What’s In Hardlines Retailers’ Merchandise Planning Blind Spot?

It’s no secret that consumers have completely altered the way they shop in the past few years. But their love affair with powerful, personalized and increasingly mobile technologies has affected few retailers as much as those selling complicated, relatively high investment merchandise.

Will the consumer know more about which blouse she’s likely to buy than her favorite store’s buyer? Perhaps. But she will definitely know more about the couch she wants to buy for her home, or the cordless drill she plans to give as a gift than virtually anyone in the retail demand chain ever predicted.

As such, hard goods retailers are in a tough situation, and there is much that lives in their blind spot. This series seeks not only to expose those blind spots, but also to surface some ways to bring those issues into focus and mitigate them.

For starters, retailers know they have a merchandise planning problem, and for those selling hard goods, it’s not just that they share the same dirty data problems that everyone has: their pain is compounded.