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.

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Merchandising: Juggling Stats?