Galleria, provider of customer-centric merchandising solutions, announced that Giant Eagle will deploy its Behavioral Cluster Planning solution for consumer insight and analysis. By clustering its stores based on product and category performance, Giant Eagle expects to more accurately meet customer demand throughout its grocery chain. Giant Eagle is one of the largest food retailers and food distributors in the U.S., operating 222 stores on the east coast.
Through a combination of bottom-up and top-town methodologies, the solution accounts for critical factors including local demographics, sales patterns, store sizes and store locations. Giant Eagle can then determine the ideal amount of clusters for each category to ensure the benefits of localization are balanced against the costs of implementation.
The need for this type of enhanced forecasting is alive and well, as retailers are increasingly challenged to provide more personalized experiences to differentiate themselves from competitors. According to the November 2010 Aberdeen Research report titled Race to Top-Line Revenue: Rapid Sales Forecasting Improves Sales Effectiveness, “retailers that perform rapid forecasts are 76% more likely than their slower counterparts to formally define sales stages and create weighted sales forecasts based on the trajectory and timing of each deal under consideration.”
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An existing customer of Galleria, Giant Eagle is currently using Galleria’s Customer-Centric Merchandising and Promotional Display Optimization solutions and plans to roll out the Behavioral Cluster Planning solution in 2011.
“We continuously work to better understand our customers’ wants and needs to provide them with the best shopping experience possible,” said Dan Schnorr, Senior Director of Retail Space Planning at Giant Eagle. “We continue to have great success with Galleria’s other merchandising solutions and look forward to deploying Behavioral Cluster Planning to further optimize sales opportunities and help ensure we have the right products for our customers in store.”
