Our Retail offering has helped several retailers understand their customers, develop customer acquisition strategies and build high-performance operations. Below is an overview of our experience and process to work with clients to deliver lasting value.
We serve clients in five functional areas:
Corporate Strategy – identifying opportunities and defining strategic direction for incremental growth through optimization of decision processes and best practices.
Organization – maximize performance with optimization of people, processes and internal structures.
Marketing and Research – determining specific strategies to manage brand portfolios brands, ensure marketing spend effectiveness, and strengthening marketing capabilities.
Customer Engagement – deeper market research, consumer insight, optimization of internal sales- related processes, team performance, channels, and capabilities to identify and grow the most profitable customer base.
Operations – ensure best practice performance in processes, functions and optimization
Featured Research
Growth in a Recession: Consumption smoothing refers to an individual’s preference to maintain a certain standard of living over time. All things constant this means an individual will use savings as a tool to compensate when incomes are low or save more when incomes are high thus “smoothing” their consumption patterns. Download the Arcus_Retail_Best_Practices Report for growth in a recession.
Featured Case study: Customer research and Brand strategy
Scope: The scope of work on this engagement included an attitude and usage study for a grocery retailer retailer. The market for frozen and dry foods has moved towards emerging ethnic cuisines linked to a premium for “ready to eat” foods, a move away from “ready to cook” and “cooking from scratch”. Three dynamic food segments were identified with extensive qualitative research.
Opportunity: Identify new growth vectors in the food industry for emerging cuisines.
Recommendations: Consumer preferences for types of food have changed significantly as a result of time constraints, introduction of new ideas by recent immigrants, frequent global travel andmore openess to experimentation. As a result, the market for froen and dry foods has moved towards emerging ethnic cuisines linked to a premium for “rready to eat” foods, a move away from “ready to cook” and “cooking from scratch”. Three dynamic food segments were identified with extensive qualitative and quantitative research.
Results: Following extensive qualitative research, a new brand platform and business strategy was identified. Thereafter, marketing concepts were tested with customers and prospects.
Growth and Optimization Services
Strategy and Growth: We work with retail clients to capture substantial share of the value created by the industry, in part by accelerating growth through proven customer acquisition strategies, new formats, channels, and categories. As product life cycles in retail shorten, it has become critical for retailers to look at new approaches to renewal. We help retailers design, and deliver high performance retail formats through best practices and processes
Marketing & Customer Experience: We focus on helping retailers create customer-centric operations that are positioned to reach the most profitable customers with stronger brands, more effective marketing communications, and durable customer relationship management.
Merchandising & Category Management: We help clients structure effective assortment and category strategies, while creating substantial improvements in merchandising and category management processes. We achieve these objectives by applying deep customer insights and retail knowledge.
Multichannel retailers: We work with multichannel retailers and pure play e-tailers to design strategies, improve operational performance, and put in place effective multichannel organizations and processes to optimize performance across channels.
Pricing & Promotions: Today it is more important for retailers to make effective pricing, promotion, and assortment decisions. Our integrated value driven approach helps retailers create integrated programs that cover promotions,private label, pricing, loyalty programs, range architecture, and value cues.
Contact us to discuss a change management plan to transform your organization or for a complimentary presentation on a business problem your team would like to solve.