Use Merchandise Productivity To Your Advantage

There are two places where terrible business decisions are made while simultaneously allowing many employees to feel good about the decisions:

1. Catalog Pagination and Merchandise Assortment.
2. Home Page / Landing Page Merchandising.

This is one place where your Brand Response Marketing Team can make a huge difference without even trying.

Your Brand Response Marketing Team should analyze every single spread in every single catalog. Why is the item with a 48% return rate and 29% gross margin being featured on page five? Why are crappy items that need to be liquidated populating key online landing pages?

The Brand Response Marketing Team demands that the first 20 pages of every catalog are populated with the best selling items and best creative presentation possible ... period. There is no room for negotiation here. None.

The Brand Response Marketing Team demands that the home page and key landing pages are populated with the best selling items and best creative presentation possible ... period. There is not room for negotiation here, unless the topic is personalization ... there is nothing wrong with personalizing key pages to capitalize on the traffic that lands there.

Simple pagination and landing page / home page merchandising tactics alone generate a 10% sales gain ... personalization tactics frequently generate 15% - 50% conversion rate gains (though the gains are lower on a annual-demand-per-customer basis because visits are cut out of the value chain, increasing conversion rates but not impacting annual spend).

If the Brand Response Marketing Team accomplishes this, and this alone, you will meet your new customer goals and you will grow customer loyalty and your CFO will want to come over and hug the team ... and you haven't even begun to implement your customer acquisition program yet.

The Brand Response Marketing Team owns catalog pagination, email merchandising strategy, and key landing page / home page strategy. Without ownership, change won't happen. And when change happens and is positive, all employees share in the gains earned by the Brand Response Marketing Team.

This is a perfect example of improving Merchandise Productivity without changing the merchandise assortment one bit.