1.17: Strategic Planning in Retail
- Classify the general steps of strategic planning in retail
- Company strengths and weaknesses
- Personal values of the key implementers (i.e., management and the board)
- Industry opportunities and threats
- Broader societal expectations
The first two elements relate to factors internal to the company (i.e., the internal environment), while the latter two relate to factors external to the company (i.e., the external environment). These elements are considered throughout the strategic planning process.
For example, many retailers are trying to respond to customer migration from brick-and-mortar stores to online retailers. What situational, monetary, or product mix is drawing customers away from traditional stores? Imagine a local grocery store chain is trying to compete with Amazon pantry. The local store decides their goal is venture into the world of e-commerce by integrating an online website for customers to order products online, but can pick up their orders at the store. How did this local chain come to this solution and how would they go about it?
Here is a quick look at the steps in the strategic retail planning process.
- Define the business mission
- Conduct a situation audit. This can include a market attractiveness analysis, competitor analysis, self-analysis
- Identify strategic opportunities
- Evaluate strategic alternatives
- Establish specific objectives and allocate resources
- Develop a retail mix to implement strategy
- Evaluate performance and make adjustments
Here is a video that walks you through the first five steps of the strategic retail planning process. Afterwards we will discuss how to develop the retail mix to implement the retail strategy as well as evaluating performance.
You can view the transcript for “What is Strategic Planning? Process, Model, and Steps” (opens in new window).
Contributors and Attributions
- Strategic planning. Provided by : Wikipedia. Located at : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_planning#Strategic_planning_vs._financial_planning . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike
- Business Strategy/Overview of Strategic Planning. Provided by : Wikibooks. Located at : https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Business_Strategy/Marketing_Plans_and_Strategies . License : CC BY-SA: Attribution-ShareAlike