In supermarkets, convenience stores, drugstores, etc., competing products can be side-by-side on a shelf. Therefore, for the consumer, it becomes easy to differentiate and the alternative to the original product choice is readily available, just inches away. This is why in retail, more than in any other industry, it is of utmost importance to know what your competitors are doing at the points-of-sale.
Every retail-centric business has to perform merchandising activities. From stores to manufacturers, distributors, and marketing agencies, companies in retail need to make sure that products are being distributed and displayed correctly. It generates huge amounts of data. This means that detecting threats and opportunities within the captured data becomes increasingly difficult as business grows, therefore mission-critical issues such as frequent out-of stocks or damaged shipments can easily be overlooked.
Retail-focused businesses depend on merchandising audits to keep track of their in-store availability, presentation, and – in some cases – perception. Companies, from product manufacturers to distributors and marketing agencies, rely on field reps to perform those activities and are increasingly adopting apps for field marketing in order to streamline the flow of information from the stores to decision makers.
High rep turnover in merchandising field teams is seen as a chronic, inevitable situation in the industry. Reps come and go due to many reasons that can include unreasonable expectations concerning hours and amount of work, lack of experience, poor performance, fraudulent check-ins and reports, among others.
Store checklists are notorious for being difficult to plan, implement and report on, especially when the retail inspection encompasses several SKUs across multiple categories. Not only it is time and labor-intensive, but the data processing as a whole – from collection to transcription – is extremely prone to human error.
Platforms for auditing in store have become a must-have for category managers. Not only are they a key data collection instrument when reviewing and assessing category performance but these apps also assist in implementing category plans. But how can a platform for auditing in store be used in gathering shopper insights so these can be incorporated into category strategy reviews?
Field marketing and retail merchandising are complex sciences. They both rely on data from a large number of geographically dispersed stores and, therefore, also rely on the large number of people collecting such data.
Merchandising activities are traditionally natural resource intensive, from the piles of paper necessary to perform numerous daily audits to the amount of fuel used by reps in their daily routes.
Smartphone use during working hours is frowned upon in most businesses, especially when it involves outside contractors or field staff – such as merchandisers and marketing reps – or, even worse, store employees.
Big data is the word “du jour”. While being able to analyze large amounts of data and detect patterns, trends, and associations from such analysis might be beneficial for retail businesses, small manufacturers, distributors, and channels might feel like they are left out, since the cost of implementing Big Data can be prohibitive. However, recent cloud-based technology means software for retail execution has become easier – and more affordable – to subscribe and implement, opening the door of Big Data to small businesses.
