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Reinventing Retail

Transforming retail through shopper-centric merchandising

Despite the growing industry consensus that the retail environment has never been a more important shopper touch point, merchan-dising that provides a truly satisfying shopping experience frequently remains an elusive goal.   In thousands of retail stores every day, category sales are lost due to hard-to-shop, cluttered, and confusing shelf sets.  The result is foregone transactions, purchase trade-down and smaller market baskets.

The essential problem is that most categories are presented at shelf in merchandising configurations that have little to do with actual shopper behaviors and needs.  Instead, many sets reflect an accumulation of low-level and tactical decisions over time - mostly driven solely by operational convenience, cost avoidance, or just plain inertia.

Voice of the shopper is vital

Reinventing retail puts the voice of the shopper at the center of its development process, generating transformational merchandising approaches that connect with shoppers and have the power to significantly elevate retail productivity and shopper satisfaction.  The approach also facilitates the manufacturer/retailer collaboration necessary to both identify inspiring new ideas and to ensure they translate into actual merchandising executions.

Reinventing Retail Process 

Approach

Reinventing Retail applies a powerful combination of art and science to develop and deploy breakthrough merchandising approaches; transformational solutions that elevate stopability and shopability, and have the power to close the sale at the shelf.

Step 1: Develop insights foundation

The process starts with building an insights foundation.  This foundation integrates all relevant perspectives and often relies heavily on retail/productivity analytics in combination with mining available shopper research.

Additional shopper studies to address key gaps are also frequently identified and executed in this stage.  This stage yields vital perspective on the question "what merchandising problems are we trying to solve?” and begins to lay the groundwork for ideation and new concept development.

Step 2: Ideate & create

Structured ideation then identifies new concepts to address issues and opportunities identified in the insights stage.  GfK's proprietary Ideascope™ methodology combines broad participant perspectives and unique ideation exercises to drive creation of a broad range of ideas. These ideas have the power to transform and are grounded in realities of the in-store environment. Ideation can also be preceded by "retail safaris” which identify highly relevant merchandising best practices far beyond the confines of the subject category and channels.

Ideation typically creates between 10-15 initial merchandising concept directions.  GfK Shopper & Retail Strategy runs these directions through its internal creative teams to develop individual merchandising/retail design images that can be exposed and evaluated by shoppers in the "validate and refine” stage.

Validate & refine

Concept images are exposed to shoppers in various combinations of focus groups or quantitative studies, typically via board format.  Learnings are used to both identify priority concepts with highest shopper appeal as well as identify concept improvement areas.

At the conclusion of this stage, a final set of 2-3 concepts are identified as lead directions for deployment and activation.

Deploy & measure

Priority concepts are translated to full creative briefs which serve as the blueprint for development of actual POP prototypes or final merchandising systems for execution in store.  Depending on cost and complexity of the new solution, a phasing/rollout plan can also be constructed.  Scorecarding measures the ongoing impact of the new merchandising execution.

Key benefits of Reinventing Retail:

It produces big, transformational ideas that can…

• Significantly elevate the closing power of the shelf and resulting category/brand sales and productivity
• Change the game in transforming categories and their competitive dynamics
• Enable manufacturers who may not be the biggest or formal category advisors to leapfrog bigger and more entrenched players
• Allow retailers to create meaningful differentiation in key categories, aisles, and across the store
• Re-define categories, often significantly expanding traditional category boundaries and driving a change in a category’s sales potential
• Facilitate more collaborative and productive relationships between manufacturers and retailers

Getting Started

Retail Reinvention can be applied to individual categories, store aisle, or total store environments.  GfK has a deep experience leading Retail Reinvention initiatives with both manufactureres and retailers directly. 

To learn more about GfK Retail Reinvention,  contact us today.