Intage pairs its purchase-panel data with AI firm SENSY's store-siting simulator for Japanese retailers
A new joint service lets a Japanese chain model a store it has not built yet, in an area it has never traded in -- a direct answer to site-selection risk as construction and labour costs climb.
Market-research house Intage (インテージ) and AI developer SENSY announced a partnership on November 12 that combines Intage's consumer purchase-history data with SENSY's store-development simulation tool, aimed at Japanese retailers deciding where to open their next store.
The service pairs SENSY's GeoScope, which forecasts sales and analyses trade areas and competitors at a candidate site by combining a retailer's own point-of-sale data with population, trade-area and competitor data, with Intage's SCI-CODE, a purchase-history dataset built by merging Intage's national consumer panel survey with transaction data from group company Research & Innovation. Combined, the companies said, the two datasets recreate how consumers would behave after a hypothetical new store opened -- predicting footfall and sales, testing how changes to a store's size or format would move the numbers, and estimating how much business a new location would pull from the retailer's own existing stores.
The pitch addresses a gap specific to expansion: a retailer's own sales data covers only where it already trades, so it has little visibility into competitor spending or customer behaviour in areas it has not entered -- precisely where a site-selection call carries the most risk. That risk has grown, Intage and SENSY said, as rising construction and land costs and a tighter labour market raise the cost of getting a new store wrong. For a Japanese retailer weighing an unfamiliar location, a tool that prices in cannibalisation before a lease is signed is worth more than one that only confirms demand.
Intage and SENSY said they will test the simulation's accuracy for practical retail use before deciding whether to launch it commercially; no release date was given. The companies plan to present the initiative at the INTAGE GROUP FORUM 2026 on November 18 at the ANA InterContinental Tokyo.