Retailer-vendor category partners create best store-level planograms

Drug Store News, Sept 30, 1991

Retailer-Vendor Category Partners Create Best Store-Level Planograms

The new breed of vendor reps will be category experts, not just brand experts. Retailers continue to forge category partnerships with enlightened vendors, and leave parochial suppliers in second-class status.

The critical part of these relationships: vendors must understand the category emphasis of retailers, and bring relevant performance and trend information to the joint planogramming process.

Brand-thumping and competition-gouging days are history. The lesson learned from past retailer-vendor relationships is that trust is better than mistrust and adversarial postures.

To make this partnership work, vendors can't make key account calls with mere statistical presentations and untailored planograms.

The field sales force must be raised to a new level of sophistication - both through the hiring process and training programs. This escalation cannot happen too soon, because retailers are looking now for proactive category managers with the ability to bring planogramming down to individual store level.

As retailers move towards store-specific planogramming, individual store managers armed with in-store PCs will look to communicate with sales reps about their custom needs. The two will jointly determine orders and link-up via modem to the headquarters-based space management system or service center, which can produce hard-copy printouts for reset.

Vendors who prepare their field staffs first and best will have a decided advantage over their competition in the store-level decision process.

Clearly, the decentralization of planogram decision-making will place new demands on vendor reps; only those properly trained will be prepared to deal with this effectively.

This is not to say the challenge exists only for vendors. Retailers who best prepare their store managers for the challenge will have a critical advantage over less progressive merchants.

Store managers who are well-equipped and well-trained will be able to react instantaneously to their competition - and when interacting with equally prepared vendor reps, will be able to fine-tune categories at will.

The bottom line: Not only will retail store managers be able to take rapid, smart initiatives that keep their competition off-balance, they will finally be able to provide the store level input so necessary to create true store level custom planograms.

This further makes electronic space management a competitive tool as well as an analytical aid.