Today’s agile in‑store testing enables brands to optimize performance and redefine the future of retail, anticipating shopper needs, leveraging immersive technologies and crafting differentiated in-person experiences.
What fundamentals should modern POS systems have in your view?
Best practice store testing starts with robust POS datasets that allow for a true read of the overall market. A robust data set enables businesses to measure and track diverse channels and retailers, offering seamless integration with other platforms to fuel more efficient decision making.
Five thoughts you’d leave our sales readers with before we wrap up?
Turn your stores into living laboratories: The physical store is the only place you see the full stack of behavior. By treating stores as control labs for pricing, packaging, assortment and activation, you de-risk major bets before national rollouts
Close the loop from stimulus to sale: In-store is where media, merchandising and execution converge, so testing there lets you directly connect a specific intervention (i.e. display, signage) to incremental sales and margin. Closed-loop, store level testing gives numbers on what actually moves the needle.
Reduce innovation failure and accelerate winners: new products, new pack sizes, and new claims are risky and expensive. In-store tests expose real-world friction or adoption. By iterating, you can rapidly identify which variants deserve scale vs refinement, cutting failure rate and cycle time of your innovation pipeline.
This is for manufacturers, but elevate retail partnerships with proof, not promises. Retailers are flooded with requests for endcaps, feature space, and exclusive launches. Disciplined in-store testing lets you show them credible, store-level evidence of incremental category growth.
Build a repeatable, data-rich test & learn muscle. The organizations that will win are those that can run many small, well designed in-store experiments, aggregate the learnings, and feed them back into pricing, promotion, space and media decisions.
About Circana
Circana is a leader in providing technology, AI, and data to fast-moving consumer packaged goods companies, durables manufacturers, and retailers seeking to optimize their businesses. Circana’s predictive analytics and technology empower clients to measure their market share, understand the underlying consumer behavior driving it, and accelerate their growth. Circana’s Liquid Data® technology platform is powered by an expansive, high-quality data set, and intelligent algorithms trained on six decades of domain expertise.
About Patty Altman
As president of Circana’s global solutions, Patty leads an integrated global team that helps clients drive new growth using Circana’s consumer insights, receipt panels, e-commerce, media, analytics, growth consulting, and software solutions.