NRF’s new playbook offers holiday help
Retailers will reveal their 2015 holiday strategies in the weeks ahead and as they do so the National Retail Federation is offering a powerful new resource filled with industry best practices to benchmark against for this year and beyond.
The newly released document is called the 2015 Holiday Planning Playbook and was compiled by top retailers over the course of the past year who served on various NRF councils focused on retail industry disciplines.
“NRF is in the business of serving retailers large and small, on and offline, and given the importance of the holiday season to all retailers, we thought it necessary to provide even more resources as it relates to the biggest, and most wonderful time of the year,” said Vicki Cantrell, senior vice president of communities and executive director of Shop.org. “ The Retail Holiday Playbook offers important lessons learned as well as useful insights from retail leaders. Given that every facet of a retail company, including the e-commerce and digital teams and evenloss prevention and supply chain side of the house, has a stake in the holiday season, we felt it imperative to offer this unique look at the holidays as it relates to retailers year-round efforts.”
By early September, most retailers 2015 holiday plans are well established as they’ve been in the making for nearly eight months by this time, the Playbook highlights some do’s and don’ts for this season, and also serves as a valuable benchmarking tool to understand how leading operators are thinking about key industry challenges.
“The inaugural NRF 2015 Retail Holiday Planning Playbook builds on input that each of our councils – CIO, CMO, Loss Prevention, Shop.org and Supply Chain – provided in January while the 2014 holiday season was still top of mind,” according to an open letter to the retail industry signed by Rosamari Sostillio, chair of NRF’s loss prevention committee and SVP of asset protection and Shop.org chair Peter Cobb, co-founder and EVP of marketing for eBags. Others signing the letter included Strategic Supply Chain Council Larry Bergman, director of supply chain and operations at Boscov’s, Chief Marketing Officer Council chair Kathy Thomas, chief strategy officer with Half Price Books and Chief Information Officer Council chair, Janet Sherlock, SVP and CIO with Carter’s
“NRF asked two questions: what do you plan to do differently for the 2015 holiday season and what do you expect to invest in this year to that end?”
Accordingly, information contained in the Playbook focuses on topics such as:
• How are retailers thinking about supply chain issues, such as port management and working with shipping partners?
• What role will search, email and social media play in the marketing and promotion mix?
• How are CIOs, CMOs and digital executives thinking about the customer’s in-store shopping experience and how will online information influence those in-store sales?
• Which investments are retailers making this year in omnichannel fulfillment options?
• What steps are loss prevention executives taking to protect customers, staff and products?
To download the Playbook click here.