Case Study: Imperial Tobacco achieves 50% reduction in category clusters and cuts planograms from 800+ to 75 with RELEX Solutions

Imperial Tobacco Improved Collaboration with a Behavioral Clustering Approach

Imperial Tobacco, a major tobacco supplier, faced mounting pressure to deliver more credible, customer-focused category advice to retailers as market dynamics evolved. Their existing EPOS-based, bottom-up clustering method was slow, manual and insufficiently granular—taking weeks to produce insights and lacking the flexibility to react quickly to retailer needs—so they sought an automated behavioral clustering approach to improve store groupings and category understanding.

Partnering with RELEX Solutions, Imperial implemented behavioral clustering and a consumer decision tree in just four days, automating performance-based analysis across retailer estates. The solution produced fast, granular insights and concrete business benefits: cluster counts halved in a retailer trial (12 to 6), the independent estate yielded 28 distinct clusters, planogram volume was cut from 800+ to 75, labor requirements fell substantially, and sales remained stable despite the simplification.

Imperial Tobacco

Dean Elson

Distribution and Availability Executive