Can you reduce product assortment? Of course you can!
Stephen NeedelAdvanced Simulations LLC, United States
INTRODUCTION
Category management has now been part of our vocabulary for well over a decade. The philosophy of category management, as espoused in the early 1990s by such experts as Brian Harris (Harris, 1992), exhorts us to:
Treat categories as strategic business units. This means that a retailer needs to consider each category as a profit center, maximizing sales and profit per linear foot/meter.
Treat the categories as part of an overall retailer's strategy. In Harris' schema, the buying, merchandising, marketing, finance,...