MARKET OVERVIEW
The household care market in the U.S. has enjoyed mild steady growth over the years. Increased demand for the category over the past year was the combination of consumers’ increased focus on health, as they cleaned and disinfected everything around them more frequently, and a desire to hoard products they feared might be harder to obtain as the virus raced across the country.
MERCHANDISING STRATEGIES
While cleaning products is a highly planned category (88% of buyers made some type of list before they shopped), almost two-thirds (65%) do not specify a brand on their list, and 60 percent are open to being influenced in store.
Displays remains a solid sales-booster. As demand for precious display space grows, so do expectations for performance. This means that it is more essential than ever to develop an effective merchandising strategy reflective of the customers’ shopping patterns and preferences.
Consumers seek household care and laundry products that suit their lifestyles, thus keeping up with emerging consumer trends is crucial for innovation. The sector is heavily impacted by consumers’ concerns about the environment, and creating innovations catering to this issue is therefore important. Sustainability not only includes more environmentally friendly and degradable ingredients; packaging is also a key issue.
Aligning innovation with key consumer trends allows manufacturers to charge premiums over the competition. Innovation does not have to substantially change the underlying product. Large premiums can also be achieved by simple alterations, such as packaging, pack size, or the combination of products on a multi-vendor display.
As display space remains challenged, retailers and manufacturers must continue to refine merchandising strategies to maximize lift by aligning the metrics that matter across display product mix, size, location and number with new shopping patterns. Continual evaluation will be required to ensure the “right” categories get display space – merchandising strategies that worked during peak stockpiling of mid-March and subsequent stock-up periods may no longer work as behavior evolves.
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