By The Insight Into Action

The modern trade, which consists of Hypermarket, Supermarket and Convenience store, has developed rapidly in past years. After growing business via horizontal expansion, more and more retailers are facing decreases of sales and margin per outlet due to hard competition within the relevant retail format. Retailers and suppliers are looking to improve their business performance and meet consumers' needs by utilizing consolidated marketing strategies.Category management, which is a customer centric approach that help to better understand consumer and transfer consumer value, has become key component of retailer and supplier competitive advantage business strategies. To understand shopper's needs and behavior is the start point of this management process. Because of some special characters of category management process, it is not widely launched by Chinese local retailers or manufacturers. Scan data availability and integrality, level of management, internal management processes and power of execution could be barriers to implement this advanced process.How to turn myriad shopper insights into actionable strategies and to achieve business target would be key components of the following article. It would be based on practices and cases that had been implemented in various retailers by Coca-Cola China Beverages Ltd. It covers approaches of shopper study, qualitative and quantitative shopper researches, strategies and tactics development and consumer feedback to success factors.Firstly, theoretics of marketing and category management process would be discussed. Secondly, to do investigation in shopper research and shopper marketing based on real cases. Thirdly, to review the category strategies development progress, tactic models and business results. Lastly, to discuss the development stage of category management and barriers of turning insights into actions.