Saturday, July 4, 2015

Nielsen Home Scanning program

Companies are all about research, finding out who buys their products and when. Those cash back apps feed back information back to the suppliers, and this Nielsen program is using the same rationale. There have been a bunch of instances where I've seen companies quote stats taken from this system. 

I applied on their website and then waited to see if I was part of a demographic they were interested in. I was and they sent me information to sign up. In the mail came a box with a little unit in it, including a base and a handheld scanner. Plugged the base direct into the router and I was ready to go. 

Basically without going into too much detail, you are supposed to scan and send in your purchases. Every purchase. They have a hundred+ stores in their unit that cover almost every store you could be spending money at. Gas to groceries, pet food to online shopping. They want to know what you buy. 

When you enter a purchase by scanning the item's barcode, it'll ask if you used any deals, options like store sale, manufacturers coupon and more come up. Some stores you shop ask you to input the price of every single item while others just want the total bill at the end. It'll take us few extra minutes to input our purchases before we put them away in the house. The handheld can also be taken with you, in your purse or such, if you are bad at keeping receipts like I can be sometimes. 

Some items that can't be scanned as they have no barcode, you scan a pre-created barcode on a sent sheet. This include stuff like gas, restaurant and fast food, vegetables and fruits and more. I'll admit our house scans the take out barcode far too often!


They run on weekly schedules, so the idea is you send in all your purchases before the cut off day. They are/did run a promotion that if you scan and send in your purchases all 4 weeks of a month they would send you a gift card. This is still ongoing, and a good incentive to stay on top of the day of the week. (I did and got the prepaid MasterCard for $15) :)

Every transmission of purchases earns you points. I think it's 150 points per week if you send in your stuff. All of these points gather in your account to later buy stuff. Their rewards shop looks similar to the air miles one. I believe one of the cheapest rewards on there is at 5000 points, and I'm currently sitting at around 3500 myself :) 

Nielsen will also run surveys and questionnaires to get bonus points. Typically taking 5-10 min to do, you'll get 200 bonus points each. They will also ask about things they are trying, like keeping a food diary for a week (with cash rewards) or opting in to try their new mobile scanning system. More bonus points come from your "anniversary" date each year, with the number of points rewarded going up each year you keep the system. 

No cost, just some extra time. I think it's a worthwhile thing to look into. 

1 comment:

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