Page 121 - DMGT551_RETAIL_BUSINESS_ENVIRONMENT

Retail Business Environment

Notes
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Caution The main elements of a retail store mix are:

The store’s location
Merchandise assortment
Pricing policy
Customer service mechanism
Visual merchandising

Personal selling efforts
Advertising efforts
The store’s internal and external environments.

Strategy Implementation and Control

It is concerned with the designing and management of retail system to achieve the best possible
combination of human, financial, physical and service resources of a retail store; to achieve the
formulated objectives, without timely and effective implementation also requires scheduling
and coordination of various retail activities.

Further, the spirit of teamwork is an essential part for the success of strategy implementation. If
the retail store’s strategies are competitive, marketing efforts are as per demand, but the sales
promotion employees are not taking it seriously or are ineffective, the result will not be up to
the mark. The implementation of new retailing strategies sometimes require changes in the
way of functioning and duties that can lead to resistance from employees. Therefore, stores
should take positive steps to reduce this resistance to change and to convince the employees that
it in the long term will be beneficial for both the store and the employees.

Strategy control deals in three basic concepts

Inspection
Detection
Correction
It means after implementing the retail strategies, a retailer should assess how effectively the
strategies are being implemented, how far the strategic objectives are being achieved and what
has been left to be achieved in the store’s objectives list. Therefore, retailers inspect the
implemented strategies from time to time and detect any fault in the implementation of various
retail elements. If any deficiency is found during the inspection process that has to be corrected
with immediate effect without any further loss to the store.

Task Examine the retail strategy of Planet M and Levis in India.

Alternate Strategies

Given that the objectives are well articulated, resources are well managed but when it comes to
implementation due to sudden change in internal or external environment, the old concepts or
formulated policies become invalid. Now what should a retail manager do, this is not an

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