Category Management is the process of building an assortment that meets customer expectations and maximizes customer satisfaction. The assortment in each commodity group is in constant transition as customer expectations evolve.  Category Management is one of the most important factors for a company’s success in having a customer in the store, who is not just a customer wandering between store shelves, but a buyer of products and services. We most often have a customer who actually stocks some products in one chain and goes elsewhere for other products. Most market players would like to be first and one stop store for their customers. Why is this happening ? Most market players would like their point of sale to become the first choice, and ideally, most of the products needed by the customer would be purchased from a single provider.  We would need to ask ourselves whether we know which product categories should be a magnet (destination group) for our customer. Do we have a marketing strategy for this group ? What about the other product categories ? What marketing strategy do we have for the other groups ?

At this point I would like to share my expertise in the field:

• Identyfication of the customer we want or should have ?
• Choosing relevance and placement in the store for individual commodity groups.
• Strategy for commodity groups and individual sub-categories and products in sale
• Analysis and optimization of the assortment (checking the quality of products, their selling prices, the size and quality of packaging, the visual design of the product, and the selection of the target assortment and its quality) in each commodity group in relation to the competition
• Customer decision tree for commodity groups, i.e. how pre-selected products should be arranged in the shelf to attract customer interest and maximize turnover/profit from the store shelf.