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Tough Love: An In-Depth Look at Retail Pricing Practices
April 8, 2013
Retailers continue to escalate the number of price changes they send to stores and other channels. Their field human resource infrastructure groans under the sheer weight of the work effort involved in keeping signage and tags up to date, but pressured by perceived consumer price sensitivity and increased competitive pressures, these price changes continue. This [...]
Retail Pricing in a Post-Channel World: Benchmark Report 2012
April 10, 2012
RSR Research has conducted benchmarks of retailers’ pricing strategies since 2007. During that time, we have seen retailers swing from trying to achieve Everyday Low Price (EDLP) to hyper-promotions as the bottom fell out of consumer demand, to a panicked response to consumers’ latest ability to compare prices, whether between online and store or between [...]
Twenty-first Century Merchandising Takes Hold: Benchmark 2011
August 15, 2011
In 2010, data gathered from RSR’s annual Merchandising Benchmark Report showed a dramatic change in Retailers attitudes towards merchandise operations management. At that time, we defined seven core tenets of 21st Century Merchandising. This year, we gave retailers the opportunity to grade their progress in adopting these tenets. How do they rate themselves? What are [...]
Optimizing Price in a Transparent World: Benchmark 2011
April 15, 2011
RSR Research’s latest report, “Optimizing Price in a Transparent World: Benchmark 2011,” RSR’s fourth annual benchmark on the topic, finds today’s retailer challenged by a sophisticated, price-sensitive consumer. As consumers research online for the best deals before leaving home or use their smart phones to find the lowest prices in stores, they are not only [...]
The Promotion Trap: Why Promotions Are Now a Critical Cross-Organizational Issue
June 1, 2010
Promotions have undergone a strategic shift in the last two years, created by the combined forces of economic pressures; a re-learning of the importance of promotions as a traffic driver as retailers move away from other, less effective price strategies; and new requirements imposed by the drive to localize assortments. However, these new drivers behind [...]
Getting Back to Good: Retail Pricing 2010
January 15, 2010
Today, the economy has stabilized and most economists report that the recession is over. As the dust settles, it appears that the ability to maintain gross margins and reduce inventory levels served many retailers well, and pricing capabilities helped play a critical role in saving the “retail bacon.” However, going forward, a new challenge emerges: how to [...]
Going Local: Emerging Best Practices in Pricing and Promotions
January 25, 2009
Over the course of 2008, the global economy moved from merely “challenging” to some of the most difficult conditions in almost seventy years. Retailers, who generally pride themselves on their ability to react to changes in the business environment, found themselves barely able to keep up. In this environment, “pricing” is no longer a game [...]
Managing Expectations: Lessons Learned from Promotion Optimization
April 15, 2008
Given the unique challenges facing promotion optimization, along with the extremely high interest from retailers for these solutions, RSR took a look at the results of its recent benchmark report, “The Next Generation of Pricing” to see if early adopters of promotion optimization solutions had a different perspective from the rest – if there were [...]
The Next Generation of Pricing
January 15, 2008
Price optimization solutions have evolved from new technologies that only leading-edge retailers were willing to adopt to now a nearly expected part of the merchandising systems portfolio. That evolution has come in the midst of a rapidly changing retail environment – consumers realized that new channels like eCommerce gave them a lot more power in [...]