Retailers pay a great deal of attention to the positioning of products in their stores. Do these techniques work? If so, how? Or are the retailers wasting their money?
This document aims to develop a more detailed understanding of buyer behaviour by attempting to answer the aforementioned question above by focusing on a particular buyer behaviour theory.
I have chosen the above question in contrast to the other questions because I believe it can be carefully analysed in numerous ways via empirical research, personal experiences and current literature. After careful analysis of the relevant theories I feel the marketing theory best fits with analysing the above question since ‘Marketing is seen as the task of finding and stimulating buyers for the firm’s output’ (Kotler, P and J. Levy, S 1969:10). Additionally marketing involves ‘product development, pricing, distribution, and communication; and in the more progressive firms continuous attention to the changing needs of customers’ (Kotler, P and J. Levy, S 1969:10), this highlights how both retail and the marketing environment share common grounds for customer satisfaction. I will endeavour to use journal articles and contextual data to organise these materials into a comprehensive, sophisticated answer.
From working in a retail environment over a few years I have acknowledged stock rotation to be a common strategy employed in small and large retail stores. Essentially, the process involves displaying older items for sale more prominently than items that were recently acquired for sale. The idea behind this type of rotating process is to move older products in order to make room for other and newer products.
‘In marketing, positioning has come to mean the process by which marketers try to create an image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, brand, or organization’ (Ries, A and Trout, J, 2001). Having identified the potential segments and selected one or more to target, the marketer must next decide the positioning of these products, whether these techniques will be effective? If so how? Or are the retailers wasting their money in order to pursue their objectives?
A ‘position is the way a firm’s product, brand, or organisation is viewed relative to the competition by current and prospective customers’ (Hackley, C 2009). If a position is how a product is viewed, then positioning is a firm’s use of all the elements at its disposal to ‘create and maintain in the minds of a target market a particular image relative to competing products’ (Hackley, C 2009).
While stock rotation is used in every retail outlet, the strategy is particularly prominent when it comes to selling perishable items such as packaged or fresh foods. Many commercially packaged items such as cereal, canned goods, and dairy products carry a date by which the product must be sold or removed from display. As this sell-by date approaches, retailers tend to move these items to the front of the display shelves, placing newer products behind them. For casual shoppers who do not pay attention to these dates, the chance that they will simply select the item at the front of the shelf is much higher.
Supermarkets and convenience stores commonly rotate stock on an ongoing basis. Moving products to the front of the display are sometimes augmented with offering some sort of discount off the usual retail price. For example, a supermarket may apply a discount of up to fifty percent on a gallon of milk that is about to reach its sell-by date in an effort to obtain as much profit from the item as possible. I believe this sort of strategy helps both parties, as from a buyer’s perspective you are getting a bargain on a particular product; however, it is also beneficial for the one whom is selling, since there is an opportunity to increase revenue as well as making room for new stock.
It can be noted that many retail stores have a specialist visual merchandising team which ‘decides on the store design