The global COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted consumers worldwide, causing changes in their buying behavior and shopping habits. In the beginning of 2019, panic buying set in, resulting in empty retail shelves. While retailers and suppliers struggled to keep up with the drastic increase in demand for essential goods, the global supply chain disruption resulted in unavailability to enough stock.
The buying habits of consumers have also been severely affected. For example, consumers would rather opt for alcohol-based hygienic hand and body washes instead of the usual fragranced ones. Since many people faced salary cuts and unemployment, consumers became price-sensitive and opted for basic affordable goods with longer shelf life over fancy luxurious brands.
Another point worth mentioning is the increasing popularity of online shopping and eCommerce websites, since it limits consumer’s exposure to public places. However, this can severely affect retailers since reduced foot traffic results in decreased sales.
The above mentioned factors clearly explain why retailers across the world are forced to rethink their spaces and services. For brands and stores that thrive to survive, will need the right technology to plan and implement merchandising strategies quickly and accurately so that they can keep shelves fully stocked. Hence, they are relying on data-driven planograms to redesign and repurpose retail spaces.
Planograms are visual merchandising tools that provide diagrammatic representation of the store layout with special focus on product placement. Apart from being a visual representation of a store’s aisles, point of sales and displays, a planogram can exactly dictate where each product should be placed to maximize its selling potential. While appropriate product placement and improved sales are the basic reasons why retailers use planograms, there are a number of benefits that a planogram can provide- reduced out of stocks and better inventory control, maximum utilization of every square foot of space, and making better product positioning decisions.
Planogram merchandising strategies adopted during Covid-19:
1.Today, consumers visit a retail store with specific purchases in mind- be it a well-planned grocery shopping or a quick visit to grab essential goods. Here, planograms can help retailers in understanding customer demand and design merchandising strategies with respect to most requested products like face masks, hand sanitizers, canned food, cleaning supplies etc.
2.As consumer demand fluctuates, changes take place in their shopping behaviors too. This ultimately leads to a change in assortment and product sales performance. Here retailers should be able to adapt quickly to sudden increase or decrease in category sales. This can be achieved by generating data-driven planogram with latest sale data.
3.Larger per-visit spending indicates that customers are spending more time at the checkout counters. This can result in long queues causing social distancing challenges. Here retailers can use planograms redesign their checkout areas to ensure social distancing norms are followed while also placing few important impulse goods like face masks and pocket hand sanitizers in customer’s view.
Conclusion
Since COVID-19 has severely affected brick-and-mortar retailers globally, retail merchandising and design have become important than ever before. Planograms are simple yet effective tools to improve sales and profile while streamlining overall retail experience.
