Category Management Series: New Technologies To Revolutionize Merchandizing

Some extra stuffs I have seen during the IFM days. It was about merchandizing. Most of FMCG marketing & retail experts would agree on how merchandizing is key to boost in store sales. Especially when discussing about having clear planograms to organise one section.

But it is not that easy to keep updated planograms:

• It takes a lot of time to edit planograms
• It requires a lot of information, between sales figure, pictures of the product, specific information on products features
• It needs to be updated almost each month, as new products don't stop coming in
• It needs to be adapted to each store, depending on the retailers strategy: geolocalization, size of the store, specific segmentation, specific store features...

I found 2 interesting companies working on planogram and merchandizing that are worth checking out: 

Klee Commerce: It is a company specialized in planogram building. It has a powerful tool allowing to create in minutes top of the line planograms, based on a specific strategy: Profit maximization, sales generation, brand blocks, stockout limitations, etc...

I have seen a demonstration which was quite impressive. I believe it is very interesting as it could secure updated planograms, which are to me key to secure a good execution in store.

Planorama: It is a company that provides a tool for salesforce. You take pictures of a whole section and it will analyze it in minutes in order to give you data about the planogram: Which product is misplaced, which one is missing, are your products there... It is interesting because a nice in store execution is also very important to monitor. This image recognition technology seems pretty accurate.
Check out the video to see how it works.

 Before, it was difficult for a national retailer to have a clear view if its planograms were actually followed. Now this tool allow to do so.

Thanks to all of those tools, I believe that merchandizing will become more and more important to generate sales, especially because the investments will be easier to follow, and cheaper.