Retail marketing depends on learning what customers need and want in the marketplace.
The central idea behind retail marketing is ensuring that a company creates products a customer needs or wants, products the customer is willing to pay to own. Some companies have retail marketing departments within their office while others outsource marketers to research and market their product. Using diverse approaches to studying consumer behavior, marketers inventing creative ways to attract shoppers to a product.
Basics
The essence behind retail marketing is to develop merchandise and services that satisfy particular customer needs. Beauty, travel, clothing and food products advertised online, in print and on TV undergo marketing analysis and research to find out if consumers will want the product and how much they are willing to spend to have it. Retail marketers must supply the product or service at prices that will produce profits for that brand.
Customer Needs
Retail marketers make customer needs their priority. If shoppers seem to only be interested in environmentally friendly makeup products, any cosmetics company still selling animal-tested products will go under. Retail marketing researchers study how customers use products and how they like to shop. Retail marketing is only profitable through correctly anticipating, identifying and satisfying customer needs and wants.
Strategies
According to Lars Perner, Ph.D., in the department of marketing at the University of Southern California, market research ensures that companies produce what customers really want and not what companies think they want. New products generally start off slow in the marketplace before spreading to more consumers.
Retailer marketers keep in mind that, when introducing a new product, companies need to be financed enough so that they can remain in business until their product hits big. Retail marketers understand the importance in pleasing initial customers because shoppers are, in turn, responsible for spreading the word about a brand.
Research
Two kinds of market research help companies and advertisers decide what to create and attract an audience to it. Primary research is research a marketing firm designs and administers itself. Having a volunteer taste-testing kinds of chocolate or makeup brands, for instance, tells marketers which types consumers prefer overall.
Secondary research involves using information that others have already put together, such as demographic statistics showing what age group watches the most television in the evening. Retail marketers use that information to sell their product at those commercial time slots.
Making Profit
The most important concept behind retail marketing is that the product sells and creates a profit. If production exceeds demand, or the product advertising makes false claims a consumer will spread bad press about, the project fails and lots of money is lost. Retail marketing mixes both an urgency to sell a product and a tasteful and a truthful--though often exaggerated--communication with the public.
