Meet Flora Delaney:

Flora Delaney, a Senior Executive with 25+ years experience in the Retail, Marketing, Consumer Research and Information Services industries and author of RETAIL The Second-Oldest Profession. In this podcast, Flora shares her deep experience in Category Management, Productivity and Merchandising, and the future of retailing including AI and supply chain changes.

In this podcast episode you can learn about:

• Seven principles that every CPG and retailer needs to know. This is a powerful framework to allow you to think about different dimensions of retailing.

• The value of curating assortment for stores. This is not just about giving customers what they want. It's about providing a store experience that engages, delights and fosters revisits. As Flora says, "Riches are in the niches." This means giving customers what they want in that specific store in that specific time.

• Flora deep dives into the "war for customers" between CPGs and retailers. Who really "owns" the customer? Who owns the relationship between the two? Will we see CPGs going after customers more directly using online and offline delivery channels? Can they delight and surprise customers?

• How to drive more out of category assortment optimising between the core brands vs surprise & delight brands? While core brands generate store traffic, surprise & delight brands can foster impulse buying (because they are unplanned) and increase shoppers' baskets.

• What is happening with AI in retail and category management? Flora shares her view and why "cluster" assortment segmentation just does not work. Each store is unique and should be treated that way to surprise and delight shoppers.

• Given her background, Flora also explores space management and believes there is a huge opportunity to bring innovation. For nothing has evolved since the era of Y2K and any innovation has been "incrementalism" rather than disruptive and revolutionary. It is one of the reasons why Flora agreed to be on the podcast. She thinks what HIVERY is doing will evolve the industry for the better.

At HIVERY, merchandising, space management and promotion sit at the core of how we help our retailers and CPGs clients. Using artificial intelligence and operation research, we help our customers with unprecedented hyper-local retailing advantages.