Assortment planning is all about offering the right product, or group of goods, to the right customer at the right time, to increase sales. Many retailers find the assortment planning process challenging and frustrating.
Assortment planning software can't replace your creativity so here are four ways to bring actionable creativity into your assortment planning process.
With this blog, we’d like to transform this negative perception into an enjoyable opportunity for creative application. We will also explain the relevance of assortment planning and its importance in increasing sales.
Assortment planning offers value to customers by personalizing inventory offerings by neighborhood which improves customer satisfaction and loyalty. When the inventory you offer aligns with your customer expectations, you win, and your customers win. Before we go into the five steps of creative assortment planning, let’s first review the basics.
Assortment planning refers to the way you address the specific product wants and needs of your target customer within the context of your business strategy. Products preferred by the customer should be displayed more predominantly and be present in higher quantities.
Assortment planning should focus on creating appropriate product breadth and depth based on consumer’s desires, lifestyles, and shopping patterns.
The assortment planning process should be your first step in merchandising because it determines what to sell, where to sell it, and when to sell it.
Your plan should start by evaluating your existing product and assortment portfolios, and establish the new assortments for the predetermined planning period. The assortment planning process typically involves:
Your assortment plan should also consider the size of your store, including walkways, pillars and stairs, complementary merchandise, the profitability of merchandise, and available fixtures.
If you are unsure if your assortment planning strategy needs attention, we advise you to read our blog post which highlights symptoms of an unhealthy assortment strategy.
When assortment planning is experienced as a chore, the results are usually stiff, predictable, and boring. When seen as an opportunity to combine both creativity and careful internal and external data analysis, it captures consumers’ attention and provides memorable experiences.
Below are a few tips that might help you and your team bring more actionable creativity into the assortment planning process:
Powerful assortment planning software will help you apply a set of rules or calculations to a set of internal and external data and it will give a reliable and accurate result. The problem though is that it is not going to replace your ability to think outside of the box.
Take, for example, an electronics retailer that is the first in its region to source retro record players and introduce them as a novel item within a music player category.
Take a careful look at the purpose of each category so that the efforts around the products that are included in the category are consistently contributing to its purpose. Consider the diagram below which suggests strategies by category role types.
Whether it is purchasing too much of the wrong stock which pushes inventory levels up or whether it is a category that is becoming boring, get your team involved. Put the elephant issues out in the open and brainstorm ways in which you can solve these problems.
An idea is worth less than the paper it is written on unless it is implemented. In our experience, setting S.M.A.R.T goals around your ideas helps to get things done.
Below is a summary of what it means for a goal to be S.M.A.R.T.
Conclusion
Assortment planning helps to ensure the correct products are stocked at the right stores, at the right time, to serve your customers better. To truly succeed in assortment planning you need to combine actionable creativity and rigorous data analysis. Interested in learning more? Book a demo with us to see our software live in action.