Retail Marketing: More Inputs, Less Insight

October 2012 Integrated Solutions For Retailers

By Nikki Baird and Brian Kilcourse, managing partners, RSR Research

Now that new and much more granular signals can be harvested from the digital channels, what will retailers invest in?

Since the widespread adoption of POS systems in stores in the 1980s, the POS bar code scan has been a reliable proxy for consumer demand. Looking back, it’s easy to see now how revolutionary that new data was. Retailers could rationalize their assortments, optimize their supply chains, and perfect the mass merchandising model. Those who excelled at it (e.g. Walmart and Tesco) were able to scale their businesses to previously unimagined sizes.

But retailers know that the POS scan isn’t really the best or only indicator of demand. For example, if an item isn’t in the assortment, a retailer is challenged to understand what could have sold. But by and large, it worked; consumers bought what retailers offered.