The paper examines the various possibilities of using scanning data to improve the marketing of retailers. As a start, the method, the benefits and the status of scanning are described. Retail marketing encounters a number of general and special problems. They result in a series of major weaknesses, which are characteristic for current retail marketing. With the advent of scanning, the trade has a new and powerful source of information at its disposal, informing the retailer in a fast and detailed way about the sales at the individual point of purchase. This was up to now impossible. Scanning data has the potential to help retailers in decision-making in such critical marketing areas as product assortment management, space allocation and shelf management, pricing, promotion and advertising. The tools will be information systems, special analyses, marketing experimentation and customer panels.
Determining the number of lines per range requires assortment decisions on the number of items and facings displayed in the stores. The constraint of limited shelf space and demand and cost interactions among the various products of the assortment must be considered. In many cases, retailers try to solve the problem by trial and error. An alternative is to conduct controlled experiments using experimental designs. They allow definite statements that have a known and controllable probability of being correct and consequently provide a reliable basis for decision-making. The testing procedure is illustrated by two case studies using latin square designs to answer the fundamental questions of adding/deleting a product and changing shelf space allocation.