Eight Step Process for Creating Tactical Plans for Successful Category Management
Category management strategies are commonplace for most businesses in the retail and manufacturing industries. The Partnering Group and IDG defines an eight (8) step process for creating tactical plans for successful category management. Creating tactical plans can improve the effectiveness of a category manager’s role in the retail environment, ensuring that consumers’ demands are continually met or exceeded at the point-of-sale. The eight steps are:
- Define the Category
- Assess the role of the category within the retailer
- Asses the performance of the category
- Set objectives and targets (i.e. “Category Scorecard”)
- Devise overall category strategies
- Set category tactics (based around the “4 P’s”)
- Implement
- Review, evaluate and start process over
This eight (8) step process begins with defining the category and its role in the retail environment. This gives category managers a starting point to develop a comprehensive assessment of the current and past performance of the category to create a set of realistic goals and objectives for the category. With the first five steps in place, category management professionals can work to create strategies, implement those strategies and start the process again for additional categories and annual updates.
Most businesses do not use the full eight steps of the process. Instead, they create their own streamlined process. Strategy development can easily be customized to meet the goals of your business. The best strategies take into consideration a collaborative environment between suppliers and retailers using real-time demand data from a wide number of sources.
While category management strategies are essential to creating and meeting sales goals, Creating an effective data management strategy can make any category management strategy more cost effective and profitable. Many businesses in the consumer goods industry still use a series of spreadsheets and reports to collaborate and share data between sales managers, category managers, marketing directors and C-Level executives. Though few programs can match the ease of use and availability of programs like Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint, using these programs alone can be time consuming and costly when considering the hours put into entering data, updating spreadsheets, combining reports and creating cohesive charts and graphs. An ROI calculator can be a useful tool to evaluate the cost associated with analytical reporting.
