What is in this article?:
- GM Data Portal to Launch in Q1
- Keeping GM Shoppers
"Our mission is to give retailers the data to defend and justify the GM department."
— Mark Deuschle, chief marketing officer and vice president of business development, GMDC
Keeping GM Shoppers
With mass, dollar and other channels courting GM shoppers, the GMDC/Nielsen web platform will help food retailers better compete for GM sales, said Dewayne Rabon, vice president of general merchandise, health and beauty and family care at Winn-Dixie/Bi-Lo, Jacksonville, Fla.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to compete in this area,” said Rabon, who chairs GMDC’s Education Leadership Council.
Losing GM shoppers is financially dangerous because once they go to another channel for, say, kitchen gadgets, they may start buying meat, produce and other groceries there, too, he said.
“You need a presence in GM to keep the shopper in your store,” he said.
Read more: Supervalu to Use Segmentation Tool
Managing many GM categories has been difficult, however, due to a lack of uniform coding practices, he said. Often, one retailer will classify an item under one category, while another retailer lists it differently.
“The hierarchies are all over the place,” said Rabon.
The GMDC platform makes GM more manageable by breaking down categories into subsets, helping category managers to determine what’s driving sales.
“Nielsen is building modules so that we can start looking at categories in ways we never could before,” he said.
This, in turn, will help retailers make better decisions in areas like shelf space, assortment, adjacencies, off-shelf merchandising and pricing.
“Once we have the right offerings, we will see certain categories turn around [in sales],” said Rabon.
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