Industry Challenges
A perfect storm of factors—such as changes in consumer behavior, the emergence of large and powerful rivals, excess retail-selling-space capacity, consolidated and strong suppliers, and complex sourcing—are shaping a new competitive landscape in retailing. In such an environment, leaders in the industry face a number of key questions:
How do we become the destination for heavy spenders in our category?
How do we use transactional point-of-sale and loyalty-card data to better understand consumers and better serve them?
How do we ensure the seamless experience across channels and formats that consumers are now demanding?
How do we determine the right portfolio of products, services, formats, and locations for future growth?
How do we take advantage of scale while still maintaining local market relevance?
How can we be as lean as possible in operations—and make the right tradeoffs between cost and revenue in areas like store labor and inventory?
How can we work with suppliers to reduce purchasing costs, especially in the current climate?
BCG Competencies
From customers and competitors to strategies to organization and operations, BCG’s retailing experts help clients address virtually all the key levers of performance improvement:
In each of these areas, our practice strongly emphasizes hands-on implementation and change-management capabilities. We often “live in the stores” to ensure that our strategies can be executed in the real world. We co-design customized solutions with our clients, prioritizing initiatives that will bring the most value to consumers while minimizing the costs of implementation.
Our global team consists of 135 partners with significant retailing experience as well as local market expertise. This group is supported by 825 retail-trained professionals at all BCG levels. Over the past five years, BCG’s experts have worked with retailers on more than 600 projects across all regions globally.
Our clients include more than half of the top retailers in the world—food retailers (hypermarkets/supercenters, supermarkets, and convenience stores); specialty players such as apparel, do-it-yourself, and consumer electronics retailers; department stores; restaurants; mail-order/online players; and private-equity companies.