By Sai Verano
Retailing is an industry that is growing and growing each year. People nowadays are engaging more in retailing from online selling to the typical direct selling strategies. If you're a retailer, you want to be the first in discovering what you're customer is expected from you in your industry. The first one always get a big advantage over its competitors especially in business. You have the luxury of time to penetrate new markets or retain the current ones and the time to research more on existing trends and discover new ones. In retailing there are Three growing trends that you may want to study for your company's success.
- Growing diversity of retail formats. Retailing before is what we call "door-to-door" where salesmen go to different places and knock on your door to offer something that might be of your interest. If you've watched the movie Door to door, you'll see the emerging trends in doing business and retailing per say. We now have companies doing outsourcing which expands the retailing format. From personal selling, we now have home TV shopping, online shopping, vending machines and direct selling. The key to being ahead of the competition is to utilize your resources especially the internet. Though research shows that only 10% of online shopping contributes to a company's overall sales, you can utilize this media for other strategies for your company's goals.
- Increasing industry concentration. Historically, retailing is a local business where you go to your local convenience store to buy something. Now that new retailing formats are emerging, the demographics of your target market may also have grown or will grow in the near future. Many retailers have combined traditional formats to the new ones. As a result, the number of retailers in a given format is decreasing because they are continuously expanding their merchandise and services having them classified as another retail format. Another factor that contributes to this increase is through acquisition of big companies of the small ones and even merging of two big/small companies resulting to another format depending on the products and services of the newly combined firms.
- Globalization. From the local business in your neighborhood, firms are now expanding their market. Companies have been investing stocks in different countries and starting new branches and outlets in other regions. Through this new markets are being discovered and more sales are generated. Let us take Jollibee, a fast food restaurant in the Philippines, as an example. From putting their little ice cream parlor in Cubao, they have penetrated the fast food market in the entire Philippines so much and have extended their products and services to other countries like United States of America, Brunei, Hong Kong, Vietnam and Saudi Arabia. The factors affecting globalization are as follows:
- Maturation of domestic markets. Large companies have saturated the local market so much and expansion and extension is needed to meet their goals.
- Skills and systems. Through the integration of information technology in businesses nowadays, retailers are said to be more equipped in managing their businesses and effectively satisfy customers' needs and wants. Retailers today also have a deeper understanding on international knowledge and experience through acquiring offices across the globe. Thus, studying new customer behaviors based on their culture and traditions.
- Trade barriers. The NAFTA (North America), ASEAN (Southeast Asia) countries and the Europen Common Market have taken significant steps in lowering trade barriers. In the Philippine setting, the government have lowered tariff taxes to imports and have lowered down these barriers to invite more investors in the country.
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