No more guesswork: Sense & Crisp bring sales accountability to sampling in industry first collaboration.
As featured in The Grocer on Wednesday 4th June.
Exclusive partnership sets a new standard for FMCG experiential measurement — using verified EPOS data from the UK’s leading grocery retailers.
FMCG brands investing in out-of-home sampling finally have what they’ve been missing: clear, credible reporting on how it drives in-store sales.
In an industry-first move, Sense, the brand experience agency with 20 years of expertise in experiential marketing, has partnered exclusively with Crisp, the company whose SKUtrak retail analytics platform is trusted by the UK’s top grocery suppliers.
Together, they’ve created a new, data-led framework that directly links out-of-home sampling campaigns – from street teams and city activations to festivals and commuter hubs – to verified sales performance across the UK’s five biggest grocery retailers. The result: a new standard of clarity, consistency, and commercial relevance in a part of marketing that’s long relied on guesswork.
“Out-of-home sampling has always been a powerful way to get products into people’s hands, but without credible sales measurement, it’s been underutilised and undervalued,” said Nick Adams, CEO at Sense.
“We’ve spent 20 years building experiential campaigns that move people, and now we can prove they move product too. This partnership with Crisp – and their SKUtrak platform – finally closes the loop, offering live, independent, verifiable sales data that brands can easily plug into their reporting. No more claimed intent or skewed feedback, just hard, actionable data to inform strategy. It sets a much-needed new benchmark for the category.”
Sense has long led the way in experiential measurement, even publishing its own book, Real World Impact, in 2016 to help brands better understand the value of non-traditional marketing.
And yet, the measurement gap persists. A recent Sense-commissioned survey* of 100+ senior FMCG marketers found:
75% of those who hadn’t run a sampling campaign in the past two years said it was because they didn’t believe it drives value or in-store sales.
95% of that group said they would reconsider sampling if they could prove its impact on sales.
62% of marketers currently running sampling campaigns receive no sales data at all to validate ROI.
While in-store sampling can offer retailer sales data, brands have struggled to get the same clarity for out-of-store activity, typically relying on coupon redemption or consumer feedback based on intent, which is often inflated or unreliable. This new approach addresses that gap directly.
Through this new process, brands can:
Identify high-performing regions and environments for sampling
Compare effectiveness across activation types and locations, from festivals to train stations
Test and refine creative and promotional mechanics, such as coupons, gift-with-purchase offers and competitions
Make more informed decisions for future campaigns, backed by real retail performance data, not ambitious assumptions
This exclusive integration feeds SKUtrak’s EPOS data directly into Sense’s measurement framework, giving brands a clear picture of what happened after the sample: where and when sales increased, and by how much.
Guy Cuthbert, founder of Atheon (original developers of SKUtrak) and now General Manager & SVP at Crisp, added:“Sampling has always had strategic value, but without clear evidence of its impact, it’s struggled to earn its place at the top table. This changes that. By tying sampling activity directly to verified in-store sales, we’re helping brands turn great real-world experiences into measurable commercial results.”
Join the webinar
To explore the methodology, see how it works in practice, and dig deeper into the future of experiential marketing, Sense and Crisp will host a live webinar on Thursday 10th July – a must-attend for brand and shopper marketers ready to bring greater accountability to experiential.