Consumers, retailers, omnichannel, brand positioning, assortment, merchandising – there’s a lot to consider when designing the path towards your brand experience in the marketplace.

In today’s landscape, with consumers being more demanding than ever, a strong and differentiated brand experience is not only desirable, but critical to protect and grow market share. It is not uncommon for organizations to set aside multi-millions of dollars to improve their Point-Of-Sale (POS) experience, however beyond investment, there are a multitude of challenges that we have seen our clients face across industries and geographies:

• Ensuring Connection Between Activation Levers: Designing complementary actions aligned with the organization’s strategy, priorities, and timeline, to drive a clear brand identity and experience at the point of execution
• Considering the Reality in Each Channel: Understanding how consumer needs differ across channels, and employing a segmented approach with each activation lever, rather than “one size fits all”
• Guaranteeing the Strategy is Implementable: Keeping the execution approach simple and pragmatic, to ensure the intended actions translate clearly to the Sales Teams’ execution for maximum impact
• Aligning the Organizational Structure and Governance: Reflecting the chosen strategy in the organization of the trade structure, and putting in place a robust governance to monitor execution, feedback results, and maintain a connection between levers
• Staying Close to the Reality of the Retailer: Taking into account, while designing the strategy, that in any industry retailers can have very different realities, and even within a retailer, stores can have very different characteristics

We work with teams across your organization to design a tailor-made strategy, connecting all activation levers, differentiating approaches by segment, and guaranteeing the feasibility of implementation

Using your team’s knowledge, our experience, and research in the field, we support clients to:

• Segment sales channels and stores based on consumer personas
• Define strategic objectives per segment, connected to the commercial strategy
• Define optimal portfolio per segment, based on analysis of portfolio performance
• Organize the pricing model and price positioning per segment
• Define investment per store and store coverage, based on analysis of each action’s impact on each consumer persona
• Simulate sales and cost impacts of any adjustments to strategy or execution
• Identify internal enablers for implementation and continuously capturing  shopper insights and sales intelligence

The Perfect Store generates benefits for your organization, retailers and consumers:

• Strategy aligned with reality: ensuring the organization’s strategy makes sense with each retail segment in the current industry environment, and captures potential growth opportunities
• Effective translation to execution: build buy-in from different functional areas across the organization, and monitor execution and results through a clear, robust governance
• Increase sales and service for retailers: strengthen relationships with retail partners, through the delivery of a best-in-class consumer experience that meets their specific needs and drives volume growth
• Increase revenue: capture higher sales through a targeted SKU priority list per retail segment and category, with better customer conversion
• Optimize trade investments: target investments to increase ROI and eliminate ineffective actions
• Effective supporting structure: organize the internal structure to enable implementation, better monitoring and the capability to adjust based on field feedback
• Develop future capability: document guidelines of the most effective activation levers and trade investments in each retail segment to support continuous improvement

Everything starts with consumer understanding, and ends with a full organizational alignment

Developing the perfect store is not just about defining the right assortment, trade marketing approach, or pricing strategy. To truly deliver on brand experience, your vision must be reflected throughout the whole organization – from designing a strategy that is connected to the goals of the business, the reality of your retail partners and the needs of your customers; to effectively coordinating actions across multiple levers; and guaranteeing execution standards are met in the field. Team buy-in and cooperation are just as critical to success as setting the right price, and organizations targeting a perfect store implementation must be ready to take a holistic view when considering market challenges.

Every project and client brings a specific context, which must be understood and addressed when defining value-capture opportunities. Integration does not believe in a “copy and paste” approach – we work closely with all areas of your business to get to the root causes of pain points, leverage your knowledge of the field and bring relevant best practices to build a bespoke solution, preparing your teams to implement and manage in the long term.

Our approach is broken down into four phases:

Intrinsic to our way of working is building collaboratively. We will never know your business as well as you do, nor do we pretend to – from our experience, the best solution relies on a combination of your knowledge and our technical expertise, supported by buy-in across the organization. Throughout the project we use internal interviews, stage-gate decision-making workshops, multi-functional design workshops and day-to-day engagement with your team to make sure every area of the business has their needs recognized and answered by the project, and each professional is ready to implement from day 1.