Practical Solutions

Grocers and CPG companies find success as they embrace the evolution of category management.

- Jim Dudlicek

Retailers aren’t selling categories, they’re selling solutions — that’s a phrase we’re hearing more often these days. 

“Maintaining relevance today means simplifying the shopper’s trip — not by inundating them with more category choices, but by presenting disparate products as the holistic answer to an immediate need. Enter solutions management,” Wendy Liebmann, CEO of WSL Strategic Retail, wrote in a recent edition of the New York-based marketing consultant’s WSL Weekly Highlights.

With that, Liebmann declared category management as we’ve known it dead, urging that a solution-based approach rise from its ashes.

She’s absolutely right. It’s not enough just to sell stuff anymore, not with the fierce competition traditional grocery retailers face from physical and digital channels.

To compete, traditional retailers need to sell the “why” instead of the “what,” because there’s so many places to get things. That’s likely why Cyriac Roeding, co-founder of digital shopping app Shop kick, based in Redwood City, Calif., thinks that, while “the future of retail looks really bright, the future of physical retailers looks really dark.”

Even traditional retailers acknowledge this challenge. Steve Henig, VP of digital for Keasbey, N.J.-based Wakefern Food Corp., speaking at Nielsen CoNEXTions with Roeding, predicted that within a decade, some center store categories like health and beauty care will be sold exclusively online.

Creating experiential destinations will be key, and many retailers are doing so, for HBC and other categories, to give people a reason to go to the store.