Within the retail industry, merchandising plays a crucial role in identifying with a company’s target consumers. If operations are executed with a focus on visual merchandising, the final presentation should blend together and incorporate a well thought-out process that the target audience can appreciate.

Cultivating a strong visual merchandising culture in your organisation is critical for the development of a field strategy that can be embraced by all levels of management. If your organisation does not value this area, the outcome will be apparent in your company’s structure. Without merchandising compliance management, it may be hard to cultivate this type of culture and reap from its strengths.

Role of merchandising compliance management

Fortunately, many companies recognise the significance of creating an inviting and comfortable shopping environment. Store layouts aim at enhancing the customer shopping experience through careful design that includes visual displays, an appropriate level of well placed communications and product merchandising, creating a tidy, convenient, and customer-friendly atmosphere.

In order to constantly achieve these effects, companies must regularly evaluate merchandising compliance. This offers the following benefits:

• Maximises profitability by keeping an eye on product positioning, validating merchandising plan-o-grams are correctly set
• Ensures that all promotional signage and sales events are displayed across the system
• Evaluating whether all product displays are functional and complete
• Identifying discrepancies between product tag prices and marketing plan prices
• Assessing product adjacencies for positioning and performance
• Monitoring company standards to ensure well organised processes

In many cases, a retailer will hire a designated person with the responsibilities of developing and executing the merchandising strategy at retail, possibly with a team of 3rd party field merchandisers. The team leader is in charge of creating and overseeing the development and execution of strategies, ensuring compliance.

To successfully enforce strategies, the leader and merchandising team should:

• Have a deep understanding of the brand’s DNA and merchandising strategy in light of its' target consumer, in order to identify its objectives, goals, and motivation. This applies on a company wide basis as well as category specific level.
• Stay updated on industry-related trends: There are always new ways to do things in merchandising with regard to product presentation, signage, store design, fashion, and fixturing. The team needs to be aware of new trends, especially those pertaining to their target market.
• Stay current on new technologies that capture store conditions, manage plan-o-gram updates, validate resets and measure overall compliance
• Attend training programmes and seminars: Training offers one of the best ways for ensuring that everyone involved is adhering to the same procedures and standards for servicing stores.

Lastly, a successful merchandising strategy should be developed around the organisation's DNA, market research, consumer insight, vision and mission, so everyone on the merchandising team can align their efforts to their company’s goals, and in the process, boost compliance.