The Importance of Retail Readiness

Over the last several months, shopping experience and consumer demand changed as we know it. This only meant one thing: brands must look to new and innovative strategies to keep up with increased sales as shelves are being cleared out by panic-buying and hoarding. Now, more than ever, product merchandising is becoming a critical sales tool.

Merchandising may not be top of mind, as brands are actively cutting marketing budgets, but it should not be put on the back burner. Consumers are tightening up their wallets, that may be true, but the reality is that pent-up demand and the novelty of off-line shopping is increasing store traffic significantly and people are still looking for brands to continue telling their story. One of the best ways to do this and grab the consumer’s attention is through merchandising.

Merchandising allows you to build a strong and consistent experience for the consumer. If customers who have waited for hours in line to get into the store only to find the shelf empty and their product of choice out of stock, it is highly unlikely they will have a pleasant perception of the brand. This only shows that either the brand is discontinued or doesn’t have enough manpower to keep restocking the shelves. Don’t be that brand.

Here is why sending representatives to retail stores to merchandise your brands/products is so important right now:

• Direct Increase in Sales: By effectively merchandising product, you are influencing customers to make an impulse purchase, cross-purchasing products that go well together, or influencing consumers to purchase a premium product.
• On-shelf Availability: Due to the unpredictability of consumer purchasing behaviour in recent months, it is important to have in-person distribution checks completed to validate inventory. In addition, customers are visiting stores much less frequently; if your product isn’t on shelf when they’re in-store, they will purchase your competitors.
• Display Set-up/Install: According to Strategy’s recent Shopper Marketing Report “one-third of shoppers in China... report switching brands since the pandemic started, and in-store displays were one of the biggest factors.” As brands have been limited with driving new product trial outside of store, merchandising through displays in-store will become a key component.

At this point, you may be wondering: “Okay. I need to have x number of merchandisers calling on stores, but how do I make sure calls get completed and the merchandisers show up?”

At Karma, we integrated the solution into our platform to ensure you can access live time data without being physically present at the location, whether it is a store or event venue. Here’s how.

The Karma Casting App hosts over 27,000 profiled and vetted representatives across North America, enabling us to quickly and efficiently provide people for various types of activations across Canada and the United States.

Over the years, we have built a network of ambassadors who are trained and ready to execute merchandising activities in all markets across North America, including secondary and tertiary markets. If you need to quickly deploy against a last-minute surge project or want to augment your existing merch team with call coverage outside of their regular cycle – we can help!

With the Karma technology, we built the check-in and check-out features into the app to provide accurate data using Facial Recognition and Google Maps. This data shows the date and time a representative arrived on site, their check-in/out selfie photos, and their exact event location in real time. A Karma Manager is alerted in the event of a rep not checking in prior to shift start or whether they have left the location during their shift – extremely important during these times for health & safety reasons (i.e. contact tracing).

Merchandising comes with a ton of benefits and it should not be disregarded. Especially when you are trying to increase sales while cutting budgets, merchandising can be your solution to upping your game at or outside of retail.

If you have no idea how merchandising can help you – click on the Contact Karma button below and we will be happy to share insights and expertise to take your brand to the next level.