Merchandising Strategies

Merchandise strategies is a very important factor to take into consideration for any retailers success, but unfortunately, in today's competitive world a one size fits all approach will not work. Each strategy planned should be carefully done to target a specific objective such as increasing foot traffic, inviting new customers to try our your brand, developing loyal committed customers or increasing your overall sales.

Developing and managing merchandising strategies should be efforts put in between the retailer and the manufacturer. Manufacturers are the experts in their brand categories. A clever retailer should take every advantage of the manufacturer's knowledge to help grow the category and sales. Together the retailer and the manufacturer can help satisfy a greater number of consumers.

Merchandising strategies include pricing, promotion, product placement, ad support, consumer education and so on. These different components help achieve the retailer's goal.

Here are some merchandising strategies:

Traffic building – this strategy focuses on drawing consumer traffic into the store and/or into the target category.

Transaction building – this strategy focuses on increasing the size of the average category transaction.

Profit Generating – this focuses on the ability of the category to generate profits.

Cash generating – focuses on the ability of the category to generate incremental cash flow.

Excitement creating – this communicates a sense of urgency or a limited – time opportunity to the consumer.

Turf defending – this strategy focuses on aggressively positioning the category to appeal to the consumer by highlighting comparable items with key competitors.

Image creating – this strategy communicates an image to the consumer in one of the following ways: price, service quality, speciality or assortment.

Which merchandise strategies work for you? Share your Thoughts.