We conduct a Merchandising survey every year. And we’re about to release the results of our most recent research, titled The Real And The Unreal, at the end of this week. What did retailers tell us?

For starters, that they are in a pickle. Not long ago, retailers worried about the impact of Walmart and how they could survive its oncoming onslaught. Now that worry has shifted to Amazon. Yet as long as retailers seek to sell commodities in price competition with Amazon, they are bound to lose.

But what if they do things differently? What if they offer something Amazon cannot? When the report releases in a few days, it will tease out some of the ways science – and art – can help them offer a mix of goods in a way that does just that. Some highlights include:

• When it comes to Merchandising, almost two-thirds of retailers believe they’ve found a healthy mix of art and science. But that doesn’t help us understand why a third believe their assortments just aren’t broad enough. With the exception of retailers like Amazon, who sell virtually every commodity possible, assortment breadth is a critical merchandising art form.
• The best performers say that one of the best opportunities to compete is to use merchandising analytics as early as possible in the planning process. They are also more likely to cite demand forecasting engines as critical to success, while others flounder with “end ” rather than “means ” approaches.
• The best performers also face an entirely different set of roadblocks to meeting their merchandising objectives in today’s rapidly changing marketplace. In the Organizational Inhibitors section of the report, we find that merchants at a Retail Winner aren’t yet living an entirely different day-to-day reality than their competitors, but they are well on their way to doing so.
• And the role that technology plays within these differences cannot be overstated. Retail Winners are much more satisfied with their merchandise planning systems than their peers, are aggressively planning to refresh their existing assortment optimization tools, and are also looking to change up the space optimization tools they’ve already come to rely upon.

We look forward to releasing the full results, and we’ll let you know as soon as it’s ready.