“The Advantages of a Limited Ceramic and Porcelain Collection: Less is More”
Given that much of the ceramic industry is driven by the rationale for producing extravagant quantities of SKUs, I will focus only on the advantages or strengths of having a limited product line.
In the balance sheet of a company that manufactures ceramics and porcelain, the stock of products is included under Assets. However, it is logical that the presence of their brands in the possession of distributors and stores, the displayed slabs, and the pallets exhibited in Home Centers are not accounted for.
This is an “unaccounted asset” that should be more carefully considered and monitored, as it represents one of the most important strengths of any company. Instead, the ceramic industry races forward towards new product lines, with catalogs that are photographic samples of dubious availability.
The “live” assets (those with the most impact) are those outside the factory warehouse, offered to the final customer, and are thousands of SKUs distributed across thousands of points of sale. With such dispersion, there are no resources to allocate for the promotion of each one.
The essence of simplification is to sacrifice what is weak and develop aggressive marketing on the SKUs that are available to the end consumer.
Chess master Pierluigi Piscolo teaches:
“The game of chess is an enormous and continuous simplification.
This was wonderfully understood by José Raúl Capablanca.
To simplify means to increase the importance of what remains.
Don’t look at the pieces you no longer have; look at the pieces that are left on the board.
The essence of the endgame is to stay on the board with the good things.
After the exchange of pieces has taken place and there are fewer things, the fog clears.
You must always ask yourself what is the strength in my position, what is my weakness.
A weakness has monstrous importance.
Change, simplification serves to highlight strength and weakness.
The essence is to go to a simple situation to think about what my strength and weakness are.
A weakness can be having to defend a rook with another piece, while your competitor defends a rook with a pawn.
There is a natural aversion to simplification. It is as if confusion protects us in a certain sense; as long as it is complicated, I do not see how I win the game.
You have to be ruthless to identify a weak element. The game is to concentrate all our strength on the weakness and we abandon our weakness.
The meaning of the game of chess is a profound and enormous simplification.”
The SKUs that count the most are those that are displayed and backed up by stock.
Marketing must tell the customer where they are and at what price.
Author: Julio Sol
Source:
Anche i campioni del mondo sbagliano...
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Director at Porcellanato.com and Porcelanato.com
3 个月The same responsibility lies with stores, as Jim Inglis mentions in his book Break-Through Retailing. "Smart merchants are curators who design model stock assortments, both off-line and online, to assure maximum choice of features and benefits for their customers with a minimun of needless redundancy and duplication. To this end, they must conduct systematic line reviews aimed at consolidating SKUs and vendors, in order to create a more efficient supplay chain".