James Tenser

FD Buyer: Let's Try Coordinating the Time of Category Reviews

March 8, 2010

FROM RETAILWIRE:
Let's say you're a manufacturer with a new product breakthrough, and you're ready to present it to the trade this month. But let's also say that several of your key retailers won't be reviewing your category until the following January. Would an effort at standardizing which categories are reviewed when be beneficial for the industry?      [more...]

Wasn't one of the four planks of ECR "Efficient New Product Introduction"? Warren has neatly outlined one of the areas of confound.

It's self-evident that the priorities of store operations and product marketing are not naturally well aligned. It could be operationally efficient to change category assortments only at two or three set times per year. This would eliminate the ritual of the "new product cut-in" and probably help control one dimension of labor costs.

But who decides when and for which categories? Even within a large chain, optimal timings will vary by banner, segment or geography. Extending the standard across multiple competitors seems far out of reach to me.

And what of the product marketer who misses a launch deadline by 10 days due to say, a factory tooling or raw materials supply issue? Is that firm fated to wait until the next launch window, even if it's six months away?

From an In-Store Implementation perspective, fewer cut-ins and more predictable resets are certainly a desirable goal. But I believe this may be best addressed through intelligent loss of work. That is, by using superior marketing models and performance-oriented planning tools to flag and stop unlikely new product prospects before they launch.

In other words, retailers (and brands) must learn to manage less work by being much more calculating and selective about new products. Searching for ways to manage more work more efficiently seems to invite more--not less--shelf abuse.