Should retailers need to transform the way they plan?

Every year, retailers spend weeks and months working on their plans for next year, getting cut through in a retail landscape that’s getting increasingly congested is tough, resulting in a slow growth retail environment that’s only delivering 2% growth YOY*.

Many retailers look at last year as a base for building next year’s plans, but given the increasing challenges retail face is this still a valid approach? Seasonal events are worth £100bn to UK retail every year equating to 30% of total sales**, so retailers can’t afford to get it wrong.

In order to succeed, retailers need to get a much greater understanding of their customer and their intent to purchase, rather than just looking internally at the sales they generated last year.

This perhaps sounds easier than it is, without insights to support their case are Marketing or Trading Directors willing to go out on a limb and challenge or change the status quo?

Summit’s proprietary tool, Purchase Predictor enables them to plan their promotional calendar using product-level forecast customer demand, enabling them to produce a bottom-up planning approach for each event.

Retailers can compare customer demand to last year’s sales behaviour, so Trading managers can understand the incremental headroom opportunity even if it’s just moving a promotion by 1 or 2 weeks either way to better align their promotional activity with demand.

Understanding which products are associated with which events and themes, identifying key customer shopping missions enables retailers to understand plan cross category events to increase footfall and grow basket size.

Creating a single version of the truth enables Marketeers & Traders to work together to produce a single calendar of events based on their product portfolio, resulting in improved ROI from their campaign activity.

*Source: ONS Jan 2016 – Nov 2018
**Purchase Predictor proprietary research