Vidéo: Intermarché de Clichy: Merchandising et retailing

J'ai déjà fait pour vous une visite de l'Intermarché de Clichy sur Seine il y a peu de temps. Le magasin n'a pas encore 1 an d'existence d'ailleurs. Je vous invite vraiment à y aller pour voir tout les partis prix et son côté ambitieux.

J'ai trouvé sur Internet une très bonne vidéo ou son propriétaire Stéphane Sinopoli explique son concept, et ses partis prix. Très intéressant, à voir. De plus, Stéphane a une vrai passion du commerce contagieuse, qui se ressent clairement sur cette vidéo.

Stephane Sinopoli - Intermarché from Samir Boutarene on Vimeo.

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.

Category Management Series: #Crossmerchandizing : You Better Be Careful With It

One of the most known technique about Merchandizing is cross merchandizing. How it works: you place near a best selling product a complementary product, to lift its sales, so you can add an extra product in the basket of the shopper. 

For example, you place the batteries near the remote control sections for the shopper to get both. Most of the time it is highly beneficial, as the complementary product is more profitable than the best selling one. 

Now it does not mean that you should add cross merchandizing all over the store. Indeed, because if you use too much of this technique, you may annoy customer. Moreover, the cross selling product must be consistent with the product where it is placed near. Here are bad examples I found during different store checks. 

Why would you place lipsticks near the perfume section? Same thing: Batteries near the milk area? 

Obviously you may have impulsion purchases anywhere, but by having such cross merchandizing initiative, you are just showing out how complex your offer is, and you are not helping at all your customers.

Two good examples now: The cooking books near the frozen veggies at Picard (which makes sense to use them), and the coffee machine cleaning products near the coffee section. By doing so, you are clearly helping the customer in the purchase and the usage of its product.

But once again, you should be careful at having a clear sense at cross merchandizing initiatives.

Comment #Picard joue son Opération Italie

Je l'ai déjà dit sur mon blog, mais j'adore Picard. Picard réussi au même titre que Costco ou Ikea de jouer avec le modèle économique du Hard Discount, mais néanmoins, en travaillant son concept, de pouvoir aller loin dans les largeurs de gammes, et de travailler sur la qualité de son offre. Il y a quelques temps, je me suis rendu à un magasin Picard, pour constater la manière dont Picard jouait son opération Italie. Classiquement, dans la grande distribution alimentaire, l'opération Italie est très souvent un événement majeur, qui permet de doper ses volumes. 

Ce que j'ai particulièrement aimé, c'est la manière dont Picard bien que Hard Discounter, a réussi à mettre en valeur son opération, et notamment sa largeur de gamme, de manière qualitative, et ce à moindre dépense. Très bien travaillé, un modèle de mise en avant merchansising qualitative, avec notamment un concept très bien décliné sur tous les différents supports.Surtout qu'il est souvent difficile d'animer la catégorie surgelé, à cause des tombeaux qui sont difficile à habillés.

Le category management à l'ère du multicanal et du digital

Un petit article en français pour souligner l'exellent travail entre autres part le master distribution et relation client de l'Université Paris Dauphine.

Le travail porte sur les évolutions du métier de category manager causées par l'avénement du Drive. En effet, le drive ne cesse de gagner des parts de marché sur les magasins traditionnels, et bien évidemment, les techniques se doivent de s'adapter à ce canal de vente.

Cela me rappelle un peu la problématique soulevée par Henri Isaac au sujet de l'évolution des techniques de merchandising en ligne. Le category management des points de ventes virtuels en ligne n'en est qu'à son début, et je suis sûr que les présentations de produits et les techniques de vente vont s'améliorer et se développer très rapidement.

Le travail se focalise principalement sur la structure de management de l'offre: Est ce que les équipes dédiées à la gestion de catégorie des drives doivent elles être différentes des équipes gérant les points de vente classique?

Vous pouvez trouver en cliquant ici l'étude menée, et les réflexions liées.

Il est sûr qu'il est intéressant d'avoir des category managers qui gèrent les 2 parties de l'offre, car le client ainsi que le produit reste le même. Néanmoins, je pense qu'il y a énormément de compétences à développer via le drive et les courses en ligne, afin de capitaliser sur la croissance déjà existante.

Henri Isaac: Building A New Path For E-Merchandising

Henri Isaac is a great source of inspiration for me. He was my teacher as a student @ Paris Dauphine, and I have always loved his passion for what his does, and his ability to envision what technology may bring to customer experience.

I had the opportunity to discuss with him not a long time ago, and he told me how furstrated he was to see how e-retailers were conceiving their merchandising approach. Indeed, whereas the Internet world has changed a lot those past 10 years, with the arrival of social media, smartphones, tablets, and new technologies, product pages have not evolved that much. 

Henri recently published an article about this topic. He explains that the products catalog concept, which is used by most of e-merchants is not adapted to the best online shopper experience. Even though products catalog have improved, it is important to have a better way to link the different products of the offer together, in order to improve the shopping experience.

He also believes that brand content will be key in order to raise the shopping experience.

I must say I totally agree with him, especially when it comes to tablet. I ve tried several times to shop on different websites, and most of the time it is almost impossible to shop with a tablet.

In my opinion, it would be interesting to see what kind of merchandising concepts will appear within the next few years (I shall say few months...) in order to benefit 100% from the different platforms that exist (tablets, smartphones...). And probably this will come from a new comer, as e-retailers for most of them are already too big to try some of these actions.

If some of you owns any kind of examples or great websites to check which are highly innovative in terms of e-merchandising, I'd be thrilled to know. Feel free to comment on this blog about it.

What do you think about it?

Retailing in Columbia

You want to see some fascinating pictures of some retails in Columbia? Grégoire Kaufman, Commercial and marketing director of Ed France (Hard Discount subsidary of Carrefour) and former Merchandise director of Carrefour Columbia, has just opened his new blog, the retail art. The blog might be in French, but he shares with us some exceptional pictures of hypermarkets in Columbia, with a deep analysis about merchandising in this country.

I invite you to spend some times on this blog. You can see how the culture has a great impact on retailing, and how products are displayed and sold. Welcome Grégoire on the blogosphere.

PS: Thanks once more to Henri Kaufman, that has helped me discover this blog.