Connecting Strategy to Execution

By Steve Holtz

Good data has long been held up as the key to developing category strategy and space planning. And the two retail presenters at a NACS Show educational workshop on the subject are huge fans of it. “In retail, we love data,” said Aldo Sanchez of Mexico’s Mi Super Dollar General.

Through their careers in category management and merchandise, they’ve learned about a significant and necessary step: developing a review process that gets all the players in space planning involved.

“For a long time, space planning was owned by the category team,” said Yasir Rizvi, head of merchandise planning and strategy at Sunoco LP, during the Education Session “Space Planning’s Missing Link: Connecting Category Strategy to Shelf Execution.” As a result, often what Rizvi heard when the category team sent planograms to retailers was, “We can’t do this.” Or the new plans just never got implemented.

“We had mismatched strategy,” he said. “Our plan did not translate to execution [on site].”

The fix? Getting store teams involved earlier in the process.

“We missed the review loop,” Rizvi said. “Now, instead of building strategy based only on the data, we begin with the feedback review loop. We ask the retail teams: What do you need?”

This feedback loop allows those in category management and merchandising to pivot each store’s strategy so that it works for the staff on site.

Sanchez, in-store experience director at Mi Super Dollar General, has used a similar tactic. With stores ranging in size from 150 to 4,000 square feet, it became clear the retailer’s primary strategy of groceries, household essentials, fresh bakery and CPG products was too ambitious for some locations.

“How do you standardize with that variety of store sizes?” he asked. “Rather than insist on our core strategy, we asked, ‘What categories do you want to emphasize?’ Maybe we skip the batteries in this store, for example.”

The result was more voices that painted a clearer picture of what merchandise was right for each store.

“We integrated our operational teams,” Sanchez said. Now, the merchandise and store teams have a hand in the process “because they are the ones that put the programs into practice in the stores. This allows us to personalize a store to the neighborhood.”

Data remains an absolute necessity to get the most from a store, said session moderator Patrick O’Mara, director of solution principals for Relex Solutions. But it needs to be buffered by “people, strategy, planning and feedback.”

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