The Stories Inside the Data

Leaning into Data

Belcher was appointed to lead the company in 2019, shortly after the private-equity firm Vista Equity Partners bought and merged two market research companies under a new brand, Numerator.

Vista had a hypothesis that by melding the multiple data sets from these companies, it could create valuable new use cases for data. This idea ultimately didn’t work, but one of the data sets—purchase panel data—was a gold mine. “It was dramatically differentiated from the others,” Belcher says. “And it was completely underutilized. We just leaned into that one.”  

That set focused on consumer behavior data, so that’s where Numerator pivoted. The company looks to help clients answer questions such as: What shopping patterns do people display? What kinds of ads and promotions do shoppers respond to? Why do they switch from one brand to another?

The Numerator consumer data set is built on an app called Receipt Hog, where more than 1 million monthly active users upload receipts and answer questions about their purchases. Users can also connect Receipt Hog with their online purchases and retail accounts like Amazon, Walmart, and Kroger, as it extracts the data from their shopping history. They’re able to complete in-app surveys, answering questions about why they chose to buy a product or brand. Users are paid with rewards, such as cash prizes and gift cards.

“We’re collecting data using the smartphone, this thing that we all have with us all day every day, and we’re increasingly seeing more consumers sharing data with us digitally,” Belcher says.

Receipt Hog captures a high percentage of consumers’ overall shopping trips, allowing clients to run thousands of different reports on the data and, ultimately, uncover answers to their questions on consumer behavior.

In 2021, Bain Capital engineered the acquisition of Numerator as part of its Kantar portfolio for $1.5 billion. “We’re probably worth at least two-to-three times that now,” Belcher says.

Currently, more than half of Fortune 500 companies are Numerator clients, including Unilever, the Hershey Company, and Post Consumer Brands.

A Symbiotic Partnership

At an annual marketing event for UChicago, a professor asked Belcher if he could have access to Numerator’s data for a research project. Belcher initially said no—his company had to limit access to paying clients, who spend millions of dollars on it.

But then, more UChicago professors asked about Numerator’s data. Belcher was intrigued—he loved the idea of giving back to the university that taught him so much and instilled in him his love of data, but he worried that a partnership could overtax his employees. Would professors constantly be asking how to run reports and find data?

On a trial basis, Belcher granted access to professors, allowing the Kilts Center to distribute Numerator data across Booth and the wider university.

“A year or two later, and I’m stunned by the amount of research that’s being done using our data,” says Belcher. “The faculty are doing some cool stuff with it. We found that many of these researchers and their grad student assistants tend to be very savvy and original in their use of our data.”

To date, Numerator’s partnership with the Kilts Center has yielded more than 20 ongoing research projects, with two recently finished. In one study, researchers including Maximilian Muhn and Thomas Rauter, both associate professors of accounting, compared 24,000 survey responses from Numerator panelists with their actual purchasing behavior. They find that most panelists who claim to care about ESG practices—like companies donating to food banks and using recyclable materials—don’t spend in line with those concerns.

In another study, Booth PhD students Fern Ramoutar, Yixin Sun, and their co-researchers find that when dollar stores expand into new areas, the price of groceries tends to drop, but household consumption also shifts toward fewer varieties of products.

“The Numerator data are a unique and valuable addition to the Kilts Center’s academic archive, giving scholars a comprehensive look at US household spending on both online and offline purchases of fast-moving consumer goods that supports a wide range of research interests,” says Art Middlebrooks, clinical professor of marketing and business development for research data at Kilts.  

After seeing the mutual benefits of the partnership, Numerator established additional non-paying partnerships with Yale, Northwestern, and Harvard. Numerator also expanded its client base beyond consumer-packaged goods and is now working with consultancies, banks, and governmental agencies, including McKinsey & Company, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, J.P. Morgan, and the Federal Trade Commission.

Just the Beginning

Belcher believes Numerator and other consumer-insights companies have only scratched the surface of what can be done with big data and artificial intelligence.

“It’s almost shocking to me how little data is being used currently,” he says. “If you were to fast-forward 20, 30, 40 years from now and tell me that data was being used 100 times more in decision-making than it is today in corporate America or academic institutions, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

As an example, Belcher cites Tempus, a biotech company that uses data to sequence cancer tumors, monitoring patient treatment and outcomes. Belcher currently sits on the company’s board. He believes that much like Tempus is helping to usher in the age of precision medicine, Numerator and its partnerships with Booth's Kilts Center, UChicago, and other universities will usher in the age of precision data in business decision-making.

And by combining forces with professors, PhD students, and post-doctoral researchers across UChicago and other prestigious universities, Numerator is enabling the kind of critical, thoughtful, and creative stories with numbers that Belcher learned about as a student at Booth.

“There’s learning in both directions,” he says. “Scholars are learning from us about consumer behaviors throughout America. And we’re learning from them about the levels of information that are buried inside of our data that we didn’t even know existed.”