The need for retail audits

With economic conditions the way they are, ensuring consumers receive a positive shopping experience and encouraging them to make the purchasing decision while in the showroom has rarely been more important. All consumer-focused businesses need to be aware of the many challenges that come with achieving effective and consistent brand delivery. It is important to ensure that you are creating relevant consumer interactions that happen at the right time and consistently during the purchasing process. This means avoiding the use of mixed and confusing messages, misalignment between consumer brand perceptions and the retail experience, and a lack of consistency in how the brand is applied within the retail outlet.

An Audit can challenge how the brand is performing in the retail space, while posing searching questions or even prompt you to reconsider tactical objectives. It can also provide visibility into the execution of in-store campaigns and close the gap between what was planned and what is really happening within the retail space.

Example objectives

• Improve brand delivery management through feedback of in-store activities
• Improve merchandising standards
• Enforce Corporate Identity compliance model across all outlets
• Gain competitive edge through reliable insight and data

As we explain in this White Paper, it is important to develop a robust and fully considered retail audit in order to identify potential issues and improve brand delivery in the increasingly important retail space.

Mastering successful retail audits

According to recent research from customer insight agency, SMG, 65% of retailers believe that the in-store experience defines their brand, although two thirds admit they are still delivering a fractured retail experience. Implementing a retail audit can be a daunting process. The starting point for all business is to understand that effective auditing involves more than the deployment of a simple mystery shopping activity.

To give your business the best possible chance to gain access to the right data you will need access to specialists with robust analytical tools if you are to gather data that will provide you with meaningful insight. Such specialists will help you to uncover the critical issues hidden within your current retail practices, which will allow you to understand and adapt future policies and behaviour.

You should consider the following questions:

• Who will own the audit process internally?
• What issues are you looking to identify or solve?
• What will be the scope of the audit?
• Who will be responsible for remediation efforts?

Deciding what to audit

You should consider how your consumers engage with your brand at every touch point within the retail environment. It is important to deliver a consistent experience of the brand every time they come into contact with it, whether through your displays and point-of-purchase material, customer service standards or after-sales support. It is critical to give consumers the brand experience they have been conditioned to expect through investment in pre-purchase marketing campaigns, such as television, press, outdoor and direct marketing. Once inside the retailers, however, it is important to remember that there are many components that make up the shopping experience.

Key questions to ask:

• Is the brand identity consistent with the latest corporate guidelines?
• How well are brand values consistently reinforced within the retail environment or during product demonstrations?
• Is information available to consumers in meaningful ways and in the most important places?
• What is the current status of branded displays ?
• Are compliance levels for the brand’s corporate identity meeting agreed standards?
• How robust is our current inventory reporting on display assets?

Unlike basic mystery shopping activities, retail audits provide detailed critiques that give clarity on the key issues, inform strategy development and improve standards. Getting an expert assessment, in-depth analysis and objective feedback of what’s happening to your brand delivery - and identifying the reasons why - is essential if you are to unlock the potential of your retail presence.

Importantly, you need to understand where operational constraints of your business might be hampering even your best-laid plans. Is a lack of resource causing marketing literature to not be displayed correctly? Have displays been neglected, not cleaned, not maintained? Is your retail experience too complex to navigate? Problems such as these can cause your brand to fall at the final hurdle during interaction with consumers. Being able to identify them is vital.

An Audit can challenge how the brand is performing in the retail space, while posing searching questions or even prompt you to reconsider tactical objectives. It can also provide visibility into the execution of in-store campaigns and close the gap between what was planned and what is really happening within the retail space.

Example objectives

• Improve brand delivery management through feedback of in-store activities
• Improve merchandising standards
• Enforce Corporate Identity compliance model across all outlets
• Gain competitive edge through reliable insight and data

As we explain in this White Paper, it is important to develop a robust and fully considered retail audit in order to identify potential issues and improve brand delivery in the increasingly important retail space.

Mastering successful retail audits

According to recent research from customer insight agency, SMG, 65% of retailers believe that the in-store experience defines their brand, although two thirds admit they are still delivering a fractured retail experience. Implementing a retail audit can be a daunting process. The starting point for all business is to understand that effective auditing involves more than the deployment of a simple mystery shopping activity.

To give your business the best possible chance to gain access to the right data you will need access to specialists with robust analytical tools if you are to gather data that will provide you with meaningful insight. Such specialists will help you to uncover the critical issues hidden within your current retail practices, which will allow you to understand and adapt future policies and behaviour.

You should consider the following questions:

• Who will own the audit process internally?
• What issues are you looking to identify or solve?
• What will be the scope of the audit?
• Who will be responsible for remediation efforts?

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Deciding what to audit

You should consider how your consumers engage with your brand at every touch point within the retail environment. It is important to deliver a consistent experience of the brand every time they come into contact with it, whether through your displays and point-of-purchase material, customer service standards or after-sales support. It is critical to give consumers the brand experience they have been conditioned to expect through investment in pre-purchase marketing campaigns, such as television, press, outdoor and direct marketing. Once inside the retailers, however, it is important to remember that there are many components that make up the shopping experience.

Key questions to ask:

• Is the brand identity consistent with the latest corporate guidelines?
• How well are brand values consistently reinforced within the retail environment or during product demonstrations?
• Is information available to consumers in meaningful ways and in the most important places?
• What is the current status of branded displays ?
• Are compliance levels for the brand’s corporate identity meeting agreed standards?
• How robust is our current inventory reporting on display assets?

Unlike basic mystery shopping activities, retail audits provide detailed critiques that give clarity on the key issues, inform strategy development and improve standards. Getting an expert assessment, in-depth analysis and objective feedback of what’s happening to your brand delivery - and identifying the reasons why - is essential if you are to unlock the potential of your retail presence.

Importantly, you need to understand where operational constraints of your business might be hampering even your best-laid plans. Is a lack of resource causing marketing literature to not be displayed correctly? Have displays been neglected, not cleaned, not maintained? Is your retail experience too complex to navigate? Problems such as these can cause your brand to fall at the final hurdle during interaction with consumers. Being able to identify them is vital.

Identifying the issues and delivering insight

Until you know where and how your consumers interact with your brand, you will not be in a position to create an audit framework that will deliver analysis and insight into what’s really happening within the showroom to the depth required to provide you with authoritative feedback on what changes need to be made.

Examples of data that can be collected:

• How many variants of brand identity exist within the retail space?
• Are dealerships positioning the correct number of new cars within showrooms and with minimum space around them?
• Are corporate desks and chairs being used in sales consultation area/customer lounge?
• Are retail windows free from unauthorised stickers?
• Are parts accessories and merchandise units clean and well stocked with only corporate items on display?

A common mistake made is to only critique the most prominent and visible elements that go into creating brand delivery, such as exterior corporate signage or customer service standards. By looking beyond these more obvious touch points and investigating how retail teams manage every aspect of brand delivery, it is possible to make real in-roads in improving retail performance. Are your showrooms easy and enjoyable to shop? Are products presented efficiently, to maximise retail space? Are point-of-purchase materials being correctly sited, properly maintained and reaching their return on investment potential?

Using retail audits to improve brand standards

An effective retail audit programme can provide marketers with full visibility of retail outlets, allowing them to compare the visual and financial performance across nationwide retail estates.

Retail audits can improve brand standards in three specific ways:

1. It can help identify the signs of failure in your current brand delivery
2. It can help begin the process of making brand delivery improvements
3. It can enable you to cascade learnings throughout your business quickly and efficiently

No piece of brand communication operates in isolation within the retail environment. When combined effectively, they can offer powerful opportunities to interact with consumers, to drive buying behaviour, to increase brand value, and help you sell more. Regardless of which sector you operate within, consumers want to engage with your brand seamlessly. And each time they engage with you they will expect the experience to be the same – like developing a relationship with a close friend, where they come to know and love your personality.

How will retail audits help to improve compliance?

Investment in ever-more varied and sophisticated communications activity within the retail environment is potentially being wasted if, as industry figures suggest, compliance levels for retail marketing activity is as little as 40% (POPAI UK & Ireland). The issue of compliance is a complex one, and the reason why more and more brands are turning to retail audits to identify failings in brand delivery and ensure that return on investment is being maximised.

Whilst in the past, much of the retail marketing material produced would have simply been delivered in to stores for staff to display; the pace of technological development within P-O-P advertising solutions now makes this an impossible task, with costly P-O-P units featuring digital integration often demanding a team of specialist skilled installers. You only have to walk around a handful of stores and it quickly becomes evident why compliance levels are so low. Whether it’s the latest freestanding display unit that’s languishing, abandoned in the corner; P-O-P units carrying literature that are out of date, or in some cases units themselves that are faced away from oncoming consumers.

Some of these more basic compliance issues are, seemingly, common sense, but they are all too often things that the untrained eye fails to see. And this is often why return on investment can suffer the most. No matter how much time and effort designers continue to put into developing brand delivery policy and standards, the reality is that retail staff skills often lie in customer service and sales, and not brand management.

Conclusion

Just as you challenge whether your advertising is delivering the right message, it is essential that your retail presence is similarly on-message and delivering on its objectives too. Well-executed retail audits should not be a one-size-fits-all approach. Every brand, its values, its retail dealership estate, and its consumers are different. Professional retail audit teams use a wide range of information gathering techniques to provide qualitative and quantitative measurement data including photographic reporting, statistics recording and comment-based findings.

Without tailoring the audits to the specific needs of your brand, a true understanding of how it is performing in-store will be largely lost, making it impossible to drive lasting change. Ultimately, having good insight puts automotive marketers back in control of how their brand is delivered within showrooms, allowing you to share key data between individuals in your business that have responsibility for brand delivery and giving you the power to develop more effective long-term retail marketing strategies.