bridging the gap between merchandising and marketing...
TRANSCRIPT
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Bridging The Gap Between Merchandising And Marketing: Closing The Loop
2015 Prospective View
Nikki Baird and Paula Rosenblum, Managing Partners
May 2015
Sponsor:
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Executive Summary
Something new is happening between marketing and merchandising, something that is increasing the friction between the two organizations, while also exposing serious gaps in the ways marketing and merchandising plan for and ultimately influence demand. As consumers spend more of their shopper journey in digital paths to purchase, the impact of digital marketing is widening those gaps, to the point where the negative impact on the business is beginning to show.
In this report, you'll learn:
• How lack of effective measures is impacting retailers' digital marketing strategies • How retailers are responding to the need to offer more personalized communications • How digital promotions and touch points are creating new challenges for both marketing
and merchandising • How digital channels are creating new, non-transactional data sources, the challenges
retailers are facing in using those data sources to make operational decisions • How these trends are combining to impact retailers' ability to grow gross margin dollars
Retailers need to do something to close the gaps between marketing's actions and their impact on merchandising's plans. To be successful, retailers first must identify the information they need to have before they can define a strategic response. There are two clear information gaps that must be addressed: identifying consumers' cross-channel paths to purchase, and understanding the impact of promotions on those paths to purchase.
As retailers gather the data they need and build the capabilities to turn that data into insights – for both understanding customer path to purchase across channels and the impact of promotions on those paths to purchase – there are specific actions retailers can undertake today, which we cover in the Action Items section at the end of this report.
We certainly hope you enjoy it,
Nikki Baird and Paula Rosenblum
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Table of Contents Executive Summary .......................................................................................................................... i Coming Soon: More Disruption ....................................................................................................... 1
Prospective View ......................................................................................................................... 1 Digital Promotions: Crossing The Chasm ........................................................................................ 2
How We Got Here ........................................................................................................................ 2 The Pressure To Promote… ........................................................................................................ 2 ...And The Need To Get Personal ................................................................................................ 3 No Leaps Of Faith ........................................................................................................................ 4
Implications ...................................................................................................................................... 5 Adding More Complexity Into A Dubious Mix ............................................................................... 5 The Rise Of Non-Transactional Data In Enterprise Decisions ..................................................... 5 Promotions Complexity On Top Of A Wall Of Confusion ............................................................. 6 Creating Organizational Friction With Merchandising .................................................................. 7 The Bottom Line: Gross Margin Opportunities Start To Diminish ................................................ 8 A Dangerous Game ..................................................................................................................... 9
Strategic Goals: Preconditions for Action ...................................................................................... 10 Following Digital Bread Crumbs: Insights From Paths To Purchase ......................................... 10 Understanding The Real Impact Of Promotions ........................................................................ 10 It’s Time For A Holistic View ................................................................................................... 11
Action Items: What Can Retailers Do? .......................................................................................... 12 Reduce The Friction Between Merchandising And Marketing ................................................... 12 Design Cross-Organizational Measures For Campaigns ........................................................... 12
Appendix A: Relevant RSR Research ............................................................................................. a Appendix B: About Our Sponsor ..................................................................................................... b Appendix C: About RSR Research .................................................................................................. c
Figures Figure 1: Gut Feel Alone Is Not Enough .......................................................................................... 2
Figure 2: Retailers Believe Consumers Won't Buy Without Promotions ......................................... 3
Figure 3: Not Feeling That Great About Pricing Strategies ............................................................. 5
Figure 4: On The Surface, An Important Opportunity ...................................................................... 6
Figure 5: Understanding Pricing's Impact ........................................................................................ 6
Figure 6: Friction Increasing Between Marketing And Merchandising ............................................ 7
Figure 7: Diminishing Returns? ....................................................................................................... 8
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Coming Soon: More Disruption
No organization in the retail enterprise has been as internally disrupted by omni-channel change as marketing. Externally, marketers must engage with consumers across a broader array of touch points, many of which are technologically immature both in the ways consumers use them and in the available insights retailers can gain from examining behaviors.
The time-honored notion of outsourcing customer analysis to others is also coming under question, as retailers see the possibilities of using their own data themselves. This begs the question…do they have the capabilities to take advantage of their own customer insights?
Internally, the marketing organization faces disruption on two fronts. Most retailers are already well aware of the first internal challenge. The well-documented struggle for marketing cohesion as retailers move digital marketing resources, historically focused only on the digital experience, into a broader role focused on an integrated brand experience.
The second organizational challenge is both old and new: coordination with merchandising. The old story involves marketing's ascendency from the communications arm of merchandising, purposed to advertise the pre-negotiated promotions between the merchandising team and vendors, to an equal partner. This new role makes marketing responsible for all things customer – customer insights, customer focus, and customer communications. When such a power shift occurs, naturally there is friction. That is, indeed, an old story.
But with marketing’s ascendancy and the proliferation of product information and selling channels, marketing has become the brand’s standard-bearer. Now they participate in (or arbitrarily make) decisions involving assortment, price, and the overarching brand promise.
Something new is happening between marketing and merchandising, something that is increasing this friction tremendously, while also exposing serious gaps in the ways marketing and merchandising plan for and ultimately influence demand. As consumers spend more of their shopper journey in digital paths to purchase, the impact of digital marketing is widening those gaps, to the point where the negative impact on the business is beginning to show. Particularly in the area of promotions, in today’s hyper-promotional retail world, marketing is creating a problem.
How is this possible? When online sales are often the only bright spot in retail performance, how is it that digital marketing – the champion of digital channels – might actually have a negative impact on the business? And what can retailers do to turn the situation around?
Those questions are what we set out to explore in this report.
Prospective View This report will focus on how marketing and merchandising are being transformed by the growth of digital channels and omni-channel consumer behavior. It is part of an occasional series of reports that RSR produces to more deeply explore specific industry topics. RSR's Prospective View methodology leverages multiple research benchmarks to dig deeper into issues that cut across retail disciplines. Prospective Views bring together these disparate data trends to provide not only a current-state perspective on a topic, but also to bring a more forward-looking viewpoint to the industry. For a list of the reports referenced in this research, please see Appendix A.
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Digital Promotions: Crossing The Chasm
How We Got Here Early measures of digital channels' impact on offline sales assessed their influence at roughly 50%. This number has only crept up from there. Today, the standard rule of thumb is that at least 60% of offline sales are influenced in some way, and some retailers will say it is as much as 80%.
Ironically, in RSR's 2014 benchmark on retailers' digital marketing strategies, we found retailers were on average able to attribute only 25% of their overall marketing results to digital marketing activities. This is a huge gap between the perceived influence on sales and the reality of measurable results. It doesn’t help that digital marketers are pressured to justify social advertising spend especially from their traditional marketing counterparts.
With overarching perceptions so far out of synch, it is almost guaranteed an observer will find challenges at a tactical level. Our research shows this to be the case: from RSR's benchmark on retailers' digital marketing strategies, we found that the top three implementation challenges are a direct result of this contradiction – retailers understand that digital channels have a tremendous influence, but have no effective measures to back up their beliefs (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Gut Feel Alone Is Not Enough
Source: Retail Marketing 2014: On The Digital Road, September 2014
Why is it so hard to measure the impact of digital channels? We could explore revenue attribution (giving the right amount of sales credit to digital channel investments that lead to the first stage of a customer purchase journey vs. the last stage). But these explorations would miss the point. The reality is much of retailers' focus in digital channels has been the exact same focus they've had in traditional channels: promotions.
The Pressure To Promote… The focus on promotions is a direct response to pressure retailers feel from consumers. For several years running, RSR's research has shown consumer price sensitivity as the most frequently cited business challenge driving retailer pricing strategies (Figure 2).
29%
50%
55%
43%
37%
47%
53%
68%
Measuring the cross-channel impact of different marketing tactics
Understanding and accommodating how different customer segments engage with us
Measuring the effectiveness of different marketing tactics
Knowing which tactics work best in which channels
Top 3 Digital Marketing Implementation Challenges
Winners Others
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Figure 2: Retai lers Bel ieve Consumers Won't Buy Without Promotions
Source: The Pricing Paradox: Benchmark Report, April 2014
Concurrently we find fewer retailers obsessing on competitor pressures than in pervious years. This concern has been usurped by the need to protect their brand's price image and provide greater price consistency across channels.
Ironically, one of the most important ways that retailers believe they can address all three of these pressures (consumer price sensitivity, brand price protection, and price consistency across channels), is through promotions. From the same Pricing benchmark, retailers told us that promotions – "your" price rather than "the" price – are practically the only way to both enable different price strategies in different channels while at the same time achieving consumer perception that their pricing policies are consistent across channels.
...And The Need To Get Personal Things get tricky when personalization comes into play. Whether in marketing, merchandising, or digital channel operations, retailers understand that "mass" is no longer a viable strategy when it comes to communicating with their customers. Consumer segments are being fragmented by digital media, making it both easier to be more targeted and harder to reach large audiences with a common message. This adds new complexity to marketing communications.
Consumers, made painfully aware of the volume of personal data collection enabled by technology increasingly expect that if retailers are going to have that information, then they'd better use it to the consumer's advantage. For their parts, retailers understand that if those communications focus on promotions, a mass promotion will prove both expensive and wasteful. An offer made to at least some portion of the audience that already would have bought the product at full price without the offer is an unnecessary drain on gross margin, while an offer made to consumers who were never going to buy the product no matter the offer and never will is little more than spam.
It used to be that retailers didn't care so much about that second set of consumers. But now that consumers expect retailers to both know who they are and act intelligently on that information, a useless offer actually has a larger negative implication than ever before: it just proves that the retailer is not relevant at best, or at worst, incompetent.
41%
25%
34%
57%
32%
42%
43%
56%
Increased pricing aggressiveness from competitors
Need to provide consistency in price across channels
Need to protect our brand’s price image
Increased price sensitivity of consumers
Top 3 Strategic Pricing Business Challenges
2014 2013
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No Leaps Of Faith Retailers understand intrinsically that digital channels have value, and that they have no choice but to use them to reach consumers – they must be where shoppers are. But intrinsic value is not enough to drive a successful business.
Unfortunately, the combination of promotions and digital channels is a dangerous one. Retailers serve up offers that impact demand, (which have implications on both merchandising and supply chain operations), in channels whose reach and effectiveness are ultimately not well measured, let alone understood. The implications reach well beyond digital marketing, exacerbating the friction between merchandise and marketing, as we'll see in the next section.
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Implications
Adding More Complexity Into A Dubious Mix Price optimization technologies, and their subsequent influence on price strategies, have been around for over a decade in retail. In the early days of the solutions, retailers were reporting eye-popping gains in both revenue and margin as a result of implementing price optimization solutions.
Retailers still expect price optimization and their price strategies to yield improvements, primarily in margin, but to a lesser extent in top-line revenue as well. However, the low-hanging fruit has already been picked. Future improvements must typically come from increasingly granular ways of looking at the business. Aggregation hides variability, and it is in that variability where margin improvements can be made.
Unfortunately, retailers are less enthusiastic about how well their price strategies serve them today than they have been in the past (Figure 3).
Figure 3: Not Feel ing That Great About Pr ic ing Strategies
Source: The Pricing Paradox: Benchmark Report, April 2014
There are two main reasons for this fading enthusiasm: the rise of non-transactional data, and the increasing complexity of promotions.
The Rise Of Non-Transactional Data In Enterprise Decisions Digital marketing provides a wealth of non-transactional information about consumers. Theoretically, this should drive shopper insights and potentially even operational decisions. Hence it wasn’t all that surprising to find in our recent study on Advanced Analytics that nine out of ten retailers believe gathering customer behaviors and paths to purchase into their analytical mix is a very important initiative (Figure 4, below).
We even argued in that report that with this fixation, retailers ran the risk of missing other opportunities. In fact, only half of respondents cited analyzing cross-channel promotional effectiveness as very important. Given today’s hyper-promotional environment, we would have expected these opinions to be reversed.
27%
62%
11%
Very effective Somewhat effective Not effective at all
How Effective Are Your Pricing Strategies in Driving Top and Bottom Line Results?
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Figure 4: On The Surface, An Important Opportunity
Source: Advanced Analytics: Retailers Fixate on the Customer, Benchmark March 2015
Our concerns around retailers’ eagerness to analyze cross channel paths to purchase is that they generally haven’t thought through how this information should be incorporated into marketing decisions, let alone merchandising.
Promotions Complexity On Top Of A Wall Of Confusion This makes adding digital marketing into the promotions mix even more tricky. Based on retailers’ ambivalent feelings about the effectiveness of their existing pricing strategies, there is significant risk in adding more variability into an already questionable set of practices. And, as they indicated in RSR's last Pricing benchmark, they're piling this on top of already being terrible about understanding the impact of promotions they've made or predicting the impact of future promotions they expect to run (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Understanding Pr ic ing's Impact
Source: The Pricing Paradox: Benchmark Report, April 2014
35%
43%
46%
74%
52%
54%
60%
90%
Forensic examination of breach data
Cross channel promotional effectiveness & price elasticity
Data security
Customer behavior and cross-channel purchase decisions
Percent Citing Non-transactional Data as "Very Important"
Retail Winners All Others
39%
44%
11%
22%
22%
39%
26%
26%
26%
29%
32%
47%
Forecasting the impact of potential pricing decisions
Measuring the impact of executed pricing decisions
Minimizing markdown spend
Coordinating with marketing on promotions and offers
Maintaining visibility into promotional profitability
Keeping up with competitors' prices
Pricing Operational Challenges
Retail Winners Laggards
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Beyond keeping up with competitors' prices, underperforming retailers in particular, feel challenged to both measure the impact of executed pricing decisions and also turn those insights gained into forecasts of the impact of potential future pricing decisions. Additional top pricing operational decisions are specifically promotions related: maintaining visibility into promotional profitability and coordinating with marketing on promotions and offers.
Given the growing importance in using non-transactional data for understanding customer behavior, (which should include consumer responses to promotions and offers), and the difficulty retailers have today in tracking actual promotional results and profitability, and finally forecasting potential future promotions decisions, we have become very concerned.
It appears retailers are committed to a very risky strategy: running more promotions, delivered via channels they don't understand well, with little visibility into how well those promotions are actually working, and little existing capability to solve past mistakes in future promotions. It's no wonder they feel less enthusiastic about how their price strategies help enable the business.
Creating Organizational Friction With Merchandising Marketing is plowing ahead though, and its activities have put incredible stress on its relationship with its previous supervisors, once called the Merchant Prince.
The story told in Figure 6 is both familiar and surprising. Particularly among the over-performers we call Retail Winners, friction between marketing and merchandising has become as frequently cited an operational challenge as predicting the impact of the myriad of price changes the company makes.
Figure 6: Fr ict ion Increasing Between Market ing And Merchandis ing
Source: The Pricing Paradox: Benchmark Report, April 2014
33%
38%
50%
22%
44%
42%
41%
31%
24%
28%
31%
31%
38%
45%
52%
52%
Getting stores to execute merchandising plans
Inability to identify new ideas quickly in a sea of customer information and execute on these
Managing the complexities of cross-channel merchandising
Getting an accurate picture of our current inventory position
Executing at a more granular level against our merchandising plans
Getting merchandising and supply chain to work together
Getting marketing in line to support merchandising plans
Holistically predicting the impact of future pricing, assortment and promotional decisions
Top Three (3) Operational Challenges Differ By Performace
Retail Winners All Others
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Further, this stress now outstrips more traditional concerns around execution by both Supply Chain and Store Operations departments. It’s one thing when plans are clear but execution is lacking. It’s quite another when the planning process itself becomes completely fragmented, especially when these systems were never designed to incorporate digital demand drivers.
On the one hand we can argue that marketing is no longer required to “get in line with merchandising plans” – the groups are now functional equals. But on the other hand, when you’re really not sure how effective your pricing policies have been in driving results and you can’t predict the impact of the promotions you’re already executing, adding new ones into the mix can only add more uncertainty and potential chaos across the entire enterprise.
The implication is not just about "getting along with others." As marketing is forced to implement more personalized promotions in immature digital channels, the impact might be small for any one individual promotion, but the cumulative impact over time is enough to disrupt merchandise plans and inventory execution. The impact is two-fold: stock-outs in unexpected places that limit a retailer's ability to capture demand, and unexpected negative margin impacts resulting from better-than-anticipated response rates to digital promotions – impacts that cannot be monitored or predicted, given retailers' current capabilities for doing either of these things.
When a retailer's merchant team devotes weeks to planning and monitoring execution of a merchandise plan, only to find that marketing's activities had unanticipated – and uncommunicated – negative impacts on both the retailer's overall results and the merchant's personal performance bonus, it's no wonder there is friction between the two groups.
The Bottom Line: Gross Margin Opportunities Start To Diminish RSR’s data has indicated for many years that the myth of “razor thin gross margins” is just that – retailers have consistently enjoyed gross margin increases over the seven years we’ve reported on them. Even during the Great Recession, continued downward momentum on the cost side and anticipated benefits from optimization technologies across price, assortment, and inventory, have helped gross margins increase and kept corporate earnings reasonably stable.
However, we found in this year’s merchandising benchmark study that those gross margin improvements becoming difficult for retailers to maintain (Figure 7).
Figure 7: Diminishing Returns?
19%
18%
62%
18%
33%
48%
Decreased
Remained the Same
Increased
Changes to Selling Gross Margin
2014 2013
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Source: Modern Merchandising: Managing Complexity With New Tools And Techniques, February 2015
There are many areas that can potentially impact a company's ability to impact gross margin. There is only so much cost a manufacturer can take out of a product before quality is compromised. In 2014, the strong dollar and relatively weaker Euro, along with challenges in Far East economies, also took their toll.
However, when combined with retailers' waning enthusiasm over the benefits their price strategies can provide in growing margin, and their complete lack of visibility into the impact of promotions – especially digital promotions – it seems that some of retailers' perspective on their ability to drive gross margin improvements reflects these internal challenges as much as their external ones.
A Dangerous Game If a retailer's price strategy is the fuel that drives the company's ability to influence demand, then promotions are the equivalent of pouring gasoline on the fire: the results are unpredictable and volatile, a combination that can lead to very negative unintended consequences.
Retailers who are experimenting with digital promotions, and especially those who are turning to more personalized offers no matter the channel, need to move sooner than later to close the digital promotions gap, before those unintended consequences grow large enough to impact the bottom line. Somehow, merchants and marketers must come together on a set of joint key performance metrics to stave off potential gross margin dollar disaster.
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Strategic Goals: Preconditions for Action
Retailers need to do something to close the gaps between marketing's actions and their impact on merchandising's plans. Unfortunately, closing those gaps is not as easy or straightforward as the industry would like it to be. To be successful, retailers first must identify the information they need to have before they can define a strategic response. There are two clear information gaps that must be addressed: identifying consumers' cross-channel paths to purchase, and understanding the impact of promotions on those paths to purchase.
Following Digital Bread Crumbs: Insights From Paths To Purchase Given all the excitement among retailers on understanding consumers’ path to purchase it is imperative to ask one core, critical question: What kind of insights can retailers gain from examining pre-purchase digital information about shoppers? These kinds of insights could be critical in predicting the potential impact of digital channel promotions on the rest of the business.
Sadly, as of this writing, no one really knows the answer to this question. Certainly the sheer volume of re-targeting, for example, implies that the propensity to browse a particular item leads to a sale with some level of frequency. But even in retargeting – a highly measured activity – visibility ends at the physical store's door. What percent of retargeted ads based on an online shopping cart lead to in-store sales? Today, retailers can only guess.
But the question is even more subtle than this. We have just posited transaction-based questions, where ads are served (and paid for) and products are purchased. But how many retargeting ads triggered an in-store visit where the retargeted item was not purchased, but an entirely different set of products were purchased? And how can retailers possibly measure that kind of impact?
Anecdotally, retailers who have been early adopters of personalization have told us that when they shifted their marketing budget away from mass campaigns to more targeted ones, they found negative impacts on unconnected measures – sending fewer, more targeted emails, for example, resulted in a higher conversion rate per email, but somehow at the same time foot traffic to stores fell.
Can the fall in foot traffic be isolated to personalized emails as the root cause? No. There are too many other things that retailers are doing at the same time to ever be able to isolate such a direct cause and effect. But these leading-edge retail marketers have shared a concern – a gut-level intuition – that the two are more related than they would like to believe. And so it may well be that even though consumers don't like to receive irrelevant promotions, those irrelevant communications trigger a wider set of awareness-related activities – like an unplanned trip to the store.
Until retailers are able to follow all of consumers' myriad paths to purchase – from pre-intention to post-transaction – they stand little chance of being able to make these connections. And without these connections, any success retailers have in anticipating the impact of digital activities will be accidental at best.
Understanding The Real Impact Of Promotions As we’ve demonstrated, in RSR’s benchmark surveys, retailers consistently report a fundamental inability to understand the projected impact of planned promotions, or even the actual impact of already completed promotions. This is true regardless of the channel they’re running those
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promotions in. We fall back on the old adage, “We know half of our marketing spend is ineffective: we just don’t know which half.” Frankly, we find this almost inconceivable in today’s era.
In truth, promotions are both measurable and predictable. Part of their predictability derives from their origination in digital channels, whether driven from generic email offers or sophisticated architected social media campaigns.
As retailers begin honing and targeting their promotions, these measurements will become ever more critical. Massively large promotions will be traded for smaller, more refined promotions. It is imperative to understand unintended consequences like halo effects, cannibalization, pantry packing and more before these promotion tactics are undertaken.
It’s Time For A Holistic View It’s time to stop looking at promotions in channel-specific vacuums. It’s going to become important to understand cross-channel impacts of these activities.
1. Understanding the impact of digital marketing and promotions on store sales. The silos between digital and physical channels must be destroyed to close the loop in this area.
2. Understanding the impact of physical channel marketing and promotion on digital sales. Similarly, it’s important to understand what the impact of an FSI, for example, might be on digital sales.
3. Understanding the impact of physical media moved onto digital channels. Retailers are posting their weekly circulars on their web sites, even as companies like Shoplocal and other coupon sites are posting offers from multiple retailers for comparison purposes on their own sites. What is the impact of those sites on in-store sales? The importance of this question is rising fast.
It is entirely possible that the flattening of gross margin may be tied to underestimating the impact of the cross-channel effects of channel specific promotions. Clearly retailers don’t know these answers. It’s time that they get an answer before they get more specific.
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Action Items: What Can Retailers Do?
As retailers gather the data they need and build the capabilities to turn that data into insights – for both understanding customer path to purchase across channels and the impact of promotions on those paths to purchase – there are specific actions retailers can undertake today.
Reduce The Friction Between Merchandising And Marketing The issues that arise between merchandising and marketing can in part be blamed on a lack of communication. As marketing rises in importance internally, a resulting division of labor appears to have occurred: marketing owns "customer" and merchandising owns "product." Promotions, as the intersection between customer and product, rapidly become the most visible area of conflict as a result.
Customer segmentation can serve as the bridge for defusing some of the tension, by creating opportunities for marketing and merchandising to engage in deeper understanding of each organization's plans. First, it's important to establish common customer segments across the enterprise. This alone can be a contentious exercise, but it's an important first step to ensuring common language when it comes to talking about customers. Exploring differences in how different groups view customers can become an important way of surfacing subtleties in understanding – and engaging with – customers.
Once a common language is established, the discussion then must center on sharing two sets of plan: merchandising's goals in terms of assortment by customer segment, and marketing's plans in terms of engagement by segment. By sharing these two perspectives, each side will discover both opportunities and challenges that lie ahead, whether it is a planned promotion that may hurt merchandising plans by driving a key traffic-driver item out of stock, or an assortment that does not meet the needs of a strategic customer segment that marketing has plans to aggressively target.
Design Cross-Organizational Measures For Campaigns Building large-scale capabilities to understand complex paths to purchase and promotions' impact on those paths can take a long time. But retailers don't need to wait around for those capabilities to take tactical actions today. If retailers limit their focused activity to a specific category and customer segment, they have a better opportunity to isolate the results of those activities, not just in terms of marketing or merchandising, but with the goal of identifying the unintended consequences that impact both organizations.
In the early days of cross-channel shopping, retailers employed very simple measurement strategies to get a feel for how much online influenced offline – by, for example, sending out an email with a special code for in-store redemption. The campaigns are more sophisticated, and the results that retailers want to measure are more subtle, but starting with this philosophy (a one-off code or campaign-specific tracking mechanism) can reveal opportunities to highlight those breadcrumbs critical to understanding shopper behavior along their paths to purchase.
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Appendix A: Relevant RSR Research
The Pricing Paradox, Benchmark Report 2014, April 2014
Retail Marketing 2014: On The Digital Road: Benchmark Report, September 2014
Modern Merchandising: Managing Complexity With New Tools and Techniques: Benchmark Report 2015, February 2015
Advanced Analytics: Retailers Fixate On The Customer, Benchmark Report, March 2015
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Appendix B: About Our Sponsor
SAP is the leading provider of application solutions for the retail industry. Real-time retail has been reimagined with the SAP HANA® platform. Innovation is the core of the next-generation applications from SAP. Every function is integrated, cloud first, and on a common platform to drive insights across channels based on a unified, comprehensive view of customers and inventory. SAP HANA delivers the consistent, personalized shopping experience customers demand and improves operational efficiency and margins. SAP helps retailers of all sizes to understand, anticipate and inspire their shoppers by providing a compelling shopping experience. The SAP® for Retail solution portfolio also provides specific solutions for retail companies in the food, fashion and hardlines businesses. Learn more about SAP at www.sap.com/retail.
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Appendix C: About RSR Research
Retail Systems Research (“RSR”) is the only research company run by retailers for the retail industry. RSR provides insight into business and technology challenges facing the extended retail industry, providing thought leadership and advice on navigating these challenges for specific companies and the industry at large. We do this by:
• Identifying information that helps retailers and their trading partners to build more efficient and profitable businesses;
• Identifying industry issues that solutions providers must address to be relevant in the extended retail industry;
• Providing insight and analysis about a broad spectrum of issues and trends in the Extended Retail Industry.
Copyright© 2015 by Retail Systems Research LLC • All rights reserved.
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