Retail Marketing Management

HE PRESENTATION AND THE INTRODUCTION PRESENTATION I learned marketing at my father’s bakery counter, a business that combines industry and retail. At the bakery, I learned to observe customers and experience the greatest of all marketing lessons: to understand in order to serve. When I decided, at age 18, to work at the bakery, I had my father’s first lesson: you must know well what you sell. I started a course on bakery and learned to develop products. I didn’t used to prepare them, but I acquired the condition of creating them and monitor their execution. The products were carefully designed and tested before being offered for sale. It was necessary to please customers, to stimulate the taste and, above all, to motivate the repurchase. I’ve learned that price is value, because when a product was in fact approved, the consumer was pleased to pay for it. From an early age, I lived in the bakery concept of retail attractiveness radius, because the ability to attract customers from the bakery did not exceed 500 meters, just when a competitor was sometimes stronger. I learned to study different and creative possibilities of taking advantage of the flow of traffic, which was not in our favor because the unique, traffic flow was from neighborhood to downtown, in other words, people passed by car going to work, not home, which certainly hindered the sale of bread. I remember well once, negotiating with an ice cream supplier, we had to change our counter because, by his determination, the fridge with his brand should be visible to car passers. I learned that day, the importance of harmony in the relations business to business, terminology adopted years later to define the commercial relationship among companies. At the bakery, distribution logistics were learned with our bakers who delivered bread on bikes with speed and skill to reach that bread still warm to their end customers or resellers. The bakery has taught me the importance of marketing relationship because the whole neighborhood knew my father and his employees. They, in turn, they knew every customer by name, especially those from the book, a primitive and valuable database, now called database marketing. I learned the value of the bakery tasting and scent of the environment to stimulate the perception of value by customers. And at that time, the brand was only a set of letters and figures. People did not think of smells or sounds as the components of brands. Some years after this “school” and graduating from college, I started my academic career, and began to teach and write based on what I had experienced and what I believe: the strength of industry and commerce, and in the healthy relationship of exchange between buyers and sellers. The sum of these experiences led me to approach with CDL - Chamber of Shopkeepers of Fortaleza, and gave me the opportunity to talk and write about retail marketing in various media. This book is, therefore, at once, the result of experiments, the extent of marketing reflections and tangibilization of my great pleasure to teach. And my love for marketing. The Author INTRODUCTION In some measurement, all organizations do marketing. The issue is that few do so systematically, while other sporadically and even intuitive. Although in the title of this book there is the exposition of its focus on Marketing Management in Retail, it aims to provide guidance on business concepts and practices for any kind: • guidance in the development of marketing practices that make possible the construction of competitive advantages and brand of value; • concepts that give theoretical guidelines expressed herein; and • practices addressed through success stories that serve as a benchmarking for other organizations. Initially we present approaches to define and to show MARKETING ACTIVITIES, why and how to practice them. Then the FUNCTIONS RETAILERS are addressed and their importance in the distribution of products and services. The focus turns to the construction and management of MARKS and excellence in SERVICES as a way of adding value to branded products and organizations. CONSUMER BEHAVIOR is then discussed, including specifics of the female and child market. Aspects relating to STORE ENVIRONMENT are treated with emphasis on solving recurring problems in retail, such as QUEUES CASHIERS, including in SMALL RETAILS. Communication through the SALES PROMOTION and MOBILE MARKETING are dealt below, as well as the communication actions less commercial, NONMARKETING considered. For the market activities to gain systemizing in its planning and execution, it is presented a proposal MARKETING PLAN by which one the company MARKET POSITION can be defined. Finally, we present SOME USEFUL ADVICE to readers in the management of their marketing organizations. Good reading, and good business!