What are the keys to success for retailers?

Certainly agility and speed occupy a high step of the scale, but nowadays one of the most incisive factors is reactivity: identifying consumer behaviors, increasingly changing, and the resulting buying trends, becomes increasingly complicated.

In order to structure profitable shelves, considering the variability of the current market, it is therefore necessary to adopt innovative approaches that ensure essential elements such as speed and accuracy.

Why is a new approach necessary?

The success of a retailer depends on its ability to provide a proposal that can win over the consumer.

To achieve this result, it is necessary to undertake a path composed of coherent strategic choices, regarding the assortment of products and the management of category spaces.

This theme turns out to be fundamental, as it is with the right strategies that you can shape the identity of the retailer, making it recognizable and unique in the eyes of buyers.

The current external market has made the environment even more dynamic than it already was. On the one hand, consumer behaviour is changing faster and faster, and on the other, their expectations are increasing: buyers expect to find brands of all kinds, from international brands to local ones, from emerging products in trend, not to mention the lines related to the sustainability of the environment.

Creating a perfect assortment that can convince and retain buyers is not easy: for this reason, the competition between retailers is in the midst of evolution.

Assortments are influenced by the location of the store, the cluster, the size of the products, the frequency of purchase, the channel chosen for the purchase …

The frequent variations of price legacies to the promotions then, contribute to create a fluctuating question, that it risks to carry to stock breaks.

This combination of factors, increasingly thinner and more articulate, introduces a wide range of variables into the market, which puts a strain on the ability of the retailer to effectively execute the process of optimization of the assortment and category.

To remain competitive, therefore, it is necessary for the retailer to start making decisions on these issues in data driven mode, using the technologies available today that allow you to do so quickly, in order to maintain adequate responsiveness to market variability without losing quality.

We conclude by recalling a research already mentioned in previous articles.

According to a study by IHL Group, on a global level, the poor effectiveness of the shelf assortment costs retailers almost 1.1 trillion dollars: this means that, with the same store, sales could increase by 10.3% by paying more attention to the “shelf relevance”.

That is why in this in-depth analysis we talk about the importance of the planning process, click here to read it.