There has been a distinct change in shopper behavior over the past few years with consumers increasingly shifting their purchases to smaller-format and more experience-oriented retail locations while traffic to malls and big-box retailers has been declining. This trend necessitates cutting back assortments to products that will drive the most value. At the same time, e-commerce has been growing quickly in the CPG space, more than triple the rate of overall CPG sales. E-commerce both accelerates the trend to small shops and helps managers enable it through moving high frequency, high-bulk household staples online.
For manufacturers and retailers, making the right assortment decisions has a significant upside. Beyond supporting smaller formats, having the right assortment can grow sales, traffic, basket sizes, loyalty, turnover and returns on space, while reducing inventory on hand, cost of sales, store size needs and shopper confusion. Sophisticated CPG retailers can even tailor assortments in ways that can direct shoppers to select specific brands, or products that are more profitable or more likely to lead to additional purchases.
In this report, IRI explores the challenges and opportunities facing retailers and manufacturers and identifies five simple steps they can take to benefit from shoppers’ changing and fragmenting needs.
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