TURF analysis

What is TURF analysis

The TURF (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency) method is used in marketing to highlight a line of products from a complete range of products in order to have the highest market share. From all the products of a brand, we can obtain a subset, which should be the line of products with the maximum reach.

For example, let’s consider an ice cream manufacturer producing 30 different flavors and who wants to put forward a line of six flavors that will reach as many consumers as possible. Thus, he submitted a questionnaire to a panel of 500 consumers who scored each flavor on a scale from 1 to 10. The manufacturer believes that the consumer will be satisfied and inclined to choose the flavor if he gives a score above 8. TURF analysis will look for the combination of 6 flavors with greatest reach and frequency.

Principles of TURF analysis

This method is a simple statistical method. It is based on a questionnaire (with scores on a fixed scale). The analysis runs through every possible combination of products and records for each combination (1) the percentage of those that desire at least 1 product in the given combination (i.e. reach), and (2) the total number of times products are desired in the given combination (i.e. frequency).

XLSTAT algorithms for TURF analysis

XLSTAT offers a variety of techniques to find the best combination of products:

• the enumeration method will test all the combinations but may be time consuming;
• the greedy algorithm is very fast but can stop on a local optimum
• the fast search algorithm is close from the enumeration method but it is faster and does not guarantee the optimal solution.

Results of TURF analysis in XLSTAT

Frequencies by product

This table displays the frequency with which the objective has been reached for each product.

Product lines obtained with the TURF analysis

This table displays for each selected combination: the Reach, the frequency and the name of each product.

Product lines obtained with the TURF analysis (%)

This table displays for each selected combination: the percentage of observations for which the objective has been reached, the frequency in percentage, and the frequency in percentage for each product in each combination.