Insight-driven sales transformation
By embedding consumer insights into their merchandising processes, retailers can
boost both like-for-like sales and profitability while creating smarter merchants.
Over the past five years, traditional large
retailers—such as supermarket chains,
drugstores, and big-box specialty retailers—
have found growth elusive. In most major
markets they are facing intensified
competition, particularly from discounters, as
recession-era shopping habits have become
entrenched. Opening new stores is no longer a
surefire way to grow, in light of market
saturation and the boom in e-commerce (see
“Making stores matter in a multichannel world,”
page 4). Same-store sales growth, or “like for
like” growth, has been flat or declining for
most large players across all major Europe
Amid this punishing environment, how have a
handful of retailers outperformed the
competition and achieved substantial like-forlike
sales growth? In our experience, they have
succeeded primarily by developing a deeper
understanding of consumer and shopper
behavior and embedding these insights into
the way they manage every product category.
In other words, they have implemented an
insight-driven sales transformation.
In this article, we describe an approach that has
helped leading retailers kick-start such a
transformation. We call it the “category
accelerator”: it is simultaneously a thorough,