Improving Your Planogram Quality

By J Kent Smith, Director of Consultancy, Galleria

The art and science of planogramming has been practised for decades. While tools have become more sophisticated and data more plentiful, many merchants struggle with the same fundamental problems their predecessors did in the 1980s and earlier. The inventory versus assortment tug-of-war remains largely unregulated. Regarding inventory, store and supply chain requirements are often loosely defined and relegated behind the category manager's and supplier's needs. Within assortment, the notions of space elasticity and substitutability remain just that, notions, and are potentially compromised by fees and a "better safe than sorry" mentality that reduces the impact of analytics. Further, this is all underscored by the prevailing approach of creating, at best, cluster planograms based on average data. Worse yet, there are still many retailers that only create a few size options for its stores to choose from. This leaves the "last mile" of strategy execution solely in the hands of the in-store merchandiser who is not privy to the category strategy.