In today’s competitive retail industry, customers expect a high-quality shopping experience through quality products and services. Sales data and consumer insights are tools that provide valuable information regarding consumer behavior and marketing trends to help retail businesses. With these consumer insights, retailers can understand how to cater to their needs and how to execute products well in their stores. Other than that, the insights a retailer generate can influence all category management efforts and maximize sales.

Why Does Retail Category Management Team Depend Too Much on Consumer Insights for Shelf Planning? 

In today’s competitive retail industry, customers expect a high-quality shopping experience through quality products and services. Sales data and consumer insights are tools that provide valuable information regarding consumer behavior and marketing trends to help retail businesses. With these consumer insights, retailers can understand how to cater to their needs and how to execute products well in their stores. Other than that, the insights a retailer generate can influence all category management efforts and maximize sales.

What are Consumer Insights Within the Retail Industry? 

Consumer insights provide a deep understanding of customer behavior when it comes to purchasing decisions, patterns of how and when they make specific purchases. It will be critical to do research for consumer insights, as it can change and be affected by specific markets trends and socio-economic factors. An example of this would be the shift in demand for various products during the pandemic. Products including groceries and pharmaceutical stores have witnessed higher demand compared to apparel and electronics items. The same would apply to understanding where to place best-selling products on store shelves, as these are items that customers buy from hot spot areas. By understanding these facts, retailers can place products that are new, fast-moving and slow-moving items that have less demand with relevant sales techniques. This will encourage shoppers to purchase and increase basket sales with the help of planogram software. Planogram is a visual merchandising software, that helps retailers in proper planning and placement of products on retail shelves efficiently. With retail sales data, retailers can forecast consumer buying behavior, number of stocks to purchase to prevent stock outs, and products for various seasonal and festive occasions to entice customers. So, the following are some retail planogram features that can help retailers in proper shelf planning:

• Planogram ensures the right mix of product selection and placement with the help of consumer insights to satisfy customer’s shopping expectations.
• Planogram helps to understand customer behavior, current market demand, the latest trends with the past sales data and ensures right product placement on the right shelves.
• It helps to visually attract customers by providing products that entice customers and improves retail sales.

What are the Planogram Key Elements that Help Category Management to Track Consumer Insights? 

• Behavioral clustering:Retailers can use clustering to track consumer buying patterns, their needs and wants. This helps retailers to improve their product forecasting to match customer needs and market trends. For example, in a mid-tier store, a retailer will stock more standard brands and fewer premium brands. With clustering, retailers can understand how to cater to their customers and satisfy their shopping needs. It also helps retailers with targeted strategies and tactics to increase sales and to merchandise the right products on retail store shelves.
• Assortment planning:Assortment planning helps to track consumer behavior and products that they purchase in a store. With the planogram sales data, retailers will get enough information about what products a customer wishes to purchase. With that information, the retailer can stock more such items to satisfy customer needs at the right time. For example, on seasonal and festive occasions, retailers should fill stock at the right quantity and right time. Because ordering too much stock will not sell well after the festive season ends.
• Shelf planning:Shelf planning is the final step to building a planogram, it is a visual representation of how well the products should be placed on the shelves in the store. Shelf planning uses sales data, space analysis and days of supply to understand how many products fit on each shelf to improve sales. This also allows identifying micro tracking behavior of customers with the number of products they purchase. Planograms can easily help customers to choose the right products by ensuring and placing them on the shelves. For instance, a retailer can decide days of supply of some category-wise products between a minimum of two and maximum of 7 days. When building a planogram using shelf planning, retailers can give more facings for those items with low days of supply. This will balance the store shelves and ensures all products sell out evenly.

Overview of Nexgen POG 

Nexgen POG is a cloud-based, powerful category management software for visual merchandising. It provides the retailer with a detailed assortment optimized planogram for better shelf planning. Planogram also helps to identify consumer insights with planogram report analysis and retail data. It comes with an array of features, including customizable templates, bulk upload images, easy compliance, report generation and much more. Its interface is extremely user-friendly, and planograms can be designed by easily dragging and dropping the products. Nexgen POG is a cost-efficient planogramming tool, designed for creating store-specific planograms.

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