You may have noticed a familiar face in eMarketer’s recent report, “Using Marketing Data for Merchandising: Optimizing Inventory Levels and Launching New Products.” Jim Hertzfeld, one of our chief strategists here at Perficient Digital, weighed in on the benefits of applying marketing data to influence not only marketing and sales efforts, but also strategies and planning throughout the enterprise, including in merchandising and inventory decisions.
For many companies, particularly retailers and others with both physical locations and digital channels, emphasis on creating a more seamless experience between both worlds is rising. For digital marketers, this presents unprecedented opportunity to push data and analytics efforts beyond the confines of the marketing department into other areas of the company, such as merchandising and product development.
As the report points out, the companies that utilize data gathered through their marketing efforts see major advantages, including greater efficiency in inventory and an improved customer experience across their various channels.
One of the points Jim emphasizes in his interview with eMarketer is that effectively integrating marketing data into merchandising processes requires a lot of testing and learning.
…it’s not the data access that’s tricky, but identifying the most relevant data to optimize against.
“There’s all kinds of relevant data, or data that could be relevant,” Hertzfeld said. “It could be geolocation data; it could be sales data, preference data or planning data. What we’re trying to do is close that loop so that if we put a promotion in the checkout, we can measure how it aligns with that particular product, but also that particular region or location, and also how it aligns with that user’s preferences.”
Interested in learning more about using marketing data to make smarter merchandising and inventory decisions? Visit eMarketer.com to view the full report and complete interview with Jim.
