Specialty

Introduction:

The specialty Market covers luxury goods, books, office, gardening and many more. AMP2 is uniquely equipped to serve this range of products for bricks and mortar, catalog and e-commerce channels. The market has consolidated over the last two decades and many groups now operate a range of different outlets to serve a wide range of customer segments and geographical areas. Today’s retail software needs to support many different go-to-market strategies. Store formats, business structures, customer differentiation, assortments, multiple retail and wholesale channels, competitor impacts must all be capable of great flexibility in a fast changing business and economic environment and where for most the impact of Wal-Mart is a constant challenge despite its inclusion in another sector. Wal-mart knows no barriers!

AMP2 is a product of its time, attuned to these important needs and challenging the old silo structures where pricing, promotions, markdowns, advertising, media, loyalty, marketing and merchandise management are undertaken in different systems often without knowledge of each other’s decisions and actions. Consequently many retailers still don’t know the combined effect of all the parts of their go-to-market offer for a particular period or market. Even if they were to deploy the most advanced optimization on prices and promotions, if they haven’t brought these disparate systems together in one system, they will still be operating sub-optimally.

Merchandising Philosophy:

The specialty retail sector has adopted a variety of methods and processes to undertake its work. Most common has been the adoption of a business philosophy to manage more commercially the whole marketing, merchandising, buying and selling activities of a retailer’s business. AMP2 helps retailers manage this business approach and makes it operational, bringing together the many functions that make up the overall buying and selling elements of retail. Some sections in the specialty retail area have not adopted category management but use other commercial management methods to provide financial analysis and rigor to their businesses. These are fully supported by AMP2.

Almost every major market has become very competitive in recent years irrespective of company size or format. This has made it necessary for retailers to rethink the methods and processes they use to operate their buying and selling activities. The need to make the most of a particular market or assortment has never been greater; the frequent changing of merchandise ever more important; the need to respond to competitor activity never more necessary. The low or even negative sales growth of the last two years, brought on by the worldwide economic downturn, puts pressure on the specialty retail sector as disposable incomes are squeezed plus there is the ever constant nightmare of an expanding Wal-mart. These factors are now working against the sector and profitability will be severely challenged for years to come. Retailers need to think about these consequences as we all fight even harder for each dollar or market share decimal point.

Application of Science:

Retail Express’s use of science and technology brings merchandising systems into this new decade and properly supports the category management and commercial management philosophies with their much greater focus on analysis and evaluation with a hardnosed commercial and financial approach. This is represented in AMP2 with the category / department P&L which brings together the impact of all prices, markdowns, incentives, promotions, adverts, events, promotional displays, flyers, coupons, loyalty points, kiosks, mailers etc. into a real time simulation that understands the effects of each touch point on the customer and the interaction of different touch points. Thus AMP2 presents the category or merchandise manager with a financial go-to-market P&L before committing to the whole proposition so that it can tuned to obtain the best results. Of course this financial impact analysis is used in conjunction with the AMP2 Optimization tools to achieve the best mix of the strategic positioning on price/promotions and best execution in regard to the competition and the market/budgets in the current week/period etc.,
AMP2 is the solution where science and merchandising meet – smarter science = better results.