Recent radical changes in shopper behavior are putting pressure on category management practices to further adapt to the new dynamics of retail. How should retailers adapt their traditional category management practices to the greater influence of online shopping as well as greater competition from the likes of limited-assortment and dollar stores?
For the past decade or more, supermarkets and their brand partners have frantically worked to devise new incentives to lure the shopper to center store. But any transformation of the center store has to begin with an honest assessment of many factors. How do you think the center store should be reinvented to cater to the behavior of today’s shoppers?
The over-storing of America is perhaps the most immediate and imposing problem facing retailers. Retailers need a radical change of focus and success metrics aimed at customer growth rather than store growth. Is traditional expansion through new stores becoming more problematic or even counterproductive for many retailers?
At fixture and merchandising plan meetings attended over thirty-plus years, discussions centered on logistics and space availability, but there was little or no focus on shopper convenience or shopping efficiency. Essentially, this remains the approach of most retailers today. Which all-too-common merchandising practices work against shopper efficiency and convenience?
Unlike their online counterparts, traditional retailers do not track the time spent in-store or engagement in their merchandising. Do you see brick & mortar stores eventually leveraging in-store shopper data to the degree that e-commerce sites capitalize on browser data?
As a battered veteran of many Monday morning retail meetings, BrainTrust Panelist Mark Heckman says that while sales growth is almost always discussed, it is seldom given the prominence of profit and hitting a near term EBITDA number. What do you see as the most important determinant of pricing to achieve long-term growth objectives?
Ask any retailer what their shopper’s average trip length is or how fast shoppers buy once they are in one of their stores, and you will likely get blank stares. Why do retailers largely downplay the “time investment” part of the shopper’s journey?
Well over 20 years ago, the first “electronic” card-based loyalty programs arrived to help retailers promote more effectively. With limited technology and inherent expense, retailers quickly gave up on targeted deals. Today, apps are so abundant that shoppers can be overwhelmed with choice, and major retailers seem to all have their own proprietary app. Do you agree that retailers need to shift away from proprietary or stand-alone approaches to their loyalty programs?
EBay’s modeling predicts the amount of data available from online commerce transactions will double every year in the near term, a prediction has prompted eBay to discard the term “Big Data” in favor of a new tier of data volume. Are retailers, generally speaking, prepared to deal with the increasing amount of data they receive?
“Big Data implies that data sets are so large and complex they become awkward to work with using standard tools and techniques.” Buried within this simple definition lies many problems and pitfalls that retailers and other organizations face when their data needs exceed their current capabilities. What steps do you think are being underestimated by retailers in efforts to capitalize on Big Data?
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