Juggling Stats? - Total Retail

By Rea Syverson

Exploring a Brand’s Lifeblood

A good deal of a merchant’s energy, enthusiasm and time go into vigorous new product development. It's a brand’s lifeblood. Look at Apple. Not content to rest on its laurels with its best-selling Mac, iPod, iTunes or iPhone products, this year Apple unveiled iLife and iWork. New is part of Apple’s DNA, and risk is part of its culture. The strength of a brand-enhancing merchandising program lies in its funnel of new, customer-centric products. A strategic merchandising metric is the robustness of this funnel.

Another strategic merchandising metric is customer involvement. “The must-have Web site metric is an operational measure of visitor engagement: A metric that combines brand awareness, visitor loyalty, session duration, depth of visit, recency and qualitative inputs like direct visitor feedback and satisfaction data,” says Eric Peterson, CEO of online consulting firm Web Analytics Demystified.

Not only is a merchant’s soul warmed when customers post product reviews, blog about a product, recommend products to friends or gasp over a product, but merchants also learn a great deal from these customer touchpoints. These customers are involved, engaged and acting like brand ambassadors. Merchants need to pay close attention to this measurement and do all they can to track the conversation-worthiness of their product lines.

You might get by with just looking at the same old metrics in the same old way, but why not challenge your team to incorporate one or more of these holistic merchandising practices into your seasonal reviews and see what kind of robust conversations your brand can have about your product portfolio this year.

Multichannel merchants are born multitaskers. They juggle the planning of multiple seasons and offers, industry macro and micro trends, numerous categories, SKUs, forecasts, vendors, inventory levels, management expectations, channels, customer feedback, product reviews, creative input, trips for sourcing, and product development processes. Their time — your time — is precious and must be used strategically.

Multichannel merchants are forced to be experts at editing and sifting wheat from chaff. They continually ask themselves, “What really matters?” when it comes to evaluating the health of a product portfolio. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and/or stuck in a sea of statistics.

With that in mind, here are a few suggestions for merchants and marketers wanting to take a holistic view of their product lines — post-square-inch analysis:

First, find out what matters to management right now. In today’s short-term business world, goals change quickly. Ask these questions about your main priorities this year:

Is this year’s priority increasing top-line sales?
Improving bottom-line profitability?
Growing the housefile?

Merchants need to be key players at their companies’ strategic planning tables, as they’re integral to helping a company achieve its goals. With merchants working anywhere from six to 18 months out, they must attain a clearly communicated vision from the top.

Metrics That Matter
Simplify your metrics dashboard, but use one. Lauren Freedman, president of the e-tailing group, confirmed the problems that merchants and marketers face in the industry survey on pg. 23.

A simplified, user-friendly dashboard of key product indicators would help solve these problems. With collaboration, insights and management buy-in, merchants should look to monitor no more than one to three relevant-to-their-business metrics that are clearly actionable. These metrics should be true dashboard alerts, signaling when things are going well, not so well and when the danger zone is approaching.

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Merchandising: Juggling Stats?