Ugam Star Wars Day Report Reveals Lure of the Dark Side
Retail analysis identifies most popular characters, pricing and assortment trends for top Star Wars toys, costumes and games among Amazon and its competitors
NEW YORK, May 4, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- Ugam, a global leader in managed analytics, today announced the results of its report, May the 4th Be With You: Assortment and Pricing Analysis of Amazon and its Competitors. Among other takeaways, the report identified Kylo Ren and Darth Vader as the most searched-for Star Wars characters, and found that Amazon offered the largest assortment of toys, games, costumes and accessories, averaging nearly 13 times more products than its closest competitor, Walmart, while offering the lowest price on overlapping assortment 78 percent of the time.
According to NPD data, Star Wars had an enormous impact on toy sales in 2015, generating more than $700 million. Leading up to this year's Star Wars Day (Wednesday, May 4), Ugam analyzed product assortments offered by Amazon, Walmart, Target, Jet and Toys "R" Us to determine which retailers were best prepared to capitalize on the opportunity and how they compared with one another.
Character Popularity
The report identified the 10 most searched-for Star War characters in the U.S. from March 2015 to February 2016. Kylo Ren led the way at 550,000 average monthly searches, followed by Darth Vader (+Anakin Skywalker) with 446,000. After that, Luke Skywalker came in at 246,000 average monthly searches, Boba Fett and Princess Leia were tied at 201,000, Yoda, Han Solo and Chewbacca all had 165,000 while Darth Maul and BB-8 each had 135,000.
In spite of his second-place popularity, Darth Vader maintained the highest product count for any character, with 8,246 different products carried by Amazon alone. Next up was BB-8, with a product count on Amazon totaling 4,316, followed by Yoda (3,477) and Luke Skywalker (3,230), the only other characters to top 3,000 products on Amazon. Kylo Ren's product count was a mere 1,785. On average, Amazon carried 13 times more products than Walmart, its closest competitor.
Availability Across Retailers
Ugam examined a sample of 104 Star Wars-themed products on Amazon (including toys, games and costumes) and checked their availability across competitors, finding that Walmart carried 89 percent of the sample assortment (including similar products), while Target carried 64 percent, Jet carried 60 percent and Toys "R" Us carried 53 percent.
Price Competitiveness
Among overlapping product assortment between all five retailers, Amazon was the clear leader, offering the lowest price for 78 percent of shared products. Amazon was followed by Walmart, which offered the lowest prices 54 percent of the time, and then Jet (48%), Target (28%), and Toys "R" Us (11%).
"Star Wars Day presents a prime opportunity to showcase Ugam's unique capabilities in collecting and analyzing search, competitor and market data to provide a detailed cross-section of a specific retail market," said Mihir Kittur, co-founder and chief innovation officer at Ugam. "This type of outside-in analytics can help retailers in any area make better decisions on assortment, pricing, product and marketing content, drive increased sales and find ways to compete against the likes of Amazon."
To conduct this analysis, Ugam used its proprietary big data platform to identify trending products by collecting and analyzing consumer demand data, including Google search data, product reviews and popular items in Amazon's assortment. Using the resulting lists of trending Star Wars products, Ugam aggregated detailed pricing information from Amazon, Walmart, Target, Toys "R" Us, and Jet to determine who was selling those products and at what price.
Click here to download the full report.
For more information on Ugam's Pricing, Assortment and Content Intelligence solutions, please visit http://www.ugamsolutions.com/retailers.
About Ugam
Ugam is a global leader in managed analytics that helps retailers, brands and market research firms transform big data into valuable insights. The company's unique managed services offering combines a proprietary big data technology platform with deep domain knowledge and analytics expertise to empower clients to make decisions that improve their business. For retailers, online marketplaces and brands, Ugam supports better merchandising, marketing and channel management decisions through the use of analytics. For market research firms and insight-based consultancies, Ugam offers a portfolio of solutions including end-to-end research operations, technology transitioning support, and data warehousing, visualization and reporting that enables them to better serve their clients. Five of the top 10 U.S. retailers, many of the world's largest brands and online marketplaces, and 13 of the top 25 market research firms work with Ugam because of its ability to deliver high-quality insights with unmatched customer experience.
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Veera Fernandes
Ugam
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