A customer doesn't give much thought to entering a physical store, finding the desired item swiftly and efficiently, and checking out easily.
But the story is entirely different behind the scenes.
The exact opposite is true for brands and merchants, particularly in consumer packaged goods.
The shopper experience and how to help them find what they're looking for (or what you want them to look for) are extensively considered.
This article defines the perfect store approach and explains how it can benefit your retail business.
This is among the top of the retailer and manufacturer's objectives: the pursuit of the perfect store.
How to Define Your Perfect Store?
In a perfect store, the 6 Ps; product, pricing, place, promotion, people, and process align perfectly to direct customers to your preferred products precisely where you want them, increasing the likelihood that they will make a purchase.
Your market, category, business, and other things may affect how you define a great store and what makes it up. Overall, the seamless shopper experience results from all your sales, marketing, and category management activities and directly achieves your desired outcome.
This strategy:
How Do You Create The Perfect Store?
Having said that, where do you begin? In order to achieve this lofty goal, you should focus on a few specific areas first:
1. Start with Shopper Insights
Without initially knowing what your customers want, you cannot make successful displays, stock the right assortment, or develop a successful planogram.
Consider customer insights as you set out to create the perfect store. Recognise their requirements, how they behave in stores and the things they favour. Knowing how much they're willing to spend is crucial.
Naturally, this is the time to rely significantly on your company's shopper insights specialists.
2. Prioritise Your Efforts
Whenever you have an extensive list of tasks to complete, prioritising is necessary. This entails collecting in-store data to identify your exceptional strengths and shortcomings to create the perfect store strategy.
Do you already have price advantage?
Maybe your supply chain and out-of-stocks aren't a problem for you. However, if your in-store promotions aren't functioning as well as you'd want, it's possible that you haven't been executing on display compliance as well.
This makes creating a perfect store a little easier since you can choose which of the "6 Ps" to concentrate on first.
3. Delegate and Execute
Once you have a plan, ensure your teams have the necessary resources to carry it out.
Don't give the entire task of developing a perfect store strategy to one employee or one department.
As an alternative, you could distribute the workload among the team members. Your plan and execution should include category managers, pricing analysts, shopper insights, sales reps, marketers, and other employees.
Assign each employee a specific function and duty to enable them to maintain a laser-like focus on the end result.
4. Measure, Test, And Iterate
Finally, you need to assess whether the shelf has altered due to your activities.
Get out and gather that information. Examine the important KPIs for accessibility, visibility, display, and value. Be aware of shifting consumer attitudes and store situations.
After gathering the information, compare it to a predetermined set of KPIs and refine your ideal shopping approach. Always experiment, try new things, and improve what you currently have.
The Levers Of A Perfect Store Strategy
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The Perfect Store rules may vary according to the categories, clients, and distribution methods. CPG businesses can have up to 20 different sets of Perfect Store execution.
In general, field teams are expected to implement the following Perfect Store strategy components in the stores:
Power Or Core Skus
The SKUs that make up the lion's share of existing sales, or those that consumers want to buy, must constantly be on hand.
Brand Blocking
Creating brand blocks has a visual impact. It is essential to create brand blocks with multiple facings.
Adjacency
You can increase the number of potential customers by displaying your goods in high-traffic areas with comparable products. For instance, a supplementary display of bagged spaghetti serves as a helpful reminder to customers of what they need to buy to prepare supper tonight in the crowded vegetable aisle.
Shelving Hierarchy
When shelf space is allocated based on sales performance, it is ensured that key SKUs are readily available and that there are no out-of-stocks (OOSs) of high-demand products.
On-shelf Availability (OSA)
To ensure your customers are satisfied when they wish to purchase something, it is essential to have the right product on the shelves at the right moment.
How To Implement Your Perfect Store Strategy?
There are several benefits to be gained from implementing a Perfect Store strategy, including:
However, at the moment, determining if the picture of success is implemented effectively requires a human process and a small number of survey questions. Managers at the corporate level are forced to rely on execution reports from field teams or sales statistics. This hinders their ability to measure execution effectively and evaluate the long-term effects of program non-compliance.
Executing The Perfect Store
Overall, a positive and mutually beneficial connection between CPG brands and retailers is seen in a perfect store process. And the middle of that Venn diagram is where the shoppers are.
Everyone involved should emphasise the shopper experience and work to improve it continuously. For instance, activations and other tailored experience efforts allow CPGs to encourage product sampling while positively affecting retailers' in-store operations. Bear these tips in mind:
Build a picture of success—Define your brand's ideal appearance in each market segment.
Execute – Ensuring the field sales team's effective retail execution of strategic priorities.
Tracking—Keeping an eye on the influence on sales and the execution's quality.
Coaching –Giving input to enhance retail execution and decision-making in-store
A perfect store always has room for development; it never becomes complacent or stale.
Stores and CPG brands can collaborate to achieve near-perfection by concentrating on important ideas, including rapid data gathering, effective analysis yielding immediate action items, deployment of a flexible workforce, and prioritising the customer experience.
Improving Compliance At The Outlet Level
Using image recognition (IR) technology, you can get around the drawbacks of conventional methods. IR, which offers in-the-moment views into what is happening in every aisle of every store photographs retail shelves.
You may keep track of which components of your Perfect Store approach are in place and gauge their efficacy by seeing what is actually occurring on the shelves.
CPGs may create a tighter framework to increase the performance of Perfect Store execution if they have eyes in the store and access to trustworthy, reliable store and SKU-level data at the critical moment for the customer.
Final Thoughts
Perfect store execution may initially seem unachievable, but it is feasible if your employees coordinate and work towards the same objectives. You likely already have some elements of a perfect store in place.
You will enhance brand and category performance as well as increase store sales as soon as you discover your areas of weakness and work to improve them to your definition of a "Perfect Store."
For more insights on how to stay ahead of the curve, please connect with BeMyEye. Let’s start your journey to success now!
