Can you reduce product assortment? Of course you can!

Stephen Needel

A main feature of the category management process is the search for an optimal assortment. Improving the assortment is assumed to lead to faster turns, higher profits, and greater customer satisfaction.

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,...

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