The retail landscape today is a highly complex and competitive battlefield. In practically every sector, businesses are struggling to tackle challenges related to standing out from the competition and winning buyer attention. Their strategies and action plans revolve around engaging an audience base that is constantly exposed to a content overload and building lasting customer loyalty.
This is on top of the complications posed by evolving sales channels and customer values. Not to mention the external obstacles that make winning retail brand wars difficult. On top of the pre-existing competition, private labels and counterfeiters have become game changers. While private labels are capturing significant market share, the counterfeiters are exploiting the grey market to undermine prices.
These challenges require a thorough command of online and offline markets, modern supply chains, and price perception. You need to appease customers while also improving your profit margins. Leading retailers know they no longer can aim to get products off their shelves. Instead, they must compete against the evolving trends. Suffice it to say, moving forward into 2023-24 won’t be easy.
But you can find success by leveraging the business growth mindset. Here’s how:
A Committed Approach Requires Full Alignment
You can predict (and mitigate!) challenges, win customers, and establish yourself as an industry leader only after getting a complete organizational alignment on a growth-first strategy. You need to get a team-wide buy-in to your long-term business goals since that’s the foundation for your retail brand growth. This alignment will help you direct all initiatives to build upon your long-term plan directly.
Next, it’s important to determine the specific growth objectives for each department across the company. For example, the goals of the marketing and engineering teams vary quite drastically. So, the challenges they work on and the solutions they implement must be custom. Besides, you also need to allocate resources efficiently to improve their performance.
And a great part of that hinges upon managing present and future needs.
However, many businesses find it challenging to take a long-term view because prognosticating into the future is considerably more difficult. Be it related to business alignment, efficient resource management, market trends, or customer needs.
Indeed, future planning inherently carries many risks. But the key to growth lies in tackling it head-on to minimize loss and increase gains.
Next, let’s discuss growth avenues for winning retail brand wars and driving growth.
The Four Growth Avenues Online Brands Must Explore
The following four factors pave the road to creating a profitable retail business. In tandem, they boost growth and embolden your strategic vision with the ability to take intelligent risks that pay off in dividends.
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Competitive pricing
A careful pricing strategy grasps industry trends and then shifts to satisfy the market, customer, and industry trends. This is where price image comes into play. It lets you capitalize on the many nuanced aspects that define an item’s value. Dynamic pricing tools like Retailer Intelligence™ provide data-backed insights and suggestions on product pricing in real-time.
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Global price monitoring
If you don’t monitor resellers, you risk losing out on sales due to pricing violations. This problem is further compounded by the large-scale flow of counterfeits in the market. These affect your brand integrity and erode profit margins. With Intelligence Node’s MAP Monitoring Solution, you can monitor MAP violations and ensure compliance to protect profit margins.
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Dynamic visibility into market movements
Comprehensive data on market demand, product search and popularity, and competitor stock movements allows you to make better assortment and availability-related decisions. Intelligence Node’s Retailer Intelligence™ offers pricing automation and real-time competition monitoring to help businesses track market position.
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Targeted cross-channel promotions
It’s one thing to have the data; it’s another to apply it to real-life business challenges. Modern sales channels are complex, so how do you tackle them? Solutions like Retailer Intelligence™ help you understand which offers have resulted in high customer satisfaction and optimize your campaigns and ad spend accordingly.
Unique Challenges Call for Intelligent Solutions
A well-oriented growth strategy means balancing consumer demands with competitor movements and industry trends. Short-term plans and antiquated pricing strategies don’t cut it. You need holistic plans that balance present needs and future goals. Switch to Intelligence Node to take smarter, growth-oriented decisions that establish your retail brand and boost margins.
