Category management is dead, mission management is the future?
By him! Research & Consulting

The key reason shoppers use convenience stores is simple: convenience!  Convenience stores need to ensure they focus specifically on providing increasingly convenient solutions  to shoppers need.  Essentially, convenience retail needs to become about making the shopping trip, and thus ultimately shoppers’ lives, easier and easier.  

Retailers and suppliers need to consider NPD and in-store solutions in terms of ‘how will this make my customers life easier’ by identifying specific complications, issues or challenges in their shoppers’ lives and help to alleviate them.

For example, many stores have already started to ensure they have all the relevant products for making basic evening meals, grouped together in-store, with a suggestion for tonight’s dinner (whether or not they are discounted in a ‘dinner deal’).  Being ‘solution driven’ isn’t necessarily about promoting these ‘solutions’, more that the ranging and merchandising considerations have been made with solving a specific shoppers’ ‘problem’ in mind.  The convenience industry as a whole has been doing this to varying degrees.  However, this will need to be embraced wholeheartedly in order to fend off the threat from the supermarkets, and this is where the shift to mission management compared with category management needs to come in.

In order to really be ‘solution driven’ the industry will need to conduct range reviews focussed around shopper occasions and missions, rather than individual categories.  An allegedly fantastic confectionery offer doesn’t necessarily meet the needs of a lunchtime shopper if associated categories such as sandwiches & soft drinks aren’t also considered.

A buyer or ‘mission manager’ will therefore need to look after total ‘meal for tonight’ or ‘entertainment’ and all the products and categories which need to fall within that.  They will need to be responsible for pulling cross category solutions and promotions together.  This will mean a considerable change in how suppliers and retailers are currently working, and also a change to key KPIs and targets or goals set.

Both suppliers and retailers will need to better understand how different categories interact with each other (him! and the Convenience Tracking Program me (CTP) can help you with that) and what different solutions are relevant for different shopping missions and occasions (again just ask him!).  We know that if something is not available, associated categories suffer.  For example, the poor availability of sandwiches in many convenience stores will be a key barrier to crisps & snacks and soft drinks sales.  Currently not many impulse suppliers or buyers would claim to understand, or even consider, the sandwich category.  Cross category ranging and solutions will inevitably mean greater multi-supplier collaboration.

In order to really provide solutions to shoppers’ needs, retailers and suppliers will need to take a solution driven approach to ranging and promotions, which will mean a movement from individual category management to mission management.  Again, him! can help with this.

For more information please contact Katy Moses at him!
Email: Katy.Moses@him.uk.com or Tel. 07912 717 567
www.him.uk.com

Date article published: May 2011