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Retail Marketing
Contents
Table of Contents 2 Introduction 3 Four Decelerators Undermining Retail Marketing Performance 4 Decelerator 1: Uncertainty 5 - 6 Decelerator 2: Discontinuity 7 Decelerator 3: Misalignment 8 Decelerator 4: Imprecision 9 - 10 The Solution: High Performance Marketing 11 Four Accelerators of Retail Marketing Success 12 Accelerator 1: Visibility 13 - 15 Accelerator 2: Continuity 16 - 18 Accelerator 3: Alignment 19 - 20 Accelerator 4: Measurement 21 - 22 From the Marketing Fast-Track to Your Career Fast-Track 23 About CrossCap 24
Introduction
Retail is an extremely demanding and unforgiving race to success. As a retail marketing leader, you face intensifying competition and escalating customer expectations. And, in todays pedal-to metal, omni-channel environment, the race is more challenging than ever. To perform at your absolute best, you have to focus on the key factors that deserve your attention -- and manage them with rigor and precision. Thats the purpose of this executive guide -- to identify the critical accelerators that enable you to perform exceptionally and drive protable growth while overcoming the decelerators that might otherwise hold you back and undermine your career success. Based on our insights and experiences with leading retailers, weve witnessed certain patterns of retail marketing excellence emerge. These patterns of action span the spectrum of traditional media (such as print and broadcast) and newer digital media (such as social and mobile). The benet to you is that they have provided the immediate actions you can take to move your organization toward world class performance. Its your moment to seize. By focusing and capitalizing on the accelerators most critical to your success as a marketing leader, you will make the organizational and promotional moves needed to strengthen your brand, increase sales lift, and amplify protability. And by implementing the suggestions found in this eBook, you will be empowered to overcome the inherent inefciencies associated with todays labor-intensive and error prone approaches to retail marketing. So, what does it take to perform on the retail marketing fast-track? Read on and nd out what the most advanced retailers have discovered. Sincerely, Your Retail Marketing Experts at CrossCap
Uncertainty
Discontinuity
Misalignment
Imprecision
To perform at a level that todays hyper-competitive retail markets demand, its critical to both recognize and address these issues. Lets begin by isolating and dening them.
Decelerator 1: Uncertainty
Executing long-term, multi-channel, marketing strategies requires the handiwork of some of the best marketing planners whether youre a single banner retailer with 100 stores, or a multi-banner retailer with 1,000+ stores. Being able to accurately plan projects, efciently interact with merchants, and align campaigns across channels can easily overwhelm the resources in your marketing department. As a marketing leader, one of your key responsibilities is to ensure marketing program visibility. This means you and your colleagues must have a comprehensive view of campaign plans, schedules, assets, progress, and results. Aside from the obvious impact visibility has on the strategic vision for the organization, visibility also helps you ensure alignment among marketing teams, streamlines reporting to stakeholders, and improves marketing performance over time. However, it is difcult to gain complete visibility to all the gears turning in your marketing department when there is no shared system to capture, track and report on all the elements associated with your campaigns. Maintaining an up-to-date view of campaign elements is an immensely resource intensive task for most organizations, whove had to make do with the tools on hand. The net result is that this activity gets neglected and leads to a persistent level of uncertainty within the organization. Some other consequences you might already be experiencing are:
Collectively, such factors represent a massive waste of your time and resources. You also risk under-performance whether its tied to supporting your executive team or managing campaigns.
Decelerator 2: Discontinuity
Imagine its time for annual planning and the marketing leadership team is developing a grand strategy, a marketing plan and a series of high-level campaigns for the year to come. These could include campaigns for the Super Bowl, Black Friday, and other various holidays. Campaigns, in turn, must be translated into tactics. You and your team are tasked with providing the messages and assets for TV, radio, print, email, social media, and the stores themselves. Making sure the message across each is consistent conveying the same (or supporting) messages to your audience through each channel. Heres the challenge: This plan and its associated campaign elements will perpetually change throughout the year as budget, timing, messaging, pricing and channel mix are revised. Whats worse, each channel may have a different team managing its own respective calendar of activities. And since plans have been revised throughout the year, its impossible to know for sure if you have access to the latest version of a campaign and all its associated elements. And this is just the beginning. Over time campaign complexity compounds geometrically even as your budgeted resources remain at (or, possibly, contract). There will be new demands in terms of localizing your messages, offers, and campaign assets and campaign renements that require a rapid response. However, your organization will be severely weakened by an inability to maintain campaign continuity and asset version control.
Decelerator 3: Misalignment
With the advancement of localization, the pervasion of price transparency, and the need for omni-channel presence, marketing and merchandising organizational structures and processes are rapidly evolving. Delivering a unied customer experience has never been more important, and retailers who have these processes well dened have experienced 3% or better store sales growth over comparable outlets. Despite these requirements, fewer than 50% of retailers involve marketing in their merchandising strategy, and vice-versa. As a marketing leader, you are challenged to maintain alignment between the marketing and merchandising goals . While marketers are responsible for translating company strategy into marketing messages, merchants are responsible for setting product strategy that supports retail programs and are matched to market demand. Both marketers and merchants should be aligned to the same customer and messages. Unfortunately, marketers and merchants are often misaligned. In fact, the potential for conict, miscommunication and under-performance is exceedingly high. The main issue is that marketers and merchants dont have proper visibility into each others plans. Additionally, the parties struggle to communicate and collaborate effectively. Plans, schedules and program themes may be misaligned. Meanwhile, benchmarks for determining sensible merchant requests from marketing may also be missing leading to sales forecasts merchants are unlikely to meet.
This communication breakdown often results in under-performance when product and advertising arent aligned. At the store level, this misalignment leads to out of stocks, lost sales and trapped inventory.
Decelerator 4: Imprecision
A recent survey conducted by Vision Edge Marketing, ITSMA, and Forrester revealed some shocking results regarding marketings relevance to the business. Here are just a few: Most marketers dont know which metrics their stakeholders care about Less than 10% of senior executives are relying on marketing data to make decisions The C-suite cant relate marketing activity-based metrics to business outcomes
Clearly, measurement is a core driver of strategy, performance and continual improvement. So, what is the current state of retail marketing measurement? It varies across the board. Different metrics serve different purposes:
Forecasting Metrics Most retailers would be happy with 60% accuracy though such imprecision is hardly ideal. With these measures, the company can forecast turnover and inventory requirements. Otherwise, you may be suffering reduced sales due to out of stocks or overstocks leading to trapped inventory.
Media Metrics The objective of media metrics is to determine the value of each media channel in driving sales. And while retailers often still heavily rely on print, digital channels can cost one-tenth to one-hundredth the amount for the same outcome. You have to track your ad to sales ratio to ensure you are investing in the right media.
Operational Metrics When you take a more sophisticated view, you track your market basket. You want to know your average basket value and what drives customers to come to your store. You may also look at lift metrics, which can be determined through multiple means, to clarify what actions drive results in a particular promotion.
Brand metrics Brand people look at market share. If youre interested in these metrics, you may also measure brand to increase customer loyalty and improve long-term health.
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Together these components form the basis of an omni-channel solution that enables you to dramatically accelerate -- meeting the increasing demands you face in todays fast paced, high-stakes, retail marketing race. They enable you to apply the accelerators necessary to win at a time of rapid change, increasing localization and growing customer expectations. So what do these components contribute individually to the overall solution?
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Visibility
Continuity
Alignment
Measurement
By committing to the rigorous, disciplined and sustained application of these accelerators, you enable your marketing organization to overtake competitors and responsively meet new market demands. You elevate yourself as a strategic leader -- and champion of operational excellence. Lets explore how each of these factors plays into overall marketing performance.
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Accelerator 1: Visibility
As the experience of top performing retailers suggests, there is a set of proven practices that enhance visibility of key marketing activity and, therefore, marketing performance. Such actions enable you to perform in a more strategic and valued way within your organization. The following outline a short list of the best practices of the worlds top retailers to achieve visibility. Take these steps today, and elevate your visibility:
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Be a champion for making marketing responsible for the Marketing ROI, while supporting executive leadership in the creation of high-level marketing strategies. The business will respect your commitment and welcome the opportunity to drive sustainable, repeatable results with open arms. Visibility is the key.
Promote visibility and win the praise of team members and executive leadership alike.
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Accelerator 2: Continuity
So what does it take to turn the decelerator of campaign discontinuity into the accelerator of campaign continuity?
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Accelerator 3: Alignment
Solutions exist that can end the back and forth between marketers, merchants and inventory managers as well as the ensuing friction and failure. All parties can gain real-time access and extensive visibility into each others plans. This brings a systematic approach to promotion activity. Smart approaches enable clarity and consistency. They also bring rigor and discipline as decision-making becomes data-driven. Unsurprisingly, greater precision of this sort results in greater lift in the eld. In order to reach these new alignment heights there are three key actions you must take rst:
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Ultimately, the shift in behavior made possible by visibility into marketer-merchant arrangements girded the company for difcult economic times. With the valuable insights and measures it attained, the retailer became far less dependent on subsidy dollars alone to meet its objectives.
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Accelerator 4: Measurement
What gets measured gets managed, according to the late management theorist Peter Drucker. Thats why you need a scorecard or dashboard view of your metrics. You need it to escape the realm of imprecision and drive continual performance gains. The dashboard/scorecard approach captures and presents your KPIs (key performance indicators). Its something executives and other stakeholders can get comfortable with across the company. It tells you where you stand and gives you a strong sense of where you are headed. The C-suite needs this to provide them with actionable dashboards and win the hearts and minds of senior execs. While some retailers rely on a combination of Excel, PowerPoint, Word les and SharePoint to make their measures accessible to key decision makers, its clear this approach has severe limitations in terms of keeping measures updated and accurate. Advanced scorecarding revolves around providing a visually rich and easily revised presentation of KPIs. Your dashboard should provide retrospective views of past performance lined up against prospective forecasts. It should enable you to easily and clearly compare performance in different channels. Of course, it also provides a compelling venue for other metrics be they market basket analysis or lift models and measures. Even brand metrics can be vividly laid out for active consideration.
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About CrossCap
CrossCap is the go-to retail marketing strategy management solution for enterprise retailers such as Walmart, Target, and Safeway. Retailers trust CrossCap software to manage omni-channel campaign planning, execution and analysis. CrossCap empowers marketing, merchandising, and store operations teams through alignment of marketing strategy. Our solution provides unprecedented visibility and control of marketing programs from headquarters to the store.
Headquartered in San Francisco, with ofces in New York, and Toronto, CrossCap serves as the foundation for managing marketing strategy for Top 10 retailers and Fortune 1000 retailers alike. For more information, visit www.crosscap.com