Merchandising and Marketing Strategies and Retail Analytics

IDC Retail Insights' Merchandising and Marketing Strategies and Retail Analytics Research Advisory Service provides targeted guidance to general merchandise, apparel, footwear, food, drug, and other hard-line and soft-line specialty retailers as they align their IT and business strategies to drive financial results, brand differentiation, and customer loyalty. We focus on the needs of retailers forging relevant and engaging omnichannel relationships with their customers in the context of social media and business, mobility and broadband, cloud and evolving IT delivery models, and big data and analytics. Our research and analysis help our clients identify best practices, envision paths to applying them in their context, and manage the nexus of business needs and IT capabilities. Just as thoroughly, our research helps the vendor community align their products and services to evolving industry needs and shorten their time to market with innovative applications.

Approach

The Merchandising and Marketing Strategies and Retail Analytics global analyst team keeps in constant touch with retail CIOs, their staffs, line-of-business executives, and product strategy executives of leading technology vendors. We develop deep and comprehensive perspectives to provide actionable recommendations. Our methods include in-depth interviews, quantitative and qualitative market research, and secondary research from conferences, publications, blogs, online communities, and traditional news sources.

Topics Addressed

  • Bringing the store into the mainstream of omnichannel commerce to create online inside customer experiences that turn scanning, scramming, and showrooming shoppers into loyal customers
  • Creating an enterprise social media analytics strategy to apply its insights within and beyond marketing and branding in merchandising, product development, fulfillment, store operations, and ecommerce channel management
  • Spotting and evaluating disruptive retail technologies and business models to adopt, ignore, and defend against them
  • Developing a unified business intelligence strategy to leverage enterprise data with predictive analytics and advanced retail science and handle the volume, variety, and velocity of big data amassing within and beyond the enterprise

Key Questions Answered

  • Managing financial risk, market risks, and customer risks
  • Engaging customers across channels and localizing assortments, store layouts, planograms, and displays to fit customers' demographics and buying habits and competitors' strength and tactics
  • Optimizing life-cycle product pricing decisions for customer loyalty, differentiation, and financial goals
  • Bringing consumer sentiment insight into marketing, merchandising, product development, and channel management
  • Segmenting customers on a broad spectrum of behaviors and profiles gleaned from enterprise and social big data sources segments and optimize and personalize behavior-shaping promotions

Who Should Subscribe

IDC Retail Insights' Merchandising and Marketing Strategies and Retail Analytics Research Advisory Service is geared toward helping merchants, planners, brand and digital marketers, pricing analyst, and roles dependent on bringing predictive analytical insights into their decision management frameworks. In equal measure, our research helps IT executives align their application portfolio priorities to their business partners' needs, reduce the cost and risks in managing these portfolios, and develop mid- and longer-term business-led IT strategies. Our research address the different needs of general merchandise, apparel, footwear, food, drug, and other hard-line and soft-line specialty retailers.

Return on Research Investment

Core Benefits:

  • Assistance in optimizing the people and technology used to support merchandising, marketing, and related processes
  • Mitigation of risks in vendor and technology selection and in implementation and rollout programs
  • Clarification of benefits for the prioritization of operational and capital expenditure projects
  • Support of development of strategic and annual IT plans through spending benchmarks and analysts' insights
  • Guidance on technology buyer concerns and priorities
  • Fact-based perspective on product road maps, competitive environment, new market opportunities, and go-to-market strategies
  • Increased market awareness of your competencies, product offerings, and development programs
  • Guidance on partnerships for applications, services, and technologies text

Standard Subscription Deliverables

IDC Retail Insights values building client relationships and strives to foster a partnership with each client through continuous analyst interaction; timely delivery of current, concise, and relevant research; as well as custom research when needed. Each advisory service delivers strategic research covering business and technology issues. A summary of the basic service deliverables available to subscribers includes the following:

  • Analyst inquiry time specific to the advisory service area
  • 24 x 7 research access via www.idc-ri.com
  • Discounted admission to specific IDC Retail Insights or IDC conferences
  • Complimentary forum invitations (Web conferences, industry briefings)

Join Our Community

Our IDC Insights Community is designed to enable technology buyers to engage with our industry analysts, share knowledge and best practices, and connect with colleagues. To participate in our community, members create a profile to:

  • Participate in our discussions in our blogs, forums, and polls
  • Learn about and share best practices, tips, tricks, and tools related to business/technology alignment
  • Network with colleagues and join groups within each industry
  • Provide feedback to IDC's industry analysts and hear what we're up to

Visit us at: http://idc-insights-community.com and join our conversations.

Related Offerings

Related offerings to our industry-specific research practices include IT Spending Guides — segmented regional and country-level analysis by solution area; Go-to-Market Services (GMS) — a modular set of deliverables to assist clients in extending their market reach, validating their market strategy, and producing more responsive customer-centric marketing campaigns; and IDC Advisory Tools — a growing set of solutions designed to ensure clients that technology purchasing and deployment decisions are optimized. In addition, IDC Retail Insights experts are available for individualized consulting engagements to address specific challenges or to customize the results of our syndicated research offerings.