Category Management has such a broad sphere of influence over the retailers that if done right, everything else can become a walk in the park. Below are the 9 levers of category management that can be pulled to grow channels, categories and your brands:

1.       Range: By far the most critical. You cant sell what you don’t stock plus nothing drives the bottom line like distribution. Ensuring the right mix of SKUs, including core products, new innovations, and value vs. premium offerings. Is the range complying with retailers own CSR objectives. Is there fair coverage of sustainable & ethically sourced products.

2.       Navigation: To help shoppers find the product they are looking for the important considerations are

a.       adjacencies or the logical physical flow of products and categories next to each. These are also critical when looking to cross sell

b.       signages: these could range from signposts for the categories or the needstates within the categories

How easy it is for shoppers to find and choose the right products (e.g., planograms, aisle flow, signage). Ofcourse executing these are easier said than done as a lot of retailers have a “clean store policy” meaning they want to minimize disruptions to the shoppers’ journey by not talking too much to them

3.       Education: Educating shoppers through shelf communication tools, or shopper marketing channels about the product, category, how to use etc. Again, clean store policy comes in the way plus retailers want to packaging to play a big part of this role.

4.       Price: Optimizing pricing strategy (EDLP, premiumization, tiered pricing, competitive benchmarking) for category. Retailers generally have this for their themselves so this is again a lot of hard work if you want your category to go against the grain.

5.       Promo: Discounts, bundling, and seasonal offers. How much is deep enough? Frequent enough. What mechanics work.

6.       Planogram (incl Facings): Allocating shelf space based on sales performance and shopper behavior insights. An important consideration here is ensuring products are in stock, in the right channels (online & offline), and at the right locations. Sometimes specific shelves instore can carry more stock. At times, there could be innovative solutions for very high selling lines for restocking shelves.

7.       Innovation: Introducing new products or reformulating existing ones to drive excitement and meet emerging needs.

8.       Occasion & Mission: Aligning product placement and marketing to shopping missions (e.g., impulse buys vs. planned purchases).

9.       Macro Space: which category should get how much space.

What have I missed?