More SKUs don’t mean more sales. Too often, they mean less. Every range has its passengers. The flavours, sizes and variants that crowd the shelf, tie up working capital and quietly steal volume from the lines that actually earn their space.
Retailers want tighter, more productive ranges. You want to protect share and hold on to every shopper you’ve worked hard to win. TURF gives you the evidence to do both.
Story Insights’ range optimisation service uses TURF research to show you exactly which products to keep, cut or add. It’s built on shopper evidence, not internal opinion or last year’s habits.
TURF stands for Total Unduplicated Reach Frequency. It started life in media planning. Today, it’s one of the sharpest tools in FMCG for settling range decisions.
TURF research answers one question: which combination of products reaches the most shoppers at least once, from the limited/restricted number of SKUs we can place on the shelf or menu?
The word that matters is unduplicated. If two variants appeal to the same shoppers, running both adds very little. Your best-selling flavour and your second-best seller might be fishing in the same pond. The smartest second line in a range is rarely the second most popular. It’s the one that wins shoppers that your first line missed.
That’s why a standard popularity ranking misleads. It tells you what’s liked. A TURF analysis tells you what’s additive.
TURF modelling takes shopper-level data, such as which items each shopper would buy, and tests the combinations of products against it. It builds the range from the strongest incremental contributor up, then shows where the gains start to flatten.
The result is a reach curve. Early additions lift reach sharply. Later ones barely move it. That flattening point is where a range stops earning its complexity.
Here’s how we run it:
We’re data agnostic. We don’t push a preferred platform or a one-size method. Where TURF is the answer, we’ll say so. Where it needs support from wider FMCG market research or customer behaviour analysis, we’ll build that in.
TURF research isn’t just for cutting. It’s for building the right range from the start and defending it once you have it. Our work typically covers:
It sits naturally alongside our category management services, grounding range decisions in credible shopper evidence.
No 80-page decks here. You get clear direction you can act on:
We immerse in your category and business objectives before any research begins.
Bespoke methodology — quantitative, qualitative, or integrated calibrated to your questions.
Data collection across APAC, benchmarked against IRI and Mintel intelligence.
Decision-ready recommendations built for retailer reviews and board sessions.
Plenty of agencies can run a TURF model. Fewer can tell you what to do with it.
Story Insights is a specialist shopper and category insights agency built on senior expertise. Here’s what that means for your range project:
Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Lactalis and Carlton United Breweries are among the brands that trust us with commercially sensitive research. We’re based in Melbourne and work across 12+ markets in Asia-Pacific and Europe, so your range thinking travels well beyond a single retailer or country.
If you’re facing a range review, a retailer challenge or a launch decision, let’s talk. Tell us what you’re trying to figure out, and we’ll tell you how we’d approach it.