Retail Rumblings : Achieving Merchandising Success
Effective in-store campaigns and merchandising strategies in a changing retail landscape
January 1, 2010 By Dan WittnerWith all the customer touchpoints available to retailers, many often overlook the importance of the last mile of retail—the bricks-and-mortar store. Ultimately, the bricks and mortar store is the last touch point with a customer and the critical component to driving sales.
Though the Internet is an important medium for customer research, the majority of consumers make their decisions in-store (85 percent). As such, targeting them with effective in-store messaging, product placement and promotions becomes critical to making the sale and improving customer retention and satisfaction.
However, for many mobile and imaging retailers, executing a comprehensive in-store marketing and merchandising strategy can be a daunting challenge. The product landscape has changed a great deal over the last few years, making developing and executing effective in-store campaigns and seasonal promotions much more complicated.
With all this in mind, how exactly does a retailer stay ahead of the retail cycle and successfully implement effective in-store campaigns and merchandising strategies in this changing retail landscape? Here’s a bit of advice.
Step 1: Execution from a single platform
The first step in streamlining the merchandising and in-store campaign process is to create a single platform for executing these tasks. Today, most retailers, both in the mobile/imaging space and in other verticals, use a number of different systems to execute in-store merchandising and data collection. As a result, the cross-functional teams attempting to collaborate have an ill-defined set of tasks and little means to hold one another accountable for moving the process forward. Data silos are created and teams make decisions based only on the data available to them.
A single platform also enables retailers to extend the reach and relationship with their product suppliers, giving them insight into the merchandising process. This is becoming increasingly important as highly sought-after brands are demanding proof of execution, particularly as they make decisions about whether to allocate their marketing budgets to in-store or direct-to-consumer digital channels. Proof of execution is more often than not the driving force behind a high-profile brand’s decision to give a retailer exclusivity to a product. Thus, the retailer who is able to prove a brand’s dollars are spent in the right place and their carefully planned campaigns are executed properly will be the one most likely to win exclusivity.
Retailers that are succeeding offer their partners a unified platform where all campaigns, assets, tasks and messages are stored. Having this single view ensures everyone is on the same page no matter how quickly the product landscape changes or how many campaigns are executed in a given period.
