Customer Experience Impacting Retail Management (2012) - II of V

Planning the assortment of products

Economic downturn has forced consumers to change their buying habits. They are buying less, focusing on essential items and emphasizing price. Localized assortments and customer-centric merchandising driven by good assortment plans, is seen as the way to address the problems being faced today [3]. Getting the right product at the right time for the customer is always a priority. Retailers are integrating their financial and item planning strategies for making buying decisions based on customer preference than managing those inventories

TABLE VI

Top Assortment Planning Strategies

SKU rationalization determining the proper depth & breadth of an assortment Assortments and financial plans and how they work together Focus on buying decision than on inventory management Forecasting within an assortment plan.

Important Assortment planning strategies, we inferred from various sources related to retailers are listed in table VI. Most of the companies are doing rationalization determining the proper depth and breadth of an assortment at each store based on local demand and needs. Another important strategy of retailers that was inferred from our study was that retailers are integrating their strategic and financial plans with assortment planning so that they can develop comprehensive, enterprise-wide plans that more accurately reflect consumer demand and drive margins.

Assortment Planning execution is hindered by various internal problems, like, lack of necessary support tools (e.g. Store Planning, Store Clustering etc.) and the key functions are often not integrated (e.g. financial plans, assortment plans etc.). Understanding Consumer Demand ay store level, analysing "bestsellers" from similar assortments and integrating information from different groups using different tools are some of the challenges retailers look to address in immediate future.