11 Core Steps for Retailizing your Brand. How to Optimize Sales by connecting Brands to shoppers through the power of Retail Thinking.

January 29, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Sales Management 

Knowing how to succeed at retail is for anyone in any company who wants to increase the sales of their branded products. By retailizing your organization you would become truly retail-centric.

Retailization: optimizing sale(s) by connecting brands to shoppers through the power of retail thinking.

We believe that one way of helping you to focus on this issue is to use the word retail wherever you can, or maybe more precisely the two letters RE wherever you can. You literally need to REtail every aspect of your business. REthink, REimagine and REstructure are three aspects of this. Now we can take it further, into almost every other mindset you might encounter from REstorm to REsearch to RElearn.

11 Core Steps for Retailizing your Brand

REthink – Step 1: Understanding Our Shelf

The shelf is at the beginning of everything and every single shelf represents an arena that has a unique set of opportunities and challenges that define our strategic perspectives and resulting actions.
Understanding Our Shelf – Key Points to be Addressed
 Define your shelves – your arenas.
 Define the way those shelves are structured.
 Define the main shelf challenges you face.
 Identify the means to meet those challenges.
 Evaluate and optimize your selection of the shelves you want to be on.
 Decide whether you’re fighting on the right shelves today.
 Start exploring alternative shelf opportunities, from the internet to concept stores.
 Consider creating your own unique shelves.
 Consider reinventing the shelves you’re already on.
 Consider if there are any possibilities for co-opetition that will maximize shelf opportunities.

REthink – Step 2: Stealing Choice

In a world of infinite choices you have no choice, but to steal choice from whoever you can. Our competitive context therefore defines our opportunities
Stealing Choice – Key Points to be Addressed
 Map out your competitive context using the retail orientation grid.
 Define their strengths and their weaknesses and yours.
 Embrace the ideology of stealing choice.
 Identify ways to steal choice.
 Get inspired by other categories.
 Define how you can become the chosen one.
 Use a problem detection study to identify the gaps and holes in the competitive context.
 Start building real ideas and concepts based on the failures of everyone else in your category.
 Create a long-term objective based programme for constant outinnovation of your competitive context.

 See if you can create real choice in areas of the category where choice has been forgotten or neglected or never even existed.

REthink – Step 3: Leveraging the Shopper

In a world where shopping has become the world’s number one leisure activity you have to reconnect with customers when they shop for your brand. Sale(s) and margin growth will inevitably result
Leveraging Our Shopper Knowledge – Key Points to be Addressed
1. Define your consumers as shoppers.
2. Define your shoppers as situiduals, ie what typical situations are they in when they shop for your brands?
3. Identify what other types of products they’re shopping for when they shop for you.
4. Collate all your shopper data to date. What do you really know about your shoppers and their buying behaviour?
5. Determine what kind of experience they are looking for.
6. Identify the solutions they need in order to make their shopping more convenient, productive and pleasurable.
7. Analyse how the shopper would define the shelf, the competitive context and even themselves.
8. Determine how the shopper would define the ideal shopping situation – pre, during and post the experience.
9. Based on your immediate understanding of the shopper, determine how you would put people first in your offering.

10. Based on your immediate understanding of the shopper, see if you can turn your offering into a want, rather than a need.

REimagine – Step 4: Maximizing Product Impact

Behind every great brand there’s a great product. It pays to create a product revolution rather than an evolution.
Maximizing Product Impact – Key Points to be Addressed

 Having rethought the shelf, the competitive context and the shopper, identify what characterizes the ideal product concept.
 Define what kind of RSP you would like the product concept to stand for.
 Define how you would make your product stand out.
 Define what kind of perspectives there are for its constant remaking.
 Identify routes to making it more than just the core product.
 Make sure it makes sense.
 Identify how you would make it theirs – a RE-me product.
 Define how you would make them beg for it.
 Create the perfect product concept.

REimagine – Step 5: Maximizing Retail Impact

Shoppers are only loyal to superior shopping experiences.
Maximizing Retail Impact – Key Points to be Addressed
 Define what would most encourage sale(s) on your shelf.
 Define what makes brands shoppable on your shelf.

 Define what barriers and problems the shoppers experience in your arena and ask yourself whether your product offerings are able to solve these at retail level.
 Define what your competition does better than you.
 Describe in pictures and words what kind of ideal flagship store you would create to cater for your shoppers.
 Define how you can keep your offerings fresh and ahead of the game.
 Define how you can make your unique product offering into a unique retail presence.
 Look for ideas to maximize the buying and trying of your product at retail.
 Make sure your product passes the ‘four second’ test.
 Create clarity and involvement in the purchase situation.
 Construct a revolutionary and superior shopping situation around your brand offering.

REstructure – Step 6: Communicating to Shoppers

Unique new ways to reach and communicate to our shopper are increasingly available.
Communicating to Our Shoppers – Questions to be Addressed
1. Evaluate your overall communication objectives and spending with respect to getting the attention of shoppers.
2. Evaluate your spending’s cost-effectiveness against the shopping experience (pre, during and post).
3. Construct a RSP for your brand.
4. Identify your dream communication scenario.
5. See if there’s a tryvertising angle to your communication efforts.
6. Determine whether your can BUZZR up your marketing efforts.
7. Analyse whether you can subculturize your brand.
8. Create a community around shopping for your products.
9. Find a BRI – big retail idea.

REstructure – Step 7: Retailizing Your Organization

Living, breathing and acting the philosophy of retailization to realize sale(s).
Retailizing Your Organization – Key Questions to be Addressed
 Create an operational plan for the implementation of your Retailization process.
 Define goals, benchmarks and deadlines.
 Identify a core Retailization team responsible for carrying the process through.
 Create a plan for how to make your organization more retail-curious and how to act on that curiosity.
 Create a plan for incentivizing your organization to be creative and innovative in all matters relating to retail.
 Get everybody involved.
 Define how things will be different.
 Make a long-term commitment for living and breathing Retailization.
 Get going!

REeducate – Step 8: Building the Retail Vision

We believe that in order for the vision to be successfully communicated at all points of contact, every ‘brand communicator’ must know what the vision is and how to interpret it to his/her own constituency. We educate those communicators of the brand in the power of retail thinking – in the power of REeducation.
Building the Retail Vision – What we Need to Know

Once we have fully explored our retailization potential in the previous seven steps we are in a position to pull all this together within a new vision – a retail vision. We need to start by fully understanding our vision background and territory:
 What exactly is our retail brand?
o Business definition
o Territory
 Who are we?
o Retail brand personality
o Tone/voice/look/feel
 Essential equities
o Core values we transmit at retail level:
• intrinsic functional values (the basic functional values)
• expressive image values (the values that you make people feel like)
• central driving values (the essence of your retail brand)
 Leverageable assets
o Brand background
o Brand properties
o Givens/mandatories
 Retail brand idea
o Key creative thought (the BRI)
 How far are we retailized?

REeducate – Step 9: Identifying and Specifying the Retail Vision
Our retail Vision Process

Our model for creating the vision makes use of our combined experience, gathered over many years. It has been progressively refined to yield an approach that we have found to be rigorous and disciplined without compromising insightfulness and creativity. We start by maintaining that a retail vision is very different from a brand vision. It is in essence the realization of your brand vision in your retail environments.
Our vision process uses key building blocks: Retail Vision, Retail Mission, Retail Area of Competence, Retail Values and

Retail Brand Idea:
 Retail Vision: the world as the brand sees it.
 Retail Mission: mission in the world, based on the retail vision.
 Retail Ambition: how we want the brand to be perceived by the shoppers.
 Retail Area of Competence: the territory of the shelf (or shelves) within which the brand is performing.
 Retail Core Values: what really makes shoppers buy.
 Retail Brand Idea: what you communicate to the shopper – the BRI.

REeducate – Step 10: Retail Vision Education and Dissemination

We believe that it in order for the vision to be successfully communicated at all points of contact, every ‘brand communicator’ must know what the vision is and how to interpret it to his/her own constituency. We educate those communicators of the brand in the power of retail thinking – in the power of REeducation.
Approval
We need to initiate a series of steps to get the message approved and out.
Preparation of ‘Vision report’
 Draft of Retail Vision (with all supporting materials) submitted for approval.
 Make it available on secure internet site as a mechanism to stimulate feedback.
 Ensure approval is secured.
 Introduction at top-management forum.
 Final approval.
Retail Brand Toolbox Launch and Dissemination

The retail brand toolbox, of which the retail brand vision is the heart, is our resource for educating all retail brand communicators on the content and use of the retail brand vision and guidelines on how to interpret it to all points of retail contact the brand has with the world.
The primary tool is a retailization brand book from which all educational tools should be cut. The brand book will:
 chronicle the retail brand journey;
 summarize the information found in steps 1 to 7;
 be modular; adapted for each audience;
 be published in an intranet version;
 be updatable.
Launch and Dissemination
For maximum impact we recommend staging a launch event that will represent the first of a series of retail brand forums.

Training is about getting the tools into the hands of the brand communicators and teaching them how to maximize the potential of these tools.
Educational initiatives must be reviewed regularly to achieve and maintain optimization.

REevolve – Step 11: Evolving Retailization

Continuous Evolution of the Retail Vision

Retailization isn’t a one-off process. We need to ensure that continuity is not only maintained, but measured and developed over time to ensure a continuous cultivation of our retail vision

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