Collaboration exists all around us. It serves as a way for people to work together under a shared purpose or goal. When groups effectively collaborate, processes are improved, communication is enhanced, and results are achieved.
Within the retail space, collaboration is essential for all business functions including Supply Chain, Operations, and Promotions.
For Promotions in particular, collaboration plays a critical role in the planning process – both from an internal (Marketing & Merchandising) and external (Retail & Vendor) perspective.
Our two-part blog series will dive into the current state of collaborative planning and how strategic collaboration improves promotion performance.
The first blog of the series will focus on internal collaboration – specifically with merchants and marketing.
Internal collaboration exists between merchants and marketing when managing promotions. It is important to note that each party has distinct objectives when running a promotion.
While Merchants aim to optimize merchandise objectives (e.g., increase product margin), the Marketing team strives to maximize advertising objectives (e.g., boost the returns on ad spend).
Despite these differing objectives, both parties collaborate together to achieve a shared major goal – meeting the campaign objectives. (e.g., grow private label).
When planning a promotion, merchants and marketing often collaborate through various channels and systems, such as email, excel, and legacy systems.
Today, collaboration is often done in a siloed manner. For example, when planning a circular, the merchant for a particular category is given instructions (from marketing) to provide two slots on the front page. The merchant doesn’t have context to the overall goals and decisions of the event such as what the other slots will feature, or if there is an opportunity to feature complimentary products.Additionally, both merchants and marketing are making decisions without forecasted performance.
Here is a visual representation of today’s collaborative workflow between merchants and marketing:
Though this current system isn’t necessarily broken, there are pain points retailers should be aware of:
While the current method of collaboration between merchants and marketing works, there are two major areas that can improve internal collaboration:
Today, the current workflow operates like this: Marketing → Merchants → Marketing
But what if there could be more room for collaboration and coordination? Here is a visual representation of what this relationship could look like:
To ensure the above workflow runs smoothly, it is important for merchants and marketing to move away from disparate collaboration and instead work together in one space.
One system provides efficiency and overall financial benefits for both Merchants and Marketing.
Discover how Cognira’s PromoAI solution provides Marketing and Merchants with a single platform to collaborate and coordinate on Campaigns, Events, and Promotions.
About Cognira
About Cognira
Cognira is the leading artificial intelligence solutions provider for retailers. Cognira is passionate about helping retailers unlock valuable, transformative business insights from their data.
We know retail. We love data.
To learn more, check out our website at cognira.com or contact us today to get started.
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