Strategies for Retail Marketing. MBA Marketing study material.

Planning marketing strategies for retail business is an immense decision process especially when retailers are not getting enough footfall for the store. The process involves the strategies from the target market, positioning, retail format to sustainable competitive advantage. Strategies for retail marketing is a process of making wise decisions on every marketing action involved in the retail business. Retail store strategies are nothing but the decision-making process while applying retail marketing mix.

Following are the points to be considered while planning the strategies for retail marketing.

·        Target Market:

Target Market is a part of market segmentation where the whole market has divided into a subgroup according to the common features and selecting or focusing on the appropriate group(s) for smearing various marketing resources and retail marketing mix. Targeting a market allows the retailers to make a choice of product assortment, level of service delivery, a place to trade etc. Target market helps to grow business with little competition and more profit margin which leads to consistency in competitive advantage.

·        Retail Positioning:

Positioning in retail businesses is how the retailer positioned in the final market by differentiating itself with product or services offerings. Positioning assists the retailers to raise the competitive advantage by differentiating itself from competitors and can readily recognizable by its target market.

·        Retail Format:

The format of a retail store is a general nature of the business operation in terms of marketing mix such as range of product and services, pricing strategies, promotional programmes, store design etc. There are many types of retail store formats which are explained in the previous post such as supermarket, department store, shopping malls, convenience store etc.  

·        Sustainable Competitive Advantage:

Competitive advantage is an outperformance of store over competitors. It only exists when the store in retail business consistently outperforms other stores in the same market. The store is able to maintain it for a long period of time then it can be a sustainable competitive advantage for the store. Long-term competitive advantage should not be easily duplicable by the competitors. It is an ability of a store that difficult to exceed.   

Strategic Retail Planning Process:

The strategic retail planning process is a set of steps that retailers take in order to figure out how to target, positioning the market and how to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage. Following are the steps for strategic retail planning process:

1.      Define Store’s Mission and Objective:

At first step, retailers need to make a mission statement which involves a broad description of retail store objectives and long-term plan to undertake.

2.      Conduct a Situational Audit (SWOT Analysis):

A situational audit is a very common strategic tool to analyze store’s strength, weakness, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) in a retail environment.

3.      Identify Strategic Opportunities:

To improve the sales dimensions, searching for the opportunities is a key step. By getting and evaluating the strategic opportunities it concludes the abilities of retailers to establish a bearable competitive advantage.

4.      Establish Objective and Assign Resources:

After evaluating the opportunities it’s time to place objectives or aims for each and every opportunity to reach towards a main retail objective.

5.      Develop Retail Mix:

In this step, a retailer has to invest the resources into a retail marketing mix. Retailers need to make a decision on a product, price, place to distribute and promotional activities.

6.      Analyse the Performance:

In case of failure of any strategy, a retailer needs to study each step taken to analyze the performance and change the plan accordingly to meet the objective.