WHAT’S NEXT FOR ECOMMERCE, INTERNET ONLINE SHOPPING: RETAIL STRATEGIST CONSULTANTS EXPLAIN

Interestingly, most top consulting retail strategists are professionals who develop and execute strategies for companies to drive sustainable growth and profitability. Core focus areas would be understanding consumer behavior, identifying market opportunities, enhancing the brand experience, and formulating data-driven decisions as retail strategists across sales operations ranging from merchandising to real estate.

Connect with one, and you’ll hear experts describe duties such as:

Consumer Insights: Conduct quantitative and qualitative research as retail strategists to gain understanding into target customer demographics, values, priorities and shopping habits. Surface leading insights that can inform brand positioning and merchandising tactics. Common tools include focus groups, customer interviews, surveys and sales data analysis.

Competitive Benchmarking: Research competitor offerings, pricing, promotions, store formats and brand positioning. Identify gaps in the market that retail strategists see and opportunities to win over customers. Provide recommendations on potential differentiators.

Merchandise Planning: Create product assortment strategies and merchandise plans per season. Determine which categories to expand or reduce based on sales data, market trends and customer preferences.

Pricing Strategies: Develop pricing frameworks and promotional cadences that retail strategists recommend across different product ranges in alignment with company margins and positioning against competitor offerings.

Store Development Planning: Construct real estate expansion plans and sales forecasts for potential new store locations and markets based on demographic data and impact modeling.

Customer Experience Strategies: Pinpoint opportunities to improve store layouts, service models, loyalty programs and digital experiences to deepen customer engagement and satisfaction.

Performance Tracking: Establish retail KPIs across sales, traffic, conversion rates, average order value and inventory. Continuously monitor metrics to identify areas for improving efficiency.

Omnichannel Strategies: Develop seamless integration strategies that retail strategists advise connecting in-store and online retail across merchandise, promotions, fulfilment, payments and customer data.

The retail strategist plays a cross-functional leadership role to drive long and short term growth strategies based on consumer-centricity. Thought leaders combine strong analytics abilities with creativity in experience design and nimble execution. Top pros keep their fingers on the pulse of external trends while guiding business decisions focused squarely on exceeding shopper expectations. That produces sustainable customer loyalty and sales increases over time.