Merchandising and brand managers traditionally work at a CPG manufacturer headquarters or regional office, isolated and sometimes blissfully unaware of what actually goes on with their product or brand at actual stores. This not only affects their perception of their product’s positioning, placement, and price but it may lead to inappropriate strategies, damaging sales in the long run.
Supervising outside staff and field reps is one of the hardest parts of a manager’s job description, just because there is a lot of uncertainty when it comes to the activities being performed by the team members throughout the day. That is the main reason many companies are implementing solutions for field marketing. Through mobile technology, smartphones and tablets have become an essential tool for outside teams. But what are the main benefits of a solution for field marketing?
Adopting a system for merchandising is the first step in achieving the oversight necessary to effectively monitor retail channel strategies. With a system for merchandising, management can streamline keeping track of merchandise sets and resets, promotions, etc, by customizing audit forms and capturing valuable information without having to go through the cumbersome activity of transcribing paper forms.
Retail audit software has revolutionized how retail audits are performed since they allow reps to answer questionnaires and perform other in-store activities right on their smartphones and tablets, eliminating the need for paperwork.
With a mobile merchandising app, smartphones and tablets not only replace the old pen-and-paper method – virtually eliminating cumbersome data transcription – but also become de-facto merchandising auditing tools that provide managers real time access to retail planogram compliance check results.
Merchandising reports can seem complex to build but, with the right piece of software, merchandising and category managers can easily organize multiple store data in a way that will lead to the appropriate action by management.
Retail planogram compliance checks used to be notoriously complex activities due to the scale of operations necessary to implement them on many stores – and then transcribing sometimes thousands of pages of data in order to generate reports. VisitBasis solution for automation for merchandising in store came into the market with the purpose of making recurring retail planogram compliance checks drastically easier to implement and report – and it delivers.
Knowing your customer is the first step in having a successful business. However, for CPG businesses, sometimes the customer might seem unreachable, especially considering all the layers of distributors and retailers between them. Having merchandisers at retailers performing customer surveys is one of the traditional ways that manufacturers have to get in touch with their market and field merchandising software has revolutionized the way these surveys are performed.
By implementing an app for retail execution, managers will completely eliminate this lag time between retail data capture and reporting and even go beyond: businesses can exponentially increase the breadth of data it collects by developing in-depth forms and generate merchandising reports much more representative of their retail channel realities.
Most retail manufacturers, distributors, and agencies have adopted digital tools for merchandisers to perform in-store activities. The advantages are clear, from having all data in digital format from the moment it is captured to the ease of scheduling and planning in-store tasks for reps.
