Assortment Analysis: The Peer Review

One of the most important actions that will occur, without regard to the market niche or consumer group served, is for retail merchandising organizations to critically analyze planned Spring assortments. I've written in the past about the pitfalls in trimming breadth versus depth in recession times, and embedded in that posting was the requirement that each product in the assortment be intentional and serve multiple purposes. The question is, how do retail executives determine if this level of complexity exists in each and every assortment in the store.

First, let's accept that not all the merchants tasked with building assortments are created equal. Some are more adept at building complex and rational assortments. Others have either less experience or less training and do not demonstrate as visible a grasp on merchandising principles. No slight intended....we all have stronger merchants in some areas than in others. My suggestion is to leverage these stronger merchants as your initial screen for the assortment building and rationalization process.

Yes, it is the responsibility of DMM's and GMM's to analyze assortments and critical evaluate the merchandise planning process as executed by the buyers they manage. However, these individuals are also responsible for all kinds of other tasks and seldom have the time to critically review assortments to the extent that they should. Further, DMM's at least are often co-conspirators in the creation and execution of the merchandise strategy....which means we are asking a player to critically evaluate him or herself. Hard to do. Instead, one of the most powerful processes I've seen is the Peer Evaluation. A group of buyers or merchants NOT affiliated with the specific category are brought together. A single merchant presents his or her assortment. And then the group seeks to ask the questions necessary to determine if the assortment is powerfully constructed or not. These Peers do not have axes to grind.....they seldom know enough about the category to have an opinion on what should be done....they are simply there to question what is being proposed. The answers, creativity and adjustments remain the responsibility of the merchant who owns the category.

The simplicity of this approach is that using Peers takes some of the job security issues out of the equation, and also allows for merchants to learn from each other. A group, tasked with determining if the assortment has a strategy and then is implemented around that strategy, with intentionality will often push harder, look deeper, and accept less nonsense in response than even the most focused of DMM's. The group could then either report to the DMM responsible for the category, or the DMM could be present, in order to insure that changes occur in what may or may not have been seen as relevant and powerful within the planned assortment.

This is NOT merchandising by committee. The group does NOT make specific recommendations around products, pricing, or promotion. Rather, they simply apply the same rigor they've (hopefully) applied to their own considerations in questioning and examining the proposed assortment choices.

Why is this critical? Because open-to-buy will be at it's most limited in recent memory, putting extraordinary pressure on almost every SKU to perform. That will not happen by luck, through the subtle manipulation of skilled suppliers, or even through the vagaries of talent. It WILL happen as a result of focused intention, planning and execution, with considerable outside support to insure that the focus and intentionality do not become lost or side tracked in the process.