Product Portfolio Management: TURF

Abstract

TURF stands for Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency and is a technique developed by the advertising industry in the middle of the last century and first applied to food product lines more than 20 years ago (Miaoulis, Turf: a new planning approach for product line extensions. Marketing Research, 1990; Cohen, TURF analysis. Quirk’s Marketing Research Review, 1993; Moskowitz, Consumer testing and evaluation of personal care products. CRC Press, 1996). It aims to identify the best combination of alternative products to reach a maximum number of consumers a maximum number of times. Food manufacturers are faced with the question: How many products/flavors to offer before capping the assortment?—they have to find the “cut-point” the point at which offering more variants is no longer profitable. This is important for range optimization; when faced with too much choice, consumers default to brandsBrands or products that they know and trust or worse still don’t make a purchase at all (Iyengar, The art of choosing, 2011). TURFTotal Unduplicated Reach and Frequency (TURF) analysis addresses the problem using simple combinatorial techniques.