As a category manager, you know that optimizing your retail initiatives across hundreds of locations is no easy feat. Each store has a unique set of local customers, lifestyles, and shopping behaviors. Manually developing hyper-localized plans just isn't feasible. This is where a powerful location analytics tool like MapDash™ comes in handy.

With MapDash, you can gain visibility into hyper-local demand, purchase behaviors, and store-level opportunities to deploy highly targeted category plans across exactly the right stores. And you can develop these localized strategies at scale, ensuring each store is uniquely optimized for growth based on its own customer and competitor profile.

Datastory recently helped a major retailer deploy a new data-driven planogram program for independent hardware stores. By using MapDash's analytics, we identified over 800 stores in prime target communities based on specific consumer segments, income ranges, and purchase habits signaling high potential for the Backyard/BBQ category. Without MapDash’s preconfigured location intelligence data layers, it would have been impossible to cultivate store-level insights at this scale and execute a strategic planogram rollout. 

MapDash makes it easy for category managers to score the market opportunity for the Backyard/BBQ retail products based upon local attributes such as home type, demographics, and consumer activity. 

This massive scale of retail localization would have been nearly impossible manually, but MapDash lets us rapidly translate location insights into an actionable category strategy at the local level. With MapDash’s robust library of location-enabled data layers, we showed the highest opportunity retailers why their communities had demand to support the proposed planogram changes.

This example highlights MapDash's power to drive strategic category growth through localization at scale. By turning location analytics into actionable store plans, you can realize substantial ROI across hundreds or thousands of stores. And when communicating insights nationally, MapDash's visualizations gain buy-in from key stakeholders without getting into the weeds of data analytics. It's a game-changer for data-driven category management.

Having real conversations with actual shoppers to gain insights into consumer behavior and motivation is always valuable, but as consumers and shopping habits change faster than ever, data allows retailers to spot emerging opportunities and challenges in time to adapt. Plus, analytics provide the objectivity to cut through assumptions and detect shifts that talking to customers alone may miss.

To see how MapDash can provide off-the-shelf location intelligence to power your category management efforts, get in touch with Datastory. We’d be happy to give you a personalized demo of a category or geographic market of your choice to showcase how data-driven insights can scale your current retail initiatives.