Summary

• The current retail landscape is evolving, requiring retailers to consistently assess their market position using retail competitive analysis.
• Competitive benchmarking provides insights into business strategies by comparing products, pricing, and promotions with competitors.
• Retail competitive analysis is crucial for understanding market trends, competitors’ strategies, and adapting to changing consumer behavior.
• AI-driven retail technology is essential for competitive benchmarking as it can handle vast data, provide timely insights, and ensure accuracy.
• Abercrombie & Fitch utilized EDITED’s AI-driven platform to gain insights into assortments, pricing, and communication, aiding in strategic planning and targeting global markets.

Introduction

In today’s rapidly evolving retail landscape, staying ahead of the competition has become more challenging than ever. There are more and more shopping options, and customers increasingly expect personalized and relevant offerings. In order to succeed, retailers need to continually assess their position in the market and understand how they measure up against their competitors.

This challenge is where retail competitive analysis, powered by AI-driven retail technology, plays a crucial role.

Comparing Your Products, Pricing, and Promotions

Competitive benchmarking involves comparing various aspects of your business, such as your products or assortments, pricing strategies, and promotional efforts, with your competitors. This process allows you to gain valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your business strategies and helps you adapt to market trends and differences in various geographies/markets. 

Why Retail Competitive Analysis Is Crucial for Business Success 

With numerous options at the consumer’s disposal, keeping up with, or outperforming, your competitors is essential to stay relevant and attractive to your target audience. By benchmarking products, pricing, and promotions, you can make informed decisions that maintain or enhance your competitive edge. 

Benchmarking gives you a broader perspective of market trends and competitors’ strategies. This comprehensive view enables you to adapt to changes in consumer behavior, emerging industry trends, and competitive tactics, thus making more informed decisions.

You can also understand what works in your market and what doesn’t for your shared customer base. This information allows you to tailor your offerings to align with customer expectations, increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Harnessing AI for Effective Retail Competitive Analysis

Competitive benchmarking may seem straightforward, but the retail landscape is complex. Here’s why AI-driven retail technology is indispensable for this purpose:

The Abundance of Data: In the digital age, an overwhelming amount of data is available. Collecting and analyzing this data manually would be incredibly time-consuming and resource-intensive. AI technology can efficiently process large volumes of data, saving you time and effort.

Timeliness: Timeliness is crucial in the retail industry. Market conditions change rapidly, so you need to make decisions quickly. AI-driven solutions can provide real-time or near-real-time insights, allowing you to adapt to market changes promptly and remain customer-centric.

Accuracy: AI algorithms are designed to minimize human error, providing more accurate and reliable results. This accuracy is vital when making strategic decisions based on benchmarking data. Moreover, with an AI-driven merchandising experience platform, everyone on your team is accessing the same data from the same place, ensuring advanced consistency and accuracy. 

Scalability: As your business grows, so does the complexity of competitive benchmarking. AI software is scalable and can handle an expanding dataset without a corresponding increase in human effort or resources.

Real Life Example: How Abercrombie & Fitch Utilizes Competitive Analysis 

Using EDITED’s AI-driven merchandising experience platform, Abercrombie & Fitch’s team can easily conduct competitive retail analysis of key players in their market and see what is happening across assortments, pricing, and email communications. 

Abercrombie’s VP EMEA explains, “With EDITED, I’m looking at pricing, and I’m looking at assortments. For example, say 20% of our competitor’s assortment are dresses. How does our assortment compare? Is there an opportunity here to adjust our ticket price?”  

This information plays a crucial role for the company in planning and assortment strategies for each season. With the help of EDITED for competitive analysis, Abercrombie is able to monitor prices across key markets to ensure its pricing is consistent. This data and analysis also confirm they are creating assortments with trend-relevant products to target customers in different markets globally. 

By utilizing AI-driven retail intelligence technology, brands can access more data quickly as well as critical insights that would have otherwise remained invisible. 

Conclusion

Competitive benchmarking is a fundamental practice for any retail business that aspires to succeed. Leveraging AI-driven retail technology to compare products, pricing, and promotions ensures competitiveness and helps retailers become more customer-centric and informed about their market. 

EDITED’s AI engine collects, tracks, categorizes, and normalizes market data across retail websites. With access to the world’s largest retail market data and analysis source, EDITED can help your business excel in retail competitive analysis. Discover how by booking a demo today.