What is your retail strategy? Have you thought about it? What are the ground rules that you adhere to everyday? What are the precepts that you hold above all others? A good retail strategy gives you, and all of those who work for you, direction. Unfortunately, however, many retailers give no thought to developing a retail strategy. Rather its business as usual as they bog down in the many things that require their constant attention and forego developing a solid retail strategy.
How then does one go about establishing a retail strategy? The first thing you need to understand is how your store fits into the market within which it operates. How is your store slotted? Slotting refers to the relative position that your store fills in your market place and can help reveal a successful retail strategy. Your store operates in one of five basic “slots” within your retail community. Your store is a destination store, a regional competitor, a product-driven niche store, a price-driven niche store or convenience store and this, regardless of your product offering. Each position or slot holds both opportunities and challenges. Learn more about slotting in the book Discovery-Based Retail.
Once you have determined your store’s slot, many answers regarding a retail strategy will become self-revealing. For instance, the slotting procedure can guide you through product pricing, hours of operation, depth of assortment, breadth of assortment to name only a few. Armed this new information, a retail strategy becomes easier to implement.
A battlefield general takes stock of his army’s strengths and weaknesses. He then contrasts those strengths and weaknesses against his adversary’s strengths and weaknesses. Based upon that information he then devises a battle plan to pit his strengths against his opponents weaknesses. In a large sense, a retail strategy does the same thing. The slotting process takes on the roll of reconnaissance. Discovery Based Retail will teach you ways to perform this reconnaissance and to develop your own successful retail strategy.
