Knowing if a product is available at stores is of utmost concern for many managers at CPG companies: from merchandising to retail channel operations and from marketing to finance, many departments have their performance measured by how well revenue grows during a fiscal year. Product shortages or recurring stocking issues, however, can seriously affect revenues, especially because shoppers may switch brands because of these issues.
The emergence of store merchandising platform solutions has eased the lives of category managers with digital data collection, but still, they have to deal with many solutions not meant for the specific purpose of tracking on-shelf availability at stores.
Implementing a retail audit app will provide a sure way to produce effective planogram compliance operations. With a retail audit app, brand and category managers are able to set up country-wide, or even worldwide, retail audit operations right from their offices.
Sales people in general hate supervision. As a career that requires an independent personality from professionals, outside sales attracts people that are naturally wary of extra supervision. So how come outside sales teams tend to love working with a field marketing app that features GPS tracking?
Traditional pen-and-paper store audits do not comply with the agility necessary for such situations, since it might take quite a while for the information to go from the rep performing the audit to the person responsible for correcting the issue. An in store merchandising software is an ideal way to monitor mission-critical situations at stores.
A lot of transformation, though, is going on in supermarkets these days, and many causes of such transformation can be traced to platforms for retail execution.
Mobile technology has recently caused a revolution in merchandising, to the point that, now, retail audit software for merchandising has become indispensable. But what should brand and category managers look for in such an application?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a reality in online shopping. Who hasn’t seen a “relevant” ad on social media right after doing a web search on a certain product? Now retail image recognition is bringing artificial intelligence to store shelves as systems for retail execution start incorporating this technology.
The advent of smartphones and mobile apps has brought the emergence of tools for field marketing that allows for digital in-store data collection, eliminating the traditional pen-and-paper and, with it, the dreaded error and delay-prone transcription.
Managing a consumer product category requires a great deal of planning and organization. Retail channels mean scattered points-of-sale, different shopper profiles, and a lot of information to be processed in order to get not only key performance indicators but also customer behavior insights. That is why retail audit tool adoption has taken off among manufacturers, distributors, and sales and marketing agencies: Right from the get-go, it eliminates clumsy paperwork and inefficient data transcription.
