Retail Express’ Ed Betts explores the reasons the Golden Quarter is so difficult for retailers, and explains how AI-driven retailing can drive strategic and tactical benefits which lead to bigger profits
The Golden Quarter is a pressure pot when it comes to planning. The 100-day countdown to Christmas encompasses the majority of the year’s key fixed seasonal events, and also squeezes together retail’s most profitable period with its most critical planning window. The Golden Quarter demands that retailers not only take every measure to trade out of the year cleanly, but also that they ratify their strategy for the year ahead.
This period is monumentally difficult, and it is increasingly easy to argue that the Golden Quarter is more challenge than opportunity. The past two years have seen late-year trading happen under a veil of financial uncertainty, with increased costs pressing down on suppliers, retailers, and customers alike. There has been no great reversal of financial fortunes in the past year and the new government’s ‘tough decisions’ mean trade during 2024’s Golden Quarter will certainly not be characterised by a spending free-for-all.
Retailers will be challenged at every turn to meet their customers’ needs and expectations while maintaining their own bottom line. Forward planning is critical. Joint business planning, in most cases, must be arranged with suppliers, margins negotiated, and the dotted line signed by the start of the next financial year.
Strategy versus tactics
Squeezed, as they are, by the vast amount of pressure the Golden Quarter brings, retailers must be keenly cognisant of the relationship between strategy and tactics. Even with a winning strategy, there are forces that retailers cannot control. It doesn’t matter if a retailer has rolled into the Golden Quarter fully prepared: volatility is a fact of life.
Supply and inventory hiccups must be dealt with tactically. Tweaks must be made to future planning which has, in the course of business, not quite hit the mark. If a retailer is outplayed, surprised by a competitor with a better price or a stronger promotion, that retailer cannot simply cling to its plan defiantly. It must respond fast with effective solutions.
But those beholden to legacy systems and siloed data will struggle to move quickly. Finding key up-to-the-minute promotions and, most importantly, delivering on them when it counts, means working with the latest information and the strongest insights. The pace of business between a retailer and its suppliers must match the speed of the market – and today’s market moves faster than ever, particularly at this time of year.
Relieving the pressure
At such a stressful time, retailers must work hard to maintain their tactical acuity at all levels, while high-level executives must also be free to make high-level decisions. These set the course for the year ahead but, in legacy retailing, execs cannot always offer overall strategy the attention it deserves. A competitor makes an unexpected move, a supplier hits a speedbump, and bosses are forced to spend countless hours on minute tactical mechanics, refining and revising plans over and over, searching for any way to maintain margins and hit profit targets.
But why do this at all, when a better solution is available? Data, properly analysed, plots a course away from market share dips or worrying sales figures in the long term, and can offer immediate resolution to short-term troubles. Analysis reveals the reasons and helps suggest the solutions. With the right tools, results happen in a fraction of the time and with a fraction of the effort. The bottom line is key – with the right data retailers can lift sales, lift profits, and create offers that resonate.
The best of both worlds
With AI-based tools offering deep insights into both the retailer’s own data and that of the markets, retailers can essentially generate foresight. AI presents clear top-down predictions about the performance of their business from a strategic standpoint. And although retailers cannot remove volatility, they can make every effort to control it. Thanks to the speed of AI working with live data, they can discover enough intimate, immediate knowledge of their own operations to be able to make tactical decisions quickly and confidently.
This dual-pronged approach means AI has become one of the key drivers of modern retail techniques. Algorithmic tools can be implemented piece-by-piece on the areas that matter the most to a business, a gradual process which helps unite different business functions and, in turn, leaves retailers more organised and prepared for whatever might happen.
A vision of the future
If this year’s Golden Quarter proves to be as difficult as some analysts expect it to be, affected retailers must strongly consider their strategic direction in the years to come, because the advantages of AI-driven algorithmic retailing have already helped many of the world’s largest retailers to smooth and optimise their business practices year-round.
Those seeking to grow against such overwhelming opposition cannot stick with a business plan which inherently leaves them at a disadvantage. One’s strategy cannot simply be to stay afloat, when the opportunity to thrive is there for the taking.
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