All the recent hubbub over a certain Connecticut homemaker’s image and brand is only the tip of a major merchandising movement that is starting to consume the home furnishings field. As national brands continue to recede from the category—they are pretty much null and void in soft home categories, like sheets and towels, and hold a tenuous position at best in some smallappliance and housewares classifications—the ascendency of private and captured brands is nearing unprecedented levels.
The spectrum goes from the extreme of Kohl’s where virtually the entire home department is proprietarily branded, to stores like Target, and now Penney, where soft home is all private and hard home is mostly national brands—to ones like Macy’s and Bed Bath & Beyond where the assortments are still…well, assorted. [Read more...]
In my previous article, I discussed how traditional metrics—like comp sales performance—often work against retailers in their efforts to improve store performance. Continuing that conversation, we now take a look at how customer-centric metrics empower corporate leaders, field leaders, store managers, and individual associates to more proactively help their customers buy more and more often with a higher sense of satisfaction through quality in-store interactions.
