Shelf Intelligence

Are Weekend Blind Spots Bad for Your Brand?

Everyone loves the weekend. For brands, however, there’s cause for concern when the work week officially ends. Weekends are prime sales hours, but many brands have a difficult time getting visibility into what’s going on on the retail side of things during the weekend sales rush.

Gaining insights into sales, customer experience, and retailer compliance on weekends can be the difference between making the most of these days and leaving money on the table.

In this article, we’ll look at why weekend sales data is essential for brands, common issues in gathering data on weekend sales, and how brands can solve these problems.

Weekends are great for sales, and that’s why the lack of visibility into retailers can be so damaging for brands.

Why Weekend Sales Data is Important for Brands

Weekends are great for sales, and that’s why the lack of visibility into retailers can be so damaging for brands.

For example, how do you know if on-shelf availability during a high-volume time is at acceptable levels across your retail partners? Can you monitor promotional displays and end caps at the store level to see how they perform on weekends relative to weekdays? Are you able to identify critical business issues in real-time?

You know that your brand’s weekend sales data is crucial for understanding what’s going on in your retailers during peak times. Growth opportunities are always there, but without a complete data set, it’s hard to spot them reliably. A limited sample size makes it hard to draw robust conclusions that can drive action.

If weekend sales seem to be slumping, you need to know why. Similarly, if weekend sales are booming, how can you adapt your strategy to double down on what’s working if you don’t have any idea what could be leading to those results?

So what’s actually preventing brands from getting the data they need?

Common Problems with Weekend Sales Data

Getting visibility inside of your retail partners is difficult enough under the best of circumstances, but weekends pose unique challenges. Some of these core challenges include:

  • Spikes in sales volume: As foot traffic and sales volume spike, as they do on weekends, it’s hard to monitor and manage inventory levels, on-shelf availability, planogram compliance, display effectiveness, and more.
  • Lack of field team availability: First- and third-party field teams can’t get into retail stores every single day. You’re limited by the work week and your budget to get boots on the ground to monitor store conditions throughout the weekend.
  • Lack of associate bandwidth: Store associates have limited bandwidth to ensure full compliance with your guidelines as they deal with the influx of shoppers on weekends.
  • Lack of visibility into competitor behavior: How are your competitors faring on weekends? Are they overtaking you in prominence on the shelf? Are their displays winning customers over at a higher rate than you? It’s hard to tell if you can’t have a robust in-store presence on the weekend.
  • Lack of customer insights: Do you know how weekend shoppers differ from weekday ones? How do their point-of-sale and overall buying habits differ? Again, when you are unable to monitor what’s going on in your retail partners’ locations, you have to rely on intuition and incomplete data.

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How to Use Always-On Data Gathering to Master Weekends

Every brand would love to have teams on the ground 24/7, ensuring compliance and strong retail execution. Of course, that isn’t financially or practically feasible. That’s why it’s vital to get people where it matters most at exactly the right time and use a third-party solution to cover your gaps or highlight areas of importance.

Poor visibility into retail conditions makes it tough, if not impossible, to measure the performance of in-store promotions, merchandising, and sales. You might have the weekdays covered well, but having gaps on the weekends due to insufficient presence in your retailers means you’ll never have the full picture of what’s happening store-side.

One way around this is with a third-party retail auditing solution that can be an extra set of eyes and ears to keep tabs on brick-and-mortar execution.

The crowdsourced approach of Wiser’s retail auditing means that you can deploy shoppers in more store locations than possible with field teams. This lets you increase your reach and coverage of retail locations across the nation, quickly identify compliance gaps to fix, and have a steadier stream of store execution insights, even on weekends.

With the rise of eCommerce, brands are no longer as reliant on brick-and-mortar sales as they were in the past, but physical stores are still a vital part of a great omnichannel customer experience. Failure to make the most out of your in-store execution and visibility can hurt even the best brands.

Don’t let your customers’ interactions with your products be left to chance. Shore up your weekend sales data collection and make better decisions about how you put your best foot forward any day of the week.

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Better decisions can only come from better data.

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