Your customers are complex. They cross multiple demographics, exhibit less brand loyalty than in the past, and come well-armed with product knowledge from their social networks. 

These characteristics make it challenging to adopt a one-size-fits-all strategy to category merchandising in your store. Incorporating a well-thought-out and designed merchandising strategy can help.

Your category merchandising strategy may include several components such as product placement, advertising tactics, customer incentives, plus customer and sales associate education. Depending on your specific goals—growing foot traffic, increasing sales, category growth, or beating the competition— you must prioritize which components to emphasize.

Ensure that the products within your target belong there or if products could be pulled in from another category. For instance, your technology category probably includes PC devices, printers, storage and networking accessories, plus video and audio equipment. You might shrink your scope by removing video/audio as non-computational products whose sales may be driven by different tactics.

Example Category Strategies

Once you attain a well-defined category, decide on the specific goals you wish to accomplish:

• Creating Excitement – This strategy is oriented toward the impulse buyer. It typically involves offering time-limited purchase windows, especially on seasonal items.
   
• Building Traffic – The intention is growing customer traffic and purchase volume for frequently purchased items.
   
• Higher Ring – This strategy increases the average size of category purchases through the use of bundling or cross-selling.
   
• Higher Profits – The goal is to increase margins on the highest quality category products.
   
• Increased Cash Flow – The objective is to incrementally grow cash flow by increasing the number of items purchased.
   
• Improving Store Image – Here, the goal is beating the competition by becoming the go-to retailer in the category based on top-quality service, price, selection, or by carrying specialty items.
   
• Existing Customer Retention – This is another competitor-besting strategy that focuses on keeping current customers on board through loyalty programs, aggressive sale prices, acting as a high-quality information resource, or offering no-hassle returns.

Measurement and Review

Unless you set measurable category objectives, it’s difficult to know what success looks like. Whenever possible, ensure hard data is collected for each metric. Estimates from the sales team are likely to be overly optimistic.

Leave room during the campaign to checkpoint how it is going and correct issues before they grow into larger problems that might distort results. It is critical to conduct a post-campaign review involving the entire sales staff to share what and what did not work and to collect ideas for a re-do of the campaign or to apply what you learned to a different merchandising category.

It’s important to remember that your sales associates are the face of your brand and the products you offer. They are the ones providing guidance, both physically and product-wise, to shoppers. They have valuable first-hand knowledge about the success of product offerings, product bundling, and the physical location of products within the store.

Leverage Manufacturers' Expertise

Collaborate with the manufacturers' category captains as they are the ultimate brand experts for their products. They may suggest new devices or peripherals to add, which to liquidate, or ideas for customer incentives such as coupons or discounts for bundled items. They can assist you in optimizing the customer profiles for the category in question, which is invaluable for fine-tuning your selection of strategy components to emphasize.

Given the complexities and knowledge level of today's customers, don’t expect to hit a home run the first time you apply a category merchandising strategy. View it as an iterative process and keep trying new ideas and throwing out those that are ineffective.

Regardless of how you run your category merchandising campaigns, it is essential to build a solid foundation of knowledge and enthusiasm among your sales associates for category products.

When it comes to Intel® technology products, your team's go-to portal is the Intel® Retail Edge Program, which provides the up-to-date information on Intel® products, OEM devices, storage options, and networking accessories. Additionally, your associates gain invaluable sales tips and opportunities to be rewarded which motivates them to access the Program to learn on a regular basis in order to contribute to the success of your category merchandising strategy.

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