Marketing
Almost daily, innovations emerge in how a consumer is attracted to a store purchase. New technologies, new portals for messaging and branding, new ways to coupon or shape behavior - the ever-widening portfolio of options to a marketer can be overwhelming. These changes are happening in the midst of a transformative shift in how products are selected and presented. This shift - the move to customizing everything from pricing to assortments to offers to consumer clusters - has been building and is now here, amplified by trends such as:
- A rigorous focus on shopper insights and how to leverage them
- New couponing, e.g. delivered to the cell phone with a scannable bar code
- Increasing positive and negative influence of Social Media
- A focus on health and sustainability during an economic tough times
- Need for private label growth in line breadth and sales volume
- Optimizing and maximizing trade spend from suppliers
- Continued growth and flux in the web channel for purchases
These trends mean that your customers will be receiving more sophisticated targeted offers to try other retail channels. It is only by ensuring your category management, marketing, and micro-merchandising efforts are tuned to these trends that your business processes can keep showing the positive results that your organization has come to expect. The challenge: each of these trends requires new types of data to will have to be integrated to existing point-of-sale, syndicated, shopper, and data marts.
The transformative business processes in marketing and category management can be improved by more precise, faster analytics against more and more data. While each of these areas is not new, there is a very consistent flow of change and improvement in how you and your competitors implement them today. As more directed, customized approaches make sense consumer by consumer, these areas become the most strategic for leverage faster and smarter results:
- Price and Promotion Optimization
- Segmentation/Clustering
- Cluster-specific Assortments
- Loyalty Analytics & Target Marketing
The business benefits that emerge from responsiveness to demand are significant. Retailers today are changing their approaches, if they have not already, to implementing much more targeted product, price, promotion mixes, and doing it more consistently than ever before. By optimizing the customer behavior through marketing, the retailers are expecting and receiving benefits such as:
- Maintain category health while increasing private label share
- Focus on most profitable customers and keeping them
- Increased recency, frequency, and total purchase size
- Better understanding of cannibalization and switching
- Keeping brand loyal customers coming to your store
- Increased basket sizes while the general trends are decreased item counts
- Migrating the frequent customers to shop the profitable categories
Taken together, the ROI an organization can realize moves this area of analytics quickly to the top of the priority list. Fundamentally sound, delivered by business people, these better decisions can be made. But they can only be made if the technology is there to support the ingredients that come along with these improvements: more data, coming faster, much of it new, where existing systems can't process it and respond in time for the consumer action and messaging to have relevance.
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