In today's competitive environment, Enterprise Loyalty is king. Companies must embark on their strategic journey influenced by customer insights. These insights are gained through transactional data and allow for the shifting of mindset, culture and strategy across the entire enterprise - everywhere from merchandising and store layout to pricing. Sharing this information across the organization - beyond simply the marketing department - is essential to customer-centric merchandising.
Insight into what profitable customers are buying - not simply what product sells the most - can power-charge merchandising success.
When it comes to optimizing the assortment of products in a retail store, major retailers typically focus only on carrying items that deliver the greatest sales and profits. Traditionally, retailers have identified store clusters - those with similar customers and sales - and ranked items by volume sales or profit. Then they have eliminated those items at the bottom.
What if this approach leads to sub-optimal results?
Take the retail powerhouse Walmart, for example...
Best Practices in Calculating Trade Promotion Accruals
Calculating the accruals of trade promotion spending is a difficult topic for many manufacturers. The sales and financial departments may have different ideas of what they are and how to measure them.
By defining terms and following best practices, companies can avoid conflicts and increase profits, said Chris Beehler, finance director for Marcal, a leading maker of
paper towels, bath tissue, facial tissue and napkins. "I find trade accruals to be one of the most contentious terms in the finance or sales groups," he said. Talking clearly about it, "helps to turn on a lot of light bulbs for a lot of people. But depending on the people in the room you are talking to, you have to know who is part of the accrual that you are talking about."
A good first step is to define accrual accounting...
Nominations are now being accepted for the 2012 IBM LEADER Awards, which will be presented at the fourth annual LEAD Marketing Conference.
Sponsored by IBM, the awards program recognizes excellence in four areas:
Loyalty (marketing programs)
Engagement (engaging shoppers in or out of store)
Analytics (category or shopper)
Digital (social media, mobile marketing, web, etc).
There is a manufacturer and retailer award recipient in each category. Last year's winners included Rite Aid, Lego, Best Buy, Campbell's, Sara Lee, Jimmy Dean and Walmart.
Awards will be present at the conference, set for Oct. 1-3 at the Westin O'Hare in Chicago. More details about the event are available at www.leadmarketingconference.com.
The deadline for award nominations is July 31. Individuals may nominate their own companies or others for the award. To do so, please click here.
The LEAD Marketing Conference is produced and hosted by the Shopper Technology Institute (STI).
