Having bought a caffe latte from McDonald's for £1.35 and finding its packaging was really neat and it tasted good, I have suggested that this sets a new benchmark for UK local retailers in terms of price and quality. This morning, fresh 'n' fine, a local shop that I pass by had a sign out front saying coffee and a croissant for £1.45. That's a good deal, I said, trying to work out how much the McDonalds' latte was if I bought six and got the seventh free (if they allow me a latte?) (it's £1.16). The croissant was excellent. The coffee unremarkable, perhaps even a little watery. The important thing is what sort of profit you can deliver at £1.45, and how much footfall you win. On balance, almost good enough!
Retailers need to introduce new products to provide their shoppers with "good news" and to generate interest. But for each new product that you introduce you need to consider delisting an existing line. Easy, you might think. I will just print out the list of products in the category and take off the one with the lowest sales. However, if you do this research from the US suggest you might be wrong. What you need to consider is what sort of demand you have for each product, a white paper by Demand Tec, a US specialist software provider shows. It says that there are two kinds of sales: incremental sales, when products add to the total shopper spend and are not readily substituted by another item transferable sales, where shoppers find an alternative easily when it is not available. Using its software, it shows a category with 50 products from top seller to bottom seller. At the same time it also measures the incremental sales each product provides. The number 50 in ove...
These sort of insights would work well within Better Retailing. The encouragement that they give to try something that you have not done before is the seed corn of enterprise.
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