Forget Foes, Embrace Excellence: Transforming Your Approach to Product Line Reviews

Product line reviews often can be competitive and even adversarial between retailers and manufacturers, with an emphasis on winning and losing that clouds the path toward productive, long-term partnerships.But it doesn’t have to be that way, according to Ged King, chief executive officer of SFW Results, who will speak about how product line reviews can become win-win-win partnerships for those in the hardware and home center business, during the Path to Purchase Expo on Sept. 20 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, IL.“Nobody wins unless everybody wins,” he says. “You have to get out of the battle side of it. It’s hard work, and it’s stressful, but it’s got to be win-win.”King will appear with two colleagues at SFW—Dave Geren, director of strategy (and a former vice president of marketing for Lowe’s), and Ryan Neely, director of digital—as well as Mark Herbek, founding partner and executive director of Home Improvement Research at Cleveland Research Company.“We’re going to talk about how to use observational research, formal research, and then the product line review process itself to partner with retailers, help them learn and come up with an optimized solution that sells more stuff,” King says. “Everybody wants to do that—the manufacturer, the retailer—it’s the one thing everybody agrees on.”The presentation will begin with Cleveland Research’s insights into the macroeconomic picture of retail that touches on the current state of key drivers in the U.S. economy like housing and employment, King says. They will also discuss the impact of the presidential election on consumer behavior, which seems to be less than one might think, he says.Then the group will present research on consumer behavior conducted in partnership with North Carolina State University. Called the American Home Study, this work tracks all the major categories in home improvement, how they’re changing and how people are feeling about them, King says. “What’s the difference between buying a lawnmower, or a screwdriver [in terms of shopper orientation]?” he says.That part of the presentation will also look at generational differences in home center shopping. “People want to know, ‘What about Millennials? Why don’t they buy houses? Why do they switch jobs every two years?’ ” he says. “The Millennials came out of college, watched their parents lose all their money in the stock market, and they don’t trust the same institutions. You have to know all this stuff.”The panel will then home in on product line reviews, covering a four-part process framework designed to understand “how to deliver delighted customers to your business and your brand,” King says.That starts with observational work that includes store walking, in-depth interviews with consumers, and analysis of point-of-sale and digital data. “You take this whole lump of stuff, and you come to some preliminary conclusions that are really hypotheses on what are the behaviors that matter,” he says.Secondly, retail and CPG partners should use quantitative techniques like product receptivity studies or behavioral segmentations to examine attitudes and behaviors and try to prove the hypotheses, King says.“The secret to this whole thing—and nobody does this, you’re at a product line review, trying to win $100 million in business, nobody does their homework,” he says. “We just get our clients ready to know more than anybody else, so the buyer feels like you can’t live without them.”The presentation will drill down into hardware and home center category-level trends in product line reviews—and trends that should be happening but are not, King says. For example, most American homes have 32-inch-wide doors, yet wheelchairs cannot fit easily through anything less than 36 inches, which hasn’t changed much despite the aging of the Baby Boomer generation. “That’s a trend that should happen, but it’s not happening,” he says.Finally, SFW will unveil during the panel a new tool called Page One that can help people better understand the digital portion of the path-to-purchase. Based on the premise that shoppers are connected to their devices even while in store, the tool leverages Google data to provide a quick snapshot of consumer behavior, and could be quite useful in advance of a product line review, King says. “At the end of the day, all of this interesting stuff to talk about has to be useful,” he says.

Forget Foes, Embrace Excellence: Transforming Your Approach to Product Line Reviews

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