A Go-to-market process is the essentials steps undertaken by a retailer' utilising their inside and outside resources to deliver a competitive value proposition. In many retailers these include undocumented activities, shadow-workarounds and unspoken activities that deliver an offer for team and shoppers.
In today’s world shoppers are smarter, savvier and have high expectations when it comes to shopping. As a result retailers are having to adopt innovative marketing and merchandising strategies at store level, based on insights and localisation. For most retailers the thought of this is paralysing. To provide customers with the ultimate localised customer experience is a step change that retailers know they have to make but can they execute it?
How can we move to an insight driven customer centric approach to attract, convert and engage our customers without my marketing and product teams breaking or, my stores spending hours interpreting promotional in-store execution documents!
When just getting the basics out the door is killing the team, this can be a hard mindset for a retailer. The issue with the reality of retail today is teams are having to deal with multiple store formats, different fixtures within these formats, a magnitude of marketing assets that fit these fixtures and an ever changing product mix. How do you work efficiently, execute customer led localised campaigns and get compliance?
You need to define and/or refine the fundamentals to remain competitive and ensure your “Go-to-Market” process is a strong, agile, robust process that allows you to have scalability, adaptability and speed to market.
You need to know exactly what opportunities are out in your network and the specifications of these.
You need to equip your stores with the opportunity to be compliant by providing documents that are relevant to their store and leave no room for interpretation when it comes to in-store execution.
You need a robust two-way communication process that allows everyone to deal with issues that arise during a standard retail day so we can all be successful.
You need visibility, reporting and accountability.
The marketing and product teams can create the best customer experience ever but this must be executed at store level to be effective. With over 25 years of retail experience we have seen the good, the bad and the ugly when it comes to in-store retail execution. Stores generally want/try to be compliant but when they are made to interpret a promotional planogram that is not quite like their store environment it leaves room for error.
It is not uncommon for there to be a disconnect between Support Office and stores when it comes to the execution of a promotional campaign, the interpretation of the merchandising plan, or planogramming of product. Often the stores are expected to refer to multiple documents that contain items that they don’t even have in their store, making it irrelevant.
This comes down to Support Office having to take a cookie cutter approach to promotional and product planogramming as they have no means to house the floorplan or asset mix of each store and use this info to plan and execute promotional programs.
How can you execute a promotional campaign effectively with operational efficiencies that leaves no room for interpretation in the network? We have search the world and we have selected what we believe is the best solution for the NZ-market.
RMS is a cloud-based Go To Market platform relied on by retailers and suppliers globally to optimise operations, elevate communication, gain maximum compliance at store level and achieve stronger retail performance. With its ability to analyse multiple sources of data, customer behaviour and trends, the platform has evolved into a powerful profiling and predictive modelling tool that allows retailers to optimise their localised merchandising with intelligence. Identify hot and cold areas within stores, within shelves and planogram with intelligence.
Identify hot and cold fixtures on a store by store basis
Stores log on to their unique profile and planogram, execute any required planogram changes, mark as executed, take a photo for compliance or raise an issues ticket if they could not execute due to a missing poster, out of stock, broken fixture etc. Support Office can see in real time what is going on at each store and identify potential network issues allowing them to action and communicate an informed response.
RMS allows marketing teams to distribute a targeted marketing campaign based on data and insights. The marketing campaign is planogrammed in RMS automating an accurate print and distribution list, based on what is actually required in the network.
What's more it is incredibly cost effective for retailers of every shape and size. There are already Kiwi retailers utilising the power of RMS, alongside some incredible international brands who have found it has transformed their business.
Starbuck's use RMS to ensure their store POS is the right offer for their location, audience, seasonality and LTO offers. The store doesn't need to make any decisions, simply execute.
If you are interested in redefining your retail communications and optimising your retail operations with please email us at gina@retailo2.co.nz or 021 034 4800
RetailO2 is a sister company to RetailX which helps retail businesses create flow by optimising systems and processes and removing operational inefficiencies throughout the business. We travel the world to find the best fit-for-purpose solutions and approaches to solve retailers’ pain points. Often it simply requires internal process changes and refinement, but we also offer software for all of retail management needs – from in-store marketing communications through to compliance.