More about Consumer Trust

Yesterday I offered the opinion that building consumer trust involved delivering a merchandise assortment with integrity and intentionality. I'd like to spend a few more moments on this concept.

As retail executives, we've heard forever about the "art and the science" of merchandising. In the past decade, the "science" has tended to take a dominant position, driven by very real improvements in software and technology. Retail merchants can now create merchandise plans based not just on volume groups, but on dynamic and multiple consumer tendency profiles, on store level price responsiveness, and on an almost dizzying array of other variables. Software exists to model probably price elasticity, market basket benefits, and virtually any "use case" which defines consumer behavior. And because this technology, or science, produces numbers and outcomes and projections, perhaps a disproportionate amount of time is spent with it. Just perhaps.

One of the trends in retail for two decades has been away from the "product specialist" to the "professional buyer".....with the belief that the same process, techniques, tactics and technology can be applied to virtually all products and categories. Along with this has been a gradual and very real increase in the SKU count handled by the average merchant....supported in many cases by the technology we've already mentioned. The result is a circumstance where outside of some isolated examples, it's virtually impossible for a merchant to acquire and apply the product knowledge we would have expected (and demanded) twenty years ago. And in the growth decades, that was an OK result.

The recessionary environment almost demands a swing of the pendulum back to some level of product expertise. If my argument that building and maintaining consumer trust is vital in the coming year(s), and if doing so will demand that the assortment deliver on the brand promise....then it follows that the merchants will have to spend significantly more time evaluating each option in the assortment against that criteria. Ask this: do your merchants have either the knowledge domains or the support structure available to adequately perform that analysis? Because if they do not, how can you, as a retail executive, have any confidence that merchandise assortments deliver on the brand promise you are going to work so hard to create-reinforce-build?