TALES FROM THE DARK SIDE...

Anonymous

I recently attended a conference where many of the LP Executives expressed the need for "partnership" and cross-functional training with different disciplines within their company, and actively recruit from them into LP. Specifically mentioned multiple times were recruiting from disciplines like HR, Operations, Finance and others. Glaringly missing was "marketing and merchandising".

From a "marketer" point of view, it begged the question "why"? I have spent my 20-year career in the marketing discipline, including a decade with a company that invested over 30% of their revenues in building and protecting their consumer brand.

When marketing consumer branded products, we used dozens of ROI models and dashboards that showed how our marketing mix investment increased traffic at stores, unit sales, revenue and profit. Not one of my metrics included "shrink", or "theft", even though we would invest enormous amount of our budget on anything that had the opportunity to provide a marginal lift on our bottom line. We would plan promotions with stated objectives to increase traffic at stores, to convert certain percentage of visitors into shoppers, and we would invest enormous amount of dollars on consumer research consultants who would spend their day just observing shoppers trying to determine their decision process when choosing between "brand A" and "brand B". We would position our "hot merchandise" on endcaps or close to the entrance/exits with the logical goal of attracting more shoppers and increasing sales through impulse buy. Open displays were a no-brainer. We would scheme all kinds of innovative merchandising ideas to increase sales that now I realize caused many of you LP professionals to grow gray hairs prematurely, because we never once considered shrink/theft as a challenge. We were never even aware of it.

As my responsibility now shifts back to market LP tools that protect high-risk, high-theft merchandise, usually branded merchandise similar to the one I used to promote in the past, I have gained new perspective of the challenge both LP professionals and Brand Champions face within a retail chain. There are many standard tools in LP that can help marketers and merchandisers, from video analytics, people counters, secured intelligent display solutions to name a few, that could probably be financed or subsidized with "marketing dollars". I can only imagine how much more effective our marketing programs would have been if we had had access to the wealth of research material available in today’s LP tools. I would even have helped pay for them since most likely it would have cost a fraction compared to our investment in the army of "researchers" at stores. I guarantee we would have made different merchandising decisions.

As the LP profession continues to evolve from catching bad guys into more of a business-savvy role, I encourage you to seek out and recruit talent from the marketing discipline. The experience will only serve to improve your company by providing a critical perspective in the tightrope balance between being shopper-friendly and protecting your assets. It may also save your sanity as the next merchandising scheme is unveiled...